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Monthly View - Feb 2025

A risk-on and tactical approach to position for the new US administration

5 Feb 2025

Willem Sels

Global Chief Investment Officer, HSBC Global Private Banking and Wealth

  • Client discussions during our 2025 Investment Outlook roadshow suggest many agree with us that the new US administration’s policies will be pro-growth, pro-innovation, but somewhat inflationary and leading to two-way volatility
  • Policy announcements in the first two days already include measures to ensure AI leadership, supporting our priority #1: ‘Capture earnings tailwinds from policy priorities and innovation’. Investments in data centres and energy security should boost the case for infrastructure investments. And the prominence of tech leaders and more positive stance towards M&A are favourable for private equity activity
  • We maintain our substantial overweight in US stocks thanks to the US vitality, the new administration’s tax plans and deregulation. Moreover, the low consensus earnings expectations for Q4 are a low bar that should be exceeded, presenting further equity upside
  • We expect ongoing policy announcements to create volatility, which active managers, multi-asset strategies and hedge funds can exploit. In fact, resilient growth and some concerns over a growing deficit have already driven real US Treasury yields to attractive levels. We thus tactically extend our DM sovereign bonds’ (ex-Japan) duration and global IG bond duration from 5-7 years to 7-10 years
  • UK gilt yields have risen too, but we expect spending cuts to ease the pressure on yields and increase growth risks. Hence, we extend the duration of UK gilts and cut UK stocks to neutral. As for Europe, we are already underweight Eurozone stocks as tariff risks present a growth challenge and now move French stocks to underweight too

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