We wish all our readers a happy New Year. In our view, those who reckon 2020 as “the worst year ever” (such as Time magazine) need some education about the world’s dark historical catalog of plague, war, and sundry catastrophe. Still, it was certainly a challenging year, and we are as happy as any to turn the corner into 2021.
Recently, Asia has been rallying. We’re happy with our exposure to fast-growing emerging and Asian markets.
Recent developments in the U.K. have been positive, with a Brexit deal finally — finally! — agreed to. We believe this will lift U.K. stocks in coming months.
We remain optimistic on particular themes, sectors, and industries in the U.S., though not on the U.S. market as a whole. Our favorite areas are our long-standing “usual suspects” — cybersecurity, networking and the cloud, artificial intelligence, big data, telepresencing, fintech, e-commerce, business digitization, and certain semiconductors, among others.
We’re also following themes related to the priorities of the incoming administration — the decarbonization of transport, alternative energy, and other green themes, where the activity in SPACs (special purpose acquisition companies) has been fierce.
We believe the U.S. dollar will not make a prolonged rally any time soon; we’ll write more next week on the topic of the dollar.
And of course, we’d be remiss in that spirit not to mention Bitcoin and gold (or “Boomer coin,” as some Gen Z trolls have taken to calling it). As we have said for most of the year, we remain structurally bullish on gold in the brave new world of financial intervention into which the global economy sailed during the first quarter of 2020. And we also believe that cryptocurrencies are passing through a watershed of institutional adoption which could see leading crypto assets, particularly Bitcoin, continue to appreciate.
Thanks for listening; we welcome your calls and questions.
