Karen Watkin, CFA
21 Years at AB|25 Years of Experience
Karen Watkin is a Senior Vice President and Portfolio Manager for the Multi-Asset Solutions business in EMEA. Along with being Portfolio Manager for the All Market Income Portfolio, she is responsible for the development and management of multi-asset portfolios for a range of clients. From 2008 to 2011, Watkin was portfolio manager for the Index Strategies Group, responsible for the development and management of AB’s custom index strategies for institutional clients in EMEA. She joined the firm in 2003, after spending three years as a management consultant in the Capital Markets Group at Accenture. Watkin holds a BA in economics with European study from the University of Exeter and is a CFA charterholder. Location: London
Published Work
Multi-asset strategies must adapt to a promising—but changeable—environment for generating income.
We think today’s market landscape calls for a different mix in multi-asset income strategies
For multi-asset income investors, adapting portfolios for equity defense, credit potential and duration exposure should be on the docket for 2024.
An improved income outlook for multi-asset investors, including higher yields, sharply contrasts with cloudy conditions at 2023’s start.
Dividend investing should expand beyond traditional dividend-paying stocks to generate income effectively without giving up return potential in growth-led markets.
Multi-asset income strategies should feature high-dividend stocks, high-yield credit and global government bonds in 2023.
Global indicators continue to signal a sharp business recovery from last year's COVID-19 pandemic lows. While inflation expectations are increasing as a result, business improvements offer multi-asset investors good reasons to remain tilted to equities for the next stage of the recovery.
Having strongly underperformed the wider stock market in 2020, high-dividend stocks have shown early signs of a rebound in recent weeks.
Emerging-market (EM) asset returns substantially lagged their developed-market (DM) counterparts over the last decade. In 2020 so far, EM equity performance has been on par with DM equities. Are we at an inflection point?
Higher-income assets underperformed in the second-quarter rebound. But that also means there's pent-up potential in income-generating assets that may begin to show in later stages of the recovery.
The last decade produced great performance across most asset classes. But in the 2020s, we expect investment market returns will be lower and risk harder to manage. Looking forward, a disciplined multi-asset approach will be especially valuable to identify opportunities and help mitigate setbacks.
There are a lot of suggestions these days about where to get extra income, but less discussion about the cost attached to it. A diversified multi-asset approach can help-and provide additional growth potential. But how it's designed matters.
As the new year begins to unfold, the environment for risk assets is still benign: the global economy is strong, monetary policy is accommodative, and volatility is low and steady. At this point, we don't see excesses developing that could change that.