All posts by Jonathan Chevreau

Vanguard says Balanced portfolios still offer best chance of success as Inflation gets beaten back

While the traditional 60/40 balanced portfolio has suffered its worst year in decades, and Recession is likely in 2023, the Vanguard Group is optimistic that balanced portfolios will thrive beyond 2023 and over the rest of the decade.

A balanced portfolio still offers the best chance of success,” is one of the top conclusions that will be unveiled Monday:  Vanguard Canada is hosting its Economic and Market Outlook for 2023, with a global virtual press conference scheduled at 11 AM [Dec. 12].  It includes Vanguard economists such as Global Chief Economist Joe Davis.

Below, received last week under embargo, are highlights of a report titled Vanguard Economic and Market Outlook for 2023: Beating back inflation. It runs about 60 pages, including numerous charts.

The text below consists mostly of excerpts from the Vanguard report, with the use of an ellipsis to indicate excisions, so there are no passages in quotation marks. Subheads are also taken from the original document. Apart from a handful of charts reproduced below, references to numerous other charts or graphs have been removed in the excerpts selected below.

Base case for 2023 is Disinflation

Our base case for 2023 is one of disinflation, but at a cost of a global recession. Inflation has likely already peaked in most markets, but reducing price pressures tied to labor markets and wage growth will take longer. As such, central banks may reasonably achieve their 2% inflation targets only in 2024 or 2025.

Consistent with our investment outlook for 2022, which focused on the need for higher short-term interest rates, central banks will continue their aggressive tightening cycle into early 2023 before pausing as inflation falls. As such, our base case has government bond yields generally peaking in 2023. Although rising interest rates have created near-term pain for investors, higher starting rates have raised our return expectations for U.S. and international bonds. We now expect U.S. and international bonds to return 4%–5% over the next decade.

Equity markets have yet to drop materially below their fair-value range, which they have historically done during recessions. Longer term, however, our global equity outlook is improving because of lower valuations and higher interest rates. Our return expectations are 2.25 percentage points higher than last year. From a U.S. dollar investor’s perspective, our Vanguard Capital Markets Model projects higher 10-year annualized returns for non-U.S. developed markets (7.2%–9.2%) and emerging markets (7%–9%) than for U.S. markets (4.7%–6.7%).

Global inflation: Persistently surprising

Our base case is a global recession in 2023 brought about by the efforts to return inflation to target … growth is likely to end 2023 flat or slightly negative in most major economies outside of China. Unemployment is likely to rise over the year but nowhere near as high as during the 2008 and 2020 downturns. Through job losses and slowing consumer demand, a downtrend in inflation is likely to persist through 2023. We don’t believe that central banks will achieve their targets of 2% inflation in 2023, but they will maintain those targets and look to achieve them through 2024 and into 2025 — or reassess them when the time is right. That time isn’t now.

Global fixed income: Brighter days ahead

The market, which was initially slow to price higher interest rates to fight elevated and persistent inflation, now believes that most central banks will have to go well past their neutral policy rates — the rate at which policy would be considered neither accommodative nor restrictive — to quell inflation.

Rising interest rates and higher interest rate expectations have lowered bond returns in 2022, creating near-term pain for investors. However the bright side of higher rates is higher interest payments. These have led our return expectations for U.S. and international bonds to increase by more than twofold. We now expect U.S. bonds to return 4.1%–5.1% per year over the next decade, compared with the 1.4%–2.4% annual returns we forecast a year ago. For international bonds, we expect returns of 4%–5% per year over the next decade, compared with our year-ago forecast of 1.3%–2.3% per year.

Global equities: Resetting expectations

The silver lining is that this year’s bear market has improved our outlook for global equities, though our Vanguard Capital Markets Model (VCMM) projections suggest there are greater opportunities outside the United States.

Stretched valuations in the U.S. equity market in 2021 were unsustainable, and our fair-value framework suggests they still don’t reflect current economic realities.

Although U.S. equities have continued to outperform their international peers, the primary driver of that outperformance has shifted from earnings to currency over the last year. The 30% decline in emerging markets over the past 12 months has made valuations in those regions more attractive. We now expect similar returns to those of non-U.S. developed markets and view emerging markets as an important diversifier in equity portfolios.

