Global macro strategies and managed futures work well in periods of volatility and interest rate uncertainty because managers can access a broad range of investment products in the regions and countries presenting the best opportunities, Davis says.

In a similar vein, long-short equity strategies also have the benefit of active management—so they can find opportunities in difficult markets, says Davis. That makes them an ideal replacement for traditional long-only equity strategies during particularly uncertain or volatile times.

“We focus on two things,” says Davis. “Our funds have a consistent net-line exposure to the market so that they capture meaningful beta. Then we look for managers that are good on the short side and can add value regardless of the market environment. They’re not just shorting an index; they’re shorting stocks they think they can make money on. If you have good managers, they should be able to outperform equity markets on the long and the short sides.”

Capital preservation and potentially strong returns can also be found from commodity investing, says Bloom, but the timing has to be right.

Since the dollar was decoupled from gold in the 1970s, commodity prices have run in seven-year cycles, says Bloom—a cycle that Invesco believes bottomed out sometime in the past four months.

“Through last year into the first part of this year, we had performance of what appears to be normal cyclical weakness,” says Bloom. “The price war that OPEC instigated at the end of 2014 coincided with the run-up of the dollar resulting from divergent interest rate policies over the same time frame. It was a perfect storm to create downside on commodities.”

That downturn appears to have reversed this year, says Bloom, not just because commodities have reached another cyclical upside. “We’ve seen the dollar reverse. We’ve seen cyclical supply and demand forces turn more positive. It’s almost a perfect storm in the other direction, but it’s not a storm that will drive prices as high as fast as the downside. It’s likely to be less volatile on the way back up.”

That doesn’t mean commodities are prepared to run across the board. Bloom notes that metals and energy suffer from oversupply that won’t be quickly overcome.

“Sentiment really drives where the floor in prices is, and production tends to set the ceiling,” Bloom says. “I think we’re in an uptrend and that commodity prices are going to remain high. The nice thing is that we’re going to get plenty of reasonable entry points if we buy the dips, because we’ll continue to see some of these gyrations. Regardless of all these other influences, you still have a broad cyclical dynamic going on and things seem to be playing out exactly as we might expect. Maybe our expectations for how far energy can go should be tempered, but the outlook otherwise doesn’t change much.”

According to Bloom, commodities historically provide better inflation protection, even as TIPS have become more expensive as investors seek shelter.