Overall Market Backdrop, April
– The optimism that spearheaded equities in Q1 has continued to run through in April; vaccine
rollouts in the UK and USA has sustained the momentum gathered in Q1.
– Successful vaccine rollouts have created an atmosphere of optimism for global growth and this
is shown by the rise in bond yields, the US 10-year treasury has increased by 71 basis points
YTD.
– Recovering from 2-months of underperforming the market benchmark, Momentum was the
best performing factor in April, with a return of 6.42%.
– The Emerging Markets and Asia Pacific regions struggled when compared to the other global
equity markets in April, this was mainly due to the prolonging effect of the Chinese equity selloff which started in February.
– There is a caveat to the economic recovery being seen across the world; the easing of
restrictions is running simultaneously with virus mutations. Virus mutation may threaten the
reopening of economies.