Within the U.S. market, value stocks are fairly valued relative to growth, and small-capitalization stocks are attractive despite our expectations for weaker near-term growth. Our outlook for the global equity risk premium is still positive at 1 to 3 percentage points, but lower than last year because of a faster increase in expected bond returns

Continue Reading…

Retired Money: What Asset Class charts can teach about risk and volatility

My latest MoneySense Retired Money column addresses a topic I have regularly revisited over the years: annual charts that help investors visualize the top-performing (and bottom-performing!) asset classes. You can find the full column by clicking on the highlighted headline here: Reading the “Annual Returns of Key Asset Classes”—what it means for Canadian investors. 

As the column notes, I always enjoyed perusing the annual asset classes rotate chart that investment giant Franklin Templeton used to distribute to financial advisors and media influencers. I still have the 2015 chart on my office wall, even though it’s years out of date.

Curious about the chart’s fate, I asked the company what had become of it, and learned it’s still available but now it’s only in digital format online. As always I find it enormously instructive. It’s still titled Why diversify? Asset classes rotate. As it goes on to explain, “one year’s best performer might be the next year’s worst. A diverse portfolio can protect your from downturns and give you access to the best performing asset classes this year – every year.”

The chart lists annual returns in Canadian dollars, based on various indexes.

Right off the top, you see that U.S. equities [the S&P500 index] are as often as not the top-producing single asset class. It topped the list five of the last nine years: from 2013 to 2015, then again in 2019 and 2021.

On the flip side, bonds tend to be the worst asset class. Over the 15 years between 2007 and 2021, at least one bond fund was at the bottom seven of those years: global bonds [as measured by the Bloomberg Global Aggregate Bond Index] in 2010, 2019 and 2021, US bonds [Bloomberg US. Aggregate Bond Index] in 2019, 2012 and 2017, and Canadian bonds [FTSE Canada Universe Bond index] in 2013. And consider that all those years were considered (in retrospect) a multi-decade bull market for bonds. You can imagine how bonds will look going forward now that interest rates have clearly bottomed and are slowly marching higher.

As you might expect, volatile asset classes like Emerging Markets [measured by the MSCI Emerging Markets index] tend to generate both outsized gains and outsized losses. EM topped the chart in five of the last 15 years (2007, 2009, 2012, 2017 and 2020) but were also at the bottom in 2008 and 2011. EM’s largest gain in that period was 52% in 2009, immediately following the 41% loss in 2008. Therein lies a tale!

The latest Templeton online charts also include a second version titled “Risk is more predictable than returns.” It notes that “Higher returns often come with higher risks. That’s why it’s important to look beyond returns when choosing a potential investment.” It ranks the asset classes from lower risk to higher risk and here the results are remarkably consistent across almost the entire 15-year time span between 2005 and 2021.

The missing alternative asset classes

This is all valuable information but alas, these charts seem to focus almost exclusively on the big two asset classes of stocks and bonds, precisely the two that are the focus of all those popular All-in-one Asset Allocation ETFs pioneered by Vanguard and soon matched by BMO, iShares, Horizons and a few others. Continue Reading…

Life after Twitter: Mastodon & other alternatives

As I posted on Twitter a few days ago, Elon Musk’s ownership is causing a lot of Twitter regulars to rethink their commitment to the platform. Personally, I have invested a lot in the Bird since joining in 2009 and so I am reluctant to storm out of there merely out of sheer petulance. Better, I think, to take a wait-and-see approach and give Elon a chance to salvage it or to burn it to the ground.

But it does behoove regulars to have a contingency plan or Plan B. Once upon a time, I viewed Google Plus as an alternative but it proved to be a virtual ghost town until Google pulled the plug on it. If Twitter keep imploding, perhaps the folks at Google will think of giving it a go again. But in the meantime, there are still LinkedIn and Facebook.

While in Spain this month, I started to experiment with the platform that seems most likely to accumulate disaffected Twitter users: Mastodon. (spelt with the letter o in two places, NOT the letter “a”!

