The Barclays Wealth research team includes four groups of specialists focusing on macroeconomics, equity, fixed income and asset allocation.
We keep you informed about global macroeconomic analysis and forecasts; government bonds and corporate credit; top-down economic strategy; bottom-up stock picking and sector analysis; foreign exchange research and forecasts; property, commodities and hedge funds.
We publish research regularly as part of our flagship Signpost suite:
Quarterly Investment Strategy gives you ‘big picture’ insight into the state of the markets, from top-level strategic views to bottom-up stock picks.
Monthly Update covers the past month in the markets, individual sectors, topics in the spotlight, and the performance of our model portfolios.
We also publish stand-alone Signpost reports focusing on equities and commodities.
Please see below the most recent example of each of our Signpost reports.
For financial markets, this August has been rather better than last year’s. The credit crunch is by no means over, but time is a natural healer. At this point, we judge the outlook to be pretty closely balanced. Provided oil prices do not soar again, headline inflation will soon start heading south. In the US, we expect growth to slow towards year-end, but pick up again gradually through 2009. But in the UK, a gloomier outcome is likely: a recession next year now looks more likely than not.
Barclays Wealth, 02 September 2008
Markets look to be overly pessimistic about global macroeconomic prospects. So, we maintain a small overall equities overweight versus bonds. In the UK, however, we are adopting a small underweight.
Better macroeconomic news in the US has led the consensus to grow slightly more optimistic about prospects both this year and next. But in both Europe and Japan, worse than expected second-quarter GDP data led to sharp downwards revisions to forecasts. Concerns that emerging markets could slow have also risen.
With oil prices having stabilised around 20% below their peak, confidence has grown that headline inflation should soon start to subside – especially in the developed world. We have boosted our ‘emerging markets’ overweight, by going back to neutral on China and India, given that equity markets have fallen so far from their peaks.
The recent dollar surge marks a sea-change in attitudes to the US v. the rest of the world. Although some short-term retracement is possible, this likely marks the beginning of a long, sustained and sizeable appreciation in the greenback. Quite the reverse is true of sterling. Its sharp leg down in August is merely another step in what will be a long, drawn-out depreciation of the pound.
Signpost Monthly Update September 2008: Dented, but not destroyed [PDF, 1.30 MB]
Signpost Monthly Update September 2008: Video webcast with Michael Dicks [WMV, 10.8 MB, 04:55 minutes]
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