Advisors and investors who have spent the last two years looking for income are big-time losers—they just don’t know it yet. That’s what Richard Bernstein of the eponymous advisory firm told attendees at a press luncheon sponsored by Eaton Vance on Wednesday.
“In 2000, advisors didn’t want income,” Bernstein recalled. Now, after a decade of historically low interest rates, income is the primary goal of many advisors and their yield-starved clients.
“People don’t realize it yet, but when they start looking at total returns” it will hit them, he continued.
Since June 2016, everyone has been “worried about inflation returning,’ he continued. In the intervening time period, bonds have fallen about 2 percent or 3 percent, stocks are up about 45 percent and commodities are up about 15 percent.
“Bonds are as risky as tech in 2000” or housing in 2006 and 2007, Bernstein said.
Kathleen Gaffney, a vice president and director of diversified fixed income, agreed and said investors should be wary of taking duration risk. With budget deficits climbing, Gaffney added she’d “bet on a weaker dollar.”
In Bernstein’s view, investors have a series of misconceptions that will hurt them sometime in the near future. Their views on technology stocks and emerging markets top his list.
“People say they are high-growth investments” when in reality they are deep-cyclical investments, he explained. Technology, in particular, has gone for entire decades like the 1980s and the 2000-2009 era when it underperformed the major indexes.
As for emerging markets, they are really a play on global growth. “If you think global growth will accelerate you want to own them,” he said.
Showing his contrarian stripes, Bernstein said investors and markets might be excessively bearish on China. “There is a hard-core consensus that China is toast,” he said. “I wouldn’t be so sure.”