FNArena’s Weekly Insights – September 18 2023
In this week’s Weekly Insights:
-Navigating The Post-August Complexities
-Best Ideas and Conviction Calls
-FNArena Talks
Navigating The Post-August Complexities
By Rudi Filapek-Vandyck, Editor
Active fund managers. They are usually brimming with optimism because, as some like to remind us all, pessimists don’t make much money.
Yet, at a recent industry panel conversation none of the managers on stage expressed anything other than caution and trepidation for what investors should expect from the Australian share market in the next 12-18 months.
The same reluctance dominates most strategy updates post-August from investment banks and stockbrokers; there are no repeats of the more dire warnings some issued in early 2022, but all seem to temper what could be too high expectations for the months ahead.
This might somewhat surprise for it is not as if the local share market has rallied hard this year. After a slightly negative return for 2022, year to date in calendar 2023 the ASX200 Accumulation index is up circa 6% but half of that stems from dividends. The ex-dividends gain of less than 3% could easily disappear throughout what is traditionally the weakest period of the year up until mid-October.
The recent August results season in Australia wasn’t an all-out inspiring event, but any massacres remained confined to individual companies and, overall, there have been plenty of positive surprises on forecasts that had become too cautious.
The main worry, however, is more directly linked to asset valuations generally.
