A new year with an updated quarterly commentary! Please feel free to tuck into the short summary video below for a tidy summary of the last quarter of last year. If you’re looking for more detail, feel free to grab a cuppa and sink yourself into the below commentary from Brendan de Jongh, recapping Q4 2022! For a recap of previous commentaries, please see our blog.

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Sending love to you and yours,
Richard and the F&A Team

This piece was compiled by Brendan de Jongh, SA Head of Research at PortfolioMetrix.

Overall, the last quarter of the year saw good performance from a number of previously beaten down asset classes, particularly continental European equities. The dollar partially retraced some of its annual gains, contributing to the underperformance of US equities seen by overseas holders.

Volatility, as measured by the VIX index, fell over the quarter although remains up over the year as a whole. Developed markets performed similarly to emerging markets however there was large divergence in performance at a sub-region or country level. Global bond yields fell slightly over the quarter leading to higher quality bond prices (as measured by the Bloomberg Global Aggregate Index) rising (bond yields and prices move in opposite directions). Lower quality ‘high yield’ bonds rose more than higher quality bonds, as investors became slightly less worried about the strength of the global economy. After strong gains earlier in the year, oil fell 2.3% over Q4 whilst gold rose 9.8% (taking its year-to-date performance to flat for the year).

The tables below summarise the asset class movements over various time frames.

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For the full Local & Global Quarterly Fund Commentaries, please click the links below.

Local Fund Commentary

Provides a commentary on the past quarter, its events and their impacts; as well as more intimate commentary on each moving part within your portfolios.