Below are the three charts I showed you at the event. If you are interested in getting full access to this website and all the underlying research, if you’d like to receive the magazine, or if you want to be considered as a delegate for future educational investor events, then please send an email to our head of research Ilyes Bdioui (he was there on the day so you might have met him).
His email is ilyes.bdioui@lastwordmedia.com – or call him
on +44 20 7382 4470.
You can also email me, Dylan Emery, if you have any questions or comments. My email is dylan.emery@lastwordmedia.com
On with the research…
Firstly, here is the investor sentiment graph. It shows the attitude towards European equities of professional investors in various countries. As you can see, Belgian, Italian and Spanish investors became less positive about European equities from mid-2012 to mid-2013; Sweden is relatively bearish on the asset class; and the run-away bulls are the Spanish.
Then we have the Fund Manager Sentiment Survey, in which we ask 25 global fund management groups whether they think a series of asset classes will be up more than 5%, down more than 5% or in the middle in 12 month’s time.
The green, orange and red bars show the sentiment in aggregate. +100 means everyone is positive; -100 means everyone thinks there will be a 5%+ drop. The purple line chart overlayed shows the movement of the index on the month we polled the managers.
As you can see, there is high correlation between how well the index does in a month and the fund managers’ aggregate outlook. So it seems that they are swayed by current performance.
If you we now take the second chart and compare how their sentiment was to the performance of the index 12 months later – which is when they were supposed to be making their predictions. At this point you can see quite a few instances where the index does the opposite of the sentiment – so when they are optimistic that might be a selling signal in 12 months’ time!
What it shows overall is that a) it’s hard to predict index movements; b) consensus estimates tend to be wrong. So either don’t try to guess index movements; or go for contrarians.
I hope you found that interesting and hope to see you at future events!
Dylan Emery, Editor, Expert Investor Europe.
