What opportunities and challenges do you see for the year ahead? - Nisarg Trivedi

Nisarg Trivedi, Middle East Sales Director at Schroders discussed the wealth management opportunities and challenges for the year ahead.

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1. What opportunities and challenges do you see for the year ahead?

Video transcript

1. What opportunities and challenges do you see for the year ahead?

Well I think 2019 is definitely going to be more challenging than [more] opportunities. But we always say that. You know, with all challenges come opportunities. And I think this is one of those years where I think investors and advisers, both will be tested quite a bit. We as investors in the market will have to work in an environment where obviously the volatility will increase. Markets are becoming more and more uncertain. The central banks and government policies are sort of favouring. We have got a lot of tensions around trade war, geopolitical issues and so on and so forth. And that means investors are very nervous. And you obviously could see that towards the end of last year. Not sure whether you got to see the Morningstar numbers, but the flows into funds had drastically dropped. And one of the reasons is obviously the clients are feeling a bit under pressure given the performances. 2018 was the first year, actually the third year in the last 100 years, where both equities and bonds produced negative returns. The other two times it happened was, first at the start of Great Depression and the other time was the Vietnam War. I hope nothing of that sort happens this time. However, I think this is a time to be cautious. But there are opportunities and the opportunities lie in some of the non-traditional asset classes. I mean, one of the things we assurers are doing currently is trying to educate clients a bit more about some liquid alternatives. Absolute return strategy. And some of more sort of long-term investments like private equity and infrastructure. I think that’s the space where the investors should clearly start looking at. Perhaps towards the middle of this year, we will get some opportunities around fixed income where the interest rates have peaked, and we feel that there won’t be further interest rates hikes happening, and that could be an interesting opportunity for clients to lock in their long term money into bonds, etcetera, to get long term returns on bond markets as well. So those are some opportunities we see coming into next year.

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