Unlike the centralized Twitter platform, Mastodon is decentralized and that’s the first thing you need to know about it when signing on. First you have to pick a server, which is run by volunteers around the world. I picked one of the few (or only?) Canadian ones: mstdn.ca. It’s also called Mastodon Canada and bills itself as being run by Canadians for Canadians

A new meeting ground for Canadian finance Tweeters and bloggers?

 

Perhaps it’s too early to say, or that it’s wishful thinking, but it seems possible that a critical mass of disaffected Canadian Twitter users may be building there, including a subset of Canadian financial tweeters; I mean tooters!

For me, Truth Social was never an option, for reasons that should be obvious, given its ownership. If there are other Canadian Mastodon servers and there may be, Google Canadian Mastodon servers.

Mastodon takes some getting used to and the learning curve seems steeper than Twitter was in its heyday. At the same time, it’s fun to give one’s atrophied social media little grey cells a new workout, and it’s a learning experience to see new networks and patterns of networks evolve almost from the ground up.

It was helpful to be fairly early with Twitter and in the same way Mastodon has that pioneering feeling here in November of 2022, the first full month of Elon’s Twitter ownership. Mastodon has been around much longer but there’s little doubt there is now a wave of Twitter users descending on the place. Most of the new arrivals admit they’re looking for a possible alternative, or don’t really know why they are there, and most either need a bit of help or encouragement or are a bit more experienced and willing to offer assistance to the newbies.

In fact, mstdn.ca is so new they are still asking for volunteers to moderate and assist with the technical side for those who have the skills. They’ve also just set up a PayPal account to accept donations to offset the server costs.  Continue Reading…

Revenge Travel in the post-Covid era, global Market Volatility, US mid-terms, Confidence Man

Malaga, Spain. Image by Pixels: Oleksandr Pidvalnyi

By the time you read this, I should be in Malaga, Spain, where we’re spending a few weeks. Call this our version of what Robb Engen described in yesterday’s Hub as “Revenge Travel” in the post-Covid era.

I realize that the term post-Covid is hardly an apt one as, from where I sit, Covid and its ever-propagating new variants seem ever with us.

Back in 2020 and 2021, it seemed Covid was something a friend of a friend of a friend contracted: these days, it’s more likely to be a next-door neighbour, friends or family, or perhaps the person staring you in the mirror in the morning. This is not a time to be complacent: I still believe in being cautious, keeping vaccinated and boosted to the max, social distancing in public places, and masking wherever there are significant gatherings.

One thing we noticed early in this trip to Spain is a higher use of masks than in North America: masks are still mandatory or highly encouraged on public transit, trains and for air travel. Last week, the Washington Post and other papers warned of a resurgent Covid wave, possibly coupled with the ordinary Flu and other respiratory viruses, constituting a dreaded possible “tridemic.”

I’m writing this as a grab-bag of recent items. As per usual, the Hub will be publishing every business day, with the help of the many generous financial bloggers who grant permission to republish their excellent insights. You know who you are! (Looking at you, Robb Engen, Bob Lai, Michael Wiener (aka James), Dale Roberts, Kyle Prevost, Mark Seed, Pat McKeough, Steve Lowrie, Adrian Mastracci, Noah Solomon, Anita Bruinsma, Mark Venning, Fritz Gilbert, Billy and Akaisha Kaderli, Beau Peters, Victoria Davis, Emily Roberts, and occasional others, including our regular Sponsor bloggers.)

I do of course  have wireless access and my laptop while abroad, and am at least partly plugged into the blogosphere and markets. As I wrote recently in my monthly MoneySense Retired Money column, 2022 has been a challenging one for investors: even those holding a version of the classic 60/40 Balanced portfolio. Pretty distressing to see both sides of the stock/bond pendulum falling!

Are GICs the answer to the Fixed-income Rout?

