From Matt Wagner: There’s no sugarcoating it: the performance of European equities in 2018 has been disappointing. The weak performance year-to-date, as measured by the -10.56% return for the MSCI Europe Index,1 has been accompanied by a marked slowdown in economic growth in the eurozone.
From WisdomTree: Each year, we monitor the global Dividend Stream® for growth, so that we can refresh the weights of the underlying constituent companies in various WisdomTree Indexes.
From WisdomTree: Does the “global trade war,” quotation marks intentional, spell doom? It depends on your silo.
From WisdomTree: When investors talk about the Federal Reserve (Fed), the natural focus tends to gravitate toward the potential for rate action, and in our present situation, that would mean future rate hikes.
From WisdomTree: Last week’s “Behind the Markets” podcast highlighted two of the more beaten-down regions on a pure asset price and valuation basis today: Japan and emerging markets.
From WisdomTree: If there is one thing to be learned from this year’s drawdowns in U.S. equities, it’s that traditional 60/40 portfolios1 do a comparatively poor job of limiting portfolio losses in the short run. In our view, this is primarily a function of low interest rates starting to rise.
From WisdomTree: 2018 has been a challenging year for emerging market equities, coming on the back of 2017, which was quite strong.
From WisdomTree: Despite last week’s pullback, 2018 has still been a positive year for many U.S. equity investors. If the S&P 500 Index closes positive this year, it will be its 10th consecutive positive year.
From WisdomTree: Just when everyone thought they had the U.S. Treasury (UST) yield curve all figured out, the unexpected happens. Yes, as the calendar turned to autumn, the Treasury yield construct decided to do a 180 from its predominant flattening pattern–and actually re-steepen.
From WisdomTree: So far in 2018, the performance of global equities has caught a lot of investors off guard.
From WisdomTree: When we launched the WisdomTree Emerging Markets Local Debt Fund (ELD) eight years ago, we believed that a market cap-weighted approach would have the potential to compound risk in emerging markets (EM).
From WisdomTree: After a phenomenal 2017, the last eight months have been painful for emerging market (EM) investors. The initial leg lower coincided with a general spike in volatility in February.
From WisdomTree: The 10 largest Multifactor exchange-traded funds (ETFs) in the market hold over $10.5 Billion in assets and saw $1.8 billion of net inflows over the last fifteen months1.
From WisdomTree: The WisdomTree U.S. Multifactor Index (WTUSMF), launched in June 2017, selects its basket of 200 stocks based on four equally weighted alpha signals: Low Correlation, Momentum, Quality and Value.
From WisdomTree: It was an incredibly volatile week in the bond market on both sides of the Atlantic, as the month of October got underway.