Tag Archives: Investing: Features

The state of Brazilian exports has deteriorated over the last decade. The country has become more reliant on exporting raw materials compared to manufactured goods, and has suffered from the recent downturn in the prices of many commodities. Meanwhile, the cost of manufacturing goods in the country has surged over the past decade, rendering it less competitive in the global marketplace. How can the country compete more effectively? It must get back to its roots, said manufacturers at Credit...

As soon as the Federal Reserve hiked interest rates in December 2015, market participants wanted to know how soon they’d do it again. After January served up negative economic surprises and volatility in global financial markets, the Fed held its fire at its January 27 meeting. While a March hike seemed plausible just a month ago, Credit Suisse economists say the odds of a first-quarter rate increase have fallen south of 50 percent. June is now the most likely date for the next hike.  ...

The first days of 2016 showed that China hasn’t escaped its 2015 woes. On January 4, new data showed that manufacturing activity slowed for the tenth consecutive month in December, and the ensuing sell-off in the stock market forced Chinese officials to halt trading mid-day. Global markets sank, and another bout of volatility on January 7 forced Chinese officials had to halt trading once again. But all the recent talk of China’s troubles has obscured the fact that the country’s companies...

Good governance pays, even when it slips under the radar.   “Corporate governance is not acknowledged enough when it works well, though it is frequently assailed when it fails dramatically,” says Michael O’Sullivan, Credit Suisse’s Chief Investment Officer, International Wealth Management, in a new report launched in Davos by the Credit Suisse Research Institute.   An independent board, strong controls, transparency and shareholder rights generally increase market value. But...

There’s good reason that financial technology firms – those that provide the tools that allow consumers to save, manage their wealth, access credit, and pay for things – might pique an investor’s interest. The most important one: they have outperformed the S&P 500 for seven of the past nine years. Within the fintech universe, Credit Suisse says that payment firms are the most investable segment, due to the relatively large number of publicly traded companies of all sizes, and also offer...

Fixed-income investors face a difficult dilemma these days. By definition, they seek yield to meet their investment goals, but many financial market observers are predicting trouble in one popular source of such yield – the high-yield bond market. There’s real cause for concern. The junk bond market has seized up several times in the past few years, undergoing sharp, sudden swings due to periodic lacks of liquidity. As the Federal Reserve’s long-anticipated December rate hike began to...

Earlier this year, when Tesla CEO Elon Musk tweeted about an upcoming product launch, the market paid attention. That tweet—which divulged only that the new product was not a car and would be unveiled April 30—sent Tesla’s shares soaring and boosted the electric carmaker’s market capitalization by nearly a billion dollars. (Tesla later revealed the new product to be a battery to power homes.) But not all dispatches from the Twitterverse carry the same weight as one from a...

Investors in emerging markets have underperformed their developed world peers for the past three years. After a particularly difficult year in 2015, due to the sharp depreciation many currencies experienced against the U.S. dollar, investors will need to be discerning in 2016, but Credit Suisse’s Investment Solutions & Products (IS&P) team expects economic growth to stabilize, opening opportunities to invest in select emerging market assets at attractive prices. What follows is Credit...

What central banks do – and how their policies diverge from one another – will continue to drive financial markets in 2016, impacting fixed income markets and creating opportunities for equity investors in places where policy is easing, according to the 2016 Investment Outlook from Credit Suisse’s Private Bank. The Federal Reserve seems almost certain to raise interest rates for the first time since 2006 in December – and, Credit Suisse believes it will raise them three more times in 2016....

December could be a big month for central bankers. The Federal Reserve is expected to make its first rate hike in nine years on December 16, while the European Central Bank is expected to announce further easing measures on December 3. The Swiss National Bank is likely to follow the ECB’s footsteps, sending deposit rates in the country even further into negative territory. Those moves, particularly combined with the divergence from American monetary policy, should provide a boost to European...