What are you doing with your 40%?

Fund: LF Ruffer Total Return Fund

Bond allocations in portfolios are being questioned. A potent mix of low interest rates, extraordinary monetary policy and a pandemic have pushed bond valuations to the moon. This is a decades old trend. But bonds are supposed to offset equity losses in a diversified portfolio. That relationship is no longer so straightforward when parts of the equity market are already moving in lockstep with bond valuations: the merest hint of talking about interest rate rises has hurt both bonds and some of the most popular equity names. What do you do instead when the bonds don't work?

Join Ian, manager of the Ruffer Total Return Fund, to hear what options are available for investors, where the pitfalls are to diversifying away from fixed interest allocations and how our funds can help.

Why Outsource? Finding the right solution for your client

Fund: HSBC Multi Asset Solutions

Every client is unique, as investment professionals it is very important to provide the right solution for the right client. Join Hugo Thompson from HSBC Asset Management as he discusses how to find investment solutions that tick the boxes your clients care about. Some investors prioritise cost efficiency, others want control and transparency, while an increasing number care about ESG but don’t want to sacrifice investment returns.

Replacing the silver bullet

In past decades, the classic portfolio of 60% stocks and 40% bonds was a silver bullet. Now, however, its return prospects look grim, its risks heightened. Escaping those risks will require a very different approach in the decades ahead. In this session, we lay out the case for a far more active approach to multi-asset investing—one that takes advantage of the bottom-up opportunities that are available in markets today. With the right tools and a contrarian perspective, active investors can still pursue attractive returns. Even without a silver bullet.

60/40 is dead

Fund: 7IM Passive, Blended and Active models

The idea of a 60/40 portfolio has long been one of the building blocks of investing, but is it still fit for the future? While the 60/40 portfolio has been a great place to be over the last decade, looking forward, and with an eye on what’s happened in 2020 in particular, should advisers now be looking for more from their portfolios? “Be it diversification through proper strategic asset allocation, looking at regions like emerging markets or diversification through alternatives, these should all be differentiating parts of robust multi-asset investing going forward, which should replace the increasingly flawed 60/40 approach.”

Three Inescapable Truths for the decades ahead

2020 was a watershed moment for Sustainable Investing, the Covid -19 Pandemic accelerated the shift to more sustainable investing for many investors. Join us for the session where we will unpack this trend and further Inescapable Truths you will have to consider in your Multi-Asset Portfolios for the decades ahead.

Growth? Value? Neither.

Often characterised as simply Tech and Tesla, Baillie Gifford’s Lucy Haddow will dispel that notion and explain how Baillie Gifford’s Managed Fund team think about investing for the decade ahead. She will cover why the idea of growth versus value isn’t a sensible starting point, particularly when considering ESG; how the team go about finding the next great growth businesses; and, ultimately, why very few stocks actually matter for generating good long-term returns.