Quarterly Investment Insights

Perhaps the four most dangerous words in investing are: ‘This time it’s different.’

With a boom in Artificial Intelligence (AI), a rise in big government spending programs and employment still high it is tempting to think that this time, yes this time, it is indeed different. Certainly, that’s the impression given by some media and markets. Just open the Financial Times, your CNBC app or your preferred markets newspaper and you are hit with headlines of record highs in indexes from Japan to Europe to the US. Forget about a “soft landing”, a new bull market seems to price in economic acceleration.

Scratch under the surface, however, and a different picture emerges. In this edition of our Quarterly Insights, we look at the odds and probabilities and caution that the path to prosperity for equity markets may be becoming increasingly narrow.