The massive sell-off we saw on Wall Street overnight is exactly why we have been aggressively warning people to hedge and protect their investment portfolios all year.
This is not a short-term aberration that people can walk away from and just assume the market will magically rise back up.
The hard truth is that global stock markets are only in the very early stages of pricing in a global economic slow-down that is already in full swing
There is in fact significant risk of a triple recession across the northern hemisphere of the world’s three largest economies, Europe, US and China.
China will be the first out of this difficult period, but even there too, subdued growth long-term is the new reset normal.
Europe will continue to be impacted by war, sanctions and energy concerns.
The US will have an inappropriately blindly aggressive central bank focussed only on inflation. Which is bizarre to say the least given its previous best efforts to completely ignore rising inflation for the past year.
Everywhere, yes, the entire globe will continue to experience both extreme inflation and actual food or energy scarcity over the next 12 months.
This, as we have been saying all year, even before the tragedy of Ukraine, is not an environment in which to be buying stocks.
This is a long-term correction. Not a short-term aberration. As such we cannot know if this will be a 6-18 month corrective phase or is in fact something far more significant akin to a 3-6 year decline in asset prices generally.
When hedging investment portfolios is so easy these days, why take that degree of risk. I continue to suggest playing defence in the current global economic and financial market environment.
Markets which are likely to remain strong regardless of gains already seen and recent volatility are the US dollar, Gold, and Oil.
The world is full of opportunity as long as investors play good defence now. So as to be in a position of relative power when markets eventually begin a new grand bull cycle. At the moment we are only in the early stages of ending the last grand super cycle 2009 to 2021
Market insights and analysis from Clifford Bennett, Chief Economist at ACY Securities
