Moyo said that investors still might find opportunities in staples like food, healthcare and logisitics.
During an alternatives ETFs panel, Mario Manfredi, client portfolio manager on First Trust’s alternatives team, said the era of accommodative monetary policy was over, and that the bull market would soon lose steam.
“The next eight years don’t look anything like the previous eight,” said Manfredi. “Higher valuations, stretched rates and higher volatility with longer sustained drawdowns, I think we’ll get to the point where buy the dip doesn’t work anymore.”
Concurrently with Inside Alternatives sessions, Financial Advisor magazine’s 6th Annual Impact/SRI ESG Investing conference took place, featuring a debate over where intentional investing works in portfolios and its prospects for creating financial returns and ESG impacts.
For Robert Smith, president and chief investment officer of Sage Advisory, ESG investing has become a screen to find higher quality fixed income opportunities and wring enhanced returns from corporate bonds.
“It’s an elevation of our game,” said Smith. “We’re not constrained in any way, shape or form. We want to be informed and engaged, we want to be enlightened investors, and we believe ESG analysis does this.”
At a later Impact/SRI & ESG conference panel, Abhilash Mudaliar, research director for the Global Impact Investing Network, predicted that advisors and asset managers would soon have their compensation linked to their ability to create impacts.
A general session panel featured a debate between a bearish Ali Motamed, managing partner at Invenomic Capital Management, and a more bullish Jim Paulsen, chief investment strategist at the Leuthold Group.
Motamed argued that the next market correction is imminent, as equities have become vastly overvalued, even in the small-cap stock space, and that between low interest rates and their bloated balance sheets, central banks have little ammunition to counter the next recession.
“The media has taken traditional methodologies and used them to make assumptions about the market, that the VIX is too low, but valuations are too high, and I get all that,” said Paulsen. “I see all those old rules and maybe they’re right, but a better way of looking at it is that this has been an awfully unique period and the incredible, persistent bull persists even to this day.”