I see Gordon Pape commenting recently in the Globe & Mail [paywall] about the fact that most investors will be looking at significant losses this year, unless they were mostly in energy stocks, GICs or short the market. He suggested 1-year GICs paying around 4.5% are one possible remedy. After last week’s Bank of Canada rate 0.5% rate hike, you can now get 5% or more on 5-year GICs, so it seems an apt time to start building or rebuilding 5-year GIC ladders. The way I figure it, the BOC will hike again at the end of the year, perhaps 0.25% or at most 0.5%, and perhaps once or twice in 2023. But if they do succeed in restraining inflation, then that will be that: if rates top out maybe 0.5% more from here and then start to fall again, you may end up kicking yourself for not locking in 5% for 5 years or as long as you can find. This is assuming you are building a ladder and reinvesting prior GICs every quarter or so: as long as SOME money is coming due every three or four months, the locking-in factor is less of a negative.

But before going overboard on GICs, read Robb Engen’s recent blog  at Boomer & Echo: The Trouble with GICs. Robb has an issue with locking your money up for 5 years: an Asset Allocation ETF can do much the same thing if things become normal again, with instant liquidity.

Of course, as many of our guest bloggers have been noting recently, it’s also a good time to “dollar-cost average” your way into high-quality decent-yielding Canadian and US dividend stocks, which to some extent I also have been doing. Continue Reading…

Retired Money: Are Balanced Funds really dead or destined to rise again?

Is the classic 60/40 balanced fund destined to rise again, like the phoenix?

My latest MoneySense Retired Money column addresses the unique phenomenon investors have faced in 2022: for the first times in decades, both the Stock and Bond sides of the classic balanced fund or ETF are down.

Click on the highlighted headline to access the full column: The 60/40 portfolio: A phoenix or a dud for retirees? 

While the column focuses on the Classic 60/40 Balanced Fund or ETF, the insights apply equally to more aggressive mixes of 80% stocks to 20% bonds, or more conservative mixes of 40% bonds to 60% stocks or even 80% bonds to 20% stocks. Most of the major makers of Asset Allocation ETFs provide all these alternatives. Younger investors may gravitate to the 100% stocks option: indeed with most US stocks down 20% or more year to date, it’s an opportune time to load up on equities if you have a long time horizon.

However, we retirees may find the notion of 100% equity ETFs to be far too stressful in environments like these, even if the Bonds complement has thus far let down the tea. As Vanguard says in a backgrounder referenced in the column, the classic 60/40 may yet rise phoenix-like from the ashes of the 2022 doldrums.

“We’ve been here before.”

On July 7th, indexing giant Vanguard released a paper bearing the reassuring headline “Like the phoenix, the 60/40 portfolio will rise again.”  “We’ve been here before,” the paper asserts, “Based on history, balanced portfolios are apt to prove the naysayers wrong, again.” It goes on to say that “brief, simultaneous declines in stocks and bonds are not unusual … Viewed monthly since early 1976, the nominal total returns of both U.S. stocks and investment-grade bonds have been negative nearly 15% of the time. That’s a month of joint declines every seven months or so, on average. Extend the time horizon, however, and joint declines have struck less frequently. Over the last 46 years, investors never encountered a three-year span of losses in both asset classes.”

Vanguard also urges investors to remember that the goal of the 60/40 portfolio is to achieve long-term returns of roughly 7%. “This is meant to be achieved over time and on average, not each and every year. The annualized return of 60% U.S. stock and 40% U.S. bond portfolio from January 1, 1926, through December 31, 2021, was 8.8%. Going forward, the Vanguard Capital Markets Model (VCMM) projects the long-term average return to be around 7% for the 60/40 portfolio.”

It also points out that similar principles apply to balanced funds with different mixes of stocks and bonds: its own VRIF, for example, is a 50/50 mix and its Asset Allocation ETFs vary from 100% stocks to just 20%, with the rest in bonds.

Tweaking the Classic 60/40 portfolio

While very patient investors may choose to wait for the classic 60/40 Fund to rise again, others may choose to tweak around the edges. The column mentions how TriDelta Financial’s Matthew Ardrey started to shift many client bond allocations to shorter-term bonds, thereby lessening the damage inflicted to portfolios by bond funds heavily concentrated in longer-duration bonds. Continue Reading…