Fidelity Personal Investing’s Daniel Lane highlights three popular funds that could be considered for exposure to some of the smallest businesses in the UK. UK smaller companies are “misunderstood” to some extent, according to Fidelity Personal Investing’s Daniel Lane, but there are a number of funds that can find investments where large-cap focused managers are not looking. At a time when Brexit and the health of the UK economy are never far from the headlines, Lane noted that a common...

The opening five months of 2019 have seen professional investors carry out more research into areas such as technology and ethical exchange-traded funds (ETFs) while paying less attention to strategies tracking US and UK equities, FE Trustnet analysis suggests. While 2018 was a challenging year for investors, with losses or flat returns being posted by most markets following a host of headwinds, 2019 has been relatively easier for investors to navigate. FE Analytics shows that the MSCI AC...

With a slowdown in the US seemingly on the cards, a Schroders economist has looked at how different assets have held up during this part of the cycle. The US – the world’s largest economy – appears to be heading into a slowdown, according to analysis by Schroders, and history shows that these conditions have tended to lead to government bonds beating equities. Concerns over the health of the US economy have been in place for some time and have heightened in recent weeks after the trade war...

Professional investors continued to pay more attention to popular funds like Fundsmith Equity, Lindsell Train Global Equity and Vanguard’s LifeStrategy range last month, although some less well-known strategies were also on their radars. After several months of relative calm in 2019, May threw investors a curveball after the trade tensions between the US and China were re-ignited. The US Trump administration said it would hike tariffs on $200bn of Chinese goods and China retaliated with...

Invesco chief global market strategist Kristina Hooper reviews the events of the past months and tells investors what they should be watching from here. May was “a game-changing month for global markets” and suggests that further volatility could be on the horizon, Invesco’s chief global market strategist argues. While the opening quarter of 2019 was a relatively pleasant one as markets enjoyed a strong bull run when risks such as trade tensions, Brexit and tightening monetary policy receded,...