01 Apr, 2024
Financial literacy is predicated on asking the question, “Why?” Why does this market keep moving higher? Why is inflation fading so slowly? Why are home prices high given low affordability? A stronger financial literacy or understanding likely leads to fewer investing mistakes; nobody likes mistakes. Our weekly publication often attempts to answer questions on various topics, dive into them, explain them, provide some context and share our views on what could happen next. In the past few weeks, we have talked about IPOs, gold, and inflation – hopefully improving our readers’ financial literacy and our own in the process of researching and writing. Sometimes, the questions being asked are not macro topics such as the economy, or inflation, or upcoming elections, but more focused on portfolio construction and positioning. Why are our portfolios overweight Japanese equities? Why did we add preferred shares? Why is our credit exposure low? Why are we moderately underweight U.S. equities? To answer these questions, we created the WHY Report, which is a monthly chart-heavy report that shares most of our current multi-asset portfolio tilts, explaining our rationale for that tilt. Most are working out well, some not so much. Even with strong financial literacy, mistakes still happen. With the first quarter of 2024 now in the rearview, today’s report dives into a number of portfolio tilts and sections from our monthly WHY Report . Why are we positioned the way we are? If you would like to receive the WHY Report on a monthly basis, along with any changes to our positioning over time, there is a sign-up at the end of the report. Now, let’s jump into it.