In late November, appetite for European equities among Spanish fund buyers had sunk to a record low while US equities were in vogue. A couple of months on, European equity sentiment has recovered remarkably strongly.
Eurozone inflation will hit 2% by next year, half of fund buyers attending the Expert Investor forum in Barcelona believe.
Here you can see a slideshow of pictures taken at Expert Investor Barcelona, held on 2 February 2017.
Highly unusually, investors in the Basque country and the rest of Spain were more sceptical about European equities than their peers in the rest of Europe when we last polled them in December. However, the dip in appetite appears to have been short-lived.
Though US presidential elections are approaching fast and Brexit uncertainty is still riding high, China is the biggest macroeconomic risk right now, according to fund selectors attending the local Expert Investor forum in Barcelona last week.
Here you can see a selection of photos taken at Expert Investor Spain forum, held in Barcelona on 27 October 2016.
Bankia’s head of funds-of-funds, Alvaro Martín Sauto, explains why he believes we should not be paying more than eight basis points for an actively managed government bond fund, and talks about his quest to get clients to accept more volatility.
Spanish fund buyers embarked on an unprecedented multi-asset fund buying in 2014 and 2015. This year, however, multi-asset funds have seen net outflows as local investors de-risk again.
Barcelona’s investors are remarkably unanimous in their fixed income allocation. Almost all of them are overweight short-duration bonds and eight in 10 interviewees are planning to decrease their allocation to long-duration European sovereign debt.
Barcelona’s fund buyers had been bullish about European equities almost by default for the past four years. But political instability across Europe has dented their appetite. Global emerging market equities are their new darling.
Fund buyers expect returns from their equity portfolio to be significantly lower over the next five years. However, they still expect equities to outperform bonds by a considerable margin.
Here you can see a selection of photos taken at Expert Investor Spain forum, held in Madrid on 14 June 2016.
