By Allan Lane, Algo-Chain – With the news that PayPal has entered the cryptocurrency market, quickly followed by the world’s biggest ever IPO, where Ant, the financial services arm of Alibaba, raised USD34 billion from investors, it would be fair to say that 2020 has proven to be a breakthrough year for the FinTech movement.  With Alipay reputedly accounting for USD17,000,000,000,000 in online payments, and with Ant’s share issue taking place in Asia rather than the US, the sheer scale of what is at stake here will not be lost on many.

This year has been the year when themed investing has dominated the headlines, but at this very moment in time it would be hard to exaggerate how the top 10 best performing ETFs listed on the London Stock Exchange so perfectly encodes the hope that many investors envisage in a post-pandemic world.

By Allan Lane, Algo-Chain – It is fair to say that China’s President Xi Jinping stunned the world with his recent announcement to the United Nations general assembly with his pledge that China would reach peak carbon before 2030 and for good measure drive down emissions to close to zero by 2060. 

By Linda Zhang (pictured), CEO, Purview Investments – "While writing this piece in Manhattan, I can’t imagine what New York City would be like if it were shut down for 24 hours.” This was how I started a publication about the impact of the Covid-19 shutdown in China on the world economy and capital markets in late February. A couple of weeks later, the city entered a state of shelter in place. Five months later, my beloved city and many parts of the world are still in various states of shutdown.

It has been well over 100 days since that fateful day in late March when the Fed stepped in and said they would start buying Corporate Bonds as part of a much wider plan to help avoid a broader market collapse as outflows from Fixed Income funds ran riot. 

Jason Xavier, Head of EMEA ETF Capital Markets, and Rafaelle Lennox, Senior ETF Product Specialist at Franklin Templeton, examine ETF investing within the context of the Covid-19 crisis, and why they believe investors will continue to embrace these vehicles.

One of the surprising aspects of 2020 has been the speed at which the concept of ‘active management’ in the pursuit of alpha has been rehabilitated, and in the long run I suspect this will benefit the ETF industry. 

After the mother of all market selloffs in March and the mother of all market rebounds in April, it is long overdue to survey the debris that some investors might mistake for a well-constructed portfolio. As an income investor one should really ‘beware the Ides of March’ and in this article I will review four sources of income and the risks that come with that territory.

We’ve long held the view that in the next market downturn, somewhere down the line ETFs would be vilified. And that happened, initially, with headlines noting: wild swings in premiums/discounts; illusion of liquidity; exacerbating volatility. But after the initial hysteria and alarmist headlines, as calmer heads prevailed and market participants shared their truths, the tune changed, and ETFs emerged as a hero in troublesome times.   

By Allan Lane (pictured), Algo-Chain – At Algo-Chain when re-balancing our Model Portfolios we have always been big advocates of using macro-economic data to help guide the asset allocation decision process, and central to that is the data provided by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, OECD.