Five of Our Top Investment Themes

2020-2021 Top Investment Themes

Theme 01 High-Quality Stocks: We must now favour companies which have high profitability, limited debt, low profit variability and large cash reserves.

Theme 02 Defensive Solutions: The trend is to search for alternative returns via good quality corporate bonds, hedge funds and structured products.

Theme 03 De-Globalisation: Protectionist trends and dependence on international supply chains are expected to lead to a stabilisation and even a decline in international trade in the long term. The 'deglobalisation' should provide opportunities for some companies or even for some countries. In particular, producers of goods and services which substitute imports are well positioned to benefit from this trend. The same is true for emerging market countries which compete with China.

Theme 04 Digitalisation and Technological Innovations: Alongside the trends in health care, this is one of the most marked trends: 5G, and Artificial Intelligence will benefit from the increased communication and data needs generated by the crisis. New battery storage and autonomous driving will also have a revolutionary breakthrough in auto industry too.

Theme 05 Innovations in Health Care: The sector is growing faster than the rest of the economy. Thanks to digitalisation, analytics, database management and Artificial Intelligence, the way treatment-care is given will change considerably at all levels and generate a wave of capital expenditure.

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RISKS

• Innovation is developing at such a fast speed that the idiosyncratic risks are very high. Broad diversification is necessary.

• The Coronavirus crisis is weighing heavily on the capacity of companies to invest (cash flow contraction) and this could create delays in capital expenditure.

• Risks of political nature exist, since 5G and AI are seen as key to the competitiveness of nations.

• This is an aggressive investment, volatility is well above average and has higher capital risk