Perspectives

Investing Insights

Our investment team provides insights on asset allocation and the investment markets designed to help investors improve their investment outcomes.

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  2020 Year-In-Review - A retrospective of an infamous year

  Reminiscent of Disneyland’s Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride, the economy and investment markets fluctuated wildly, free-falling during the second quarter only to swing back upward and end the year in record territory.

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  Pegged - 2020 was a record shattering year. What will 2021 bring?

  Hope on the horizon? After an unprecedented 2020, here are eight reasons why 2021 could represent a return to more normal economic times.

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  Election Night 2020

  Great-West Investments examined the outcomes of past presidential election results and summarizes the stock market performance for each election outcome scenario.

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  Active & Passive Fixed Income - Lessons learned from the Pandemic

  The ability of active fixed-income managers to identify and take measured risks — in terms of credit, duration and perhaps even a few esoteric, out-of-benchmark sector bets — may prove to be keys to success in the post-COVID-19 environment.

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  Triple Word Score

  GWI examines the recent trend-lines of various components of the economy to determine what the shape of the overall U.S. economic recovery could look like (V, U, W, or L-shaped).

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  Whither the 60/40 Portfolio?

  GWI questions the efficacy of the traditional 60/40 balanced portfolio in the current environment.

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  Unprecedented

  GWI examines the unprecedented disparity between Growth stock and Value stocks and surmises that it may be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for value investors.

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  Rivers, Market Volatility and Whipsaws

  GWI examines recent stock market volatility and illustrates how mechanical trading models would have underperformed a buy-and-hold strategy through the COVID-19 crisis.

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  Managing your portfolio during volatile times

  Examines historical market declines and illustrates the resiliency of the markets.

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  Game plan for managing investment market volatility

  Provides a game plan for managing your portfolio during periods of extreme volatility.

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  Ghost in the machine – Pairing artificial and human intelligence

  Discusses how quantitative investment strategies such as big data and machine learning can co-exist with traditional active portfolio selection to provide better diversification and portfolio efficiencies.

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  Capital market assumptions – Peeking inside the crystal ball

  This piece discusses how GWI generates and utilizes capital market assumptions to reflect our forward-looking beliefs, risks and return potential for the asset classes in which we invest.

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  Invest with style

  GWI examines the dominant out-performance of the growth style of investing relative to value over the past decade.

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  Whither the victors?

  An examination of the trade war with China and the corresponding investment market effects.

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  Emerging market equities — From emerging to mainstream

  Emerging market equities are under‐allocated to by investors relative to their world market cap and may provide an opportunity for outsized returns.

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  Be patient, be brave

  Examines stock returns over various holding periods.

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  What’s behind the curtain in your passive bond portfolio?

  Bond indexes funds have become significantly more risky over the past 10 years.

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  Considerations for commodities investments

  Discusses the benefits and challenges of allocating to commodity investments.

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  Fed liquidity and active management

  Explores the relationship between Federal Reserve liquidity and the performance of active management relative to the performance of index funds.

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  Portfolio rebalancing — Less is more

  GWI analyzes various rebalancing frequencies to determine how often investors should rebalance their portfolios.