Through his speeches and writings, Warren Buffet's late ‘right-hand man’ left a legacy of real life and investment lessons. Excerpt below (source: Compounding Quality on X)

Key takeaways: • After a strong first half of the year for equity markets, we believe that there are 5 key themes to watch in the coming months: 1) Normalisation of global economic growth; 2) Labour market normalisation; 3) Central banks kicking off their easing cycle; 4) The normalisation of the equity market leadership and; 5) A pick-up in volatility. • On a more tactical basis, our view on risk assets remains constructive but there are indeed a few indicators which lead us to become slightly more prudent as we head into Summer. As such, we have been rebalancing our clients’ portfolios to reflect our neutral view on equities. We recently decreased our slight tactical overweight on equities back to neutral. We remain underweight fixed income and overweight alternatives and Gold. We also decided to downgrade our view on the JPY from NEUTRAL to negative vs USD and all major currencies. We remain positive dollar against EUR, GBP and CHF.

One of the spiritual fathers of behavioral finance passed away in March this year. Below, we pay tribute to Daniel Kahneman by highlighting 10 of his main empirical studies in the field.

H2 2024

As demonstrated in the recent European elections, populism is in vogue in many developed countries. This is a long-term trend with major macroeconomic consequences.

According to Statista, the 10 largest asset management companies manage approximately 30% of the world’s assets under management as of June 2024. And it’s unlikely that this concentration of assets has fallen over the past two years. How can we explain such a craze for management behemoths?

Jim Simons, nicknamed the “Warren Buffet of algorithms”, passed away last month at the age of 86. Below, we attempt to shed some light on the investment strategy of his Medallion fund, one of the most successful Hegde funds in history.

Key takeaways • We believe global economic growth could soften but will likely remain positive while the disinflation trend should stay in place. This, coupled with monetary and fiscal policy support ahead of the US elections, is creating an attractive backdrop for equity markets in the months ahead. • Within our opportunistic asset-allocation guidance, we recommend clients to go underweight Fixed Income and overweight U.S and European stocks while staying underweight Emerging markets stocks. Commodities and Gold are still useful portfolio diversifiers. We are staying long dollars. • There is one change within our preference grid this month: we increase Government bonds 1-10 years from NEUTRAL to POSITIVE

Nokia's first model reappears in redesigned form. With its simplicity and basic functionality, the "boring phone" offers an escape from the incessant distractions of smartphones. Could this give the brand a new lease of life?

Key takeaways • There has been a change of tone in the markets with equities pulling back in April and US 10-year yield moving up 45 basis points over the month, while gold and the dollar soared. • The weight of evidence of our fundamental and market dynamics indicators leads us to remain neutral to positive on equities. While markets could stay choppy for a little while, we believe that the pullback could be contained, and that further equity market weakness is buyable. • Going forward, we want to keep our allocation to Equities close to our strategic asset allocation (SAA) neutral weights. We upgraded our stance on European stocks (from neutral to positive) and downgraded our view on Japanese stocks from positive to neutral. We remain negative in fixed income and downgraded our view on Emerging markets bonds. We have also upgraded our stance on Commodities to positive from neutral. Last but not least, we reduced all currencies by one “notch” vs. USD: EUR, CHF, GBP & EM are reduced down to negative (from neutral) while JPY is down to neutral (from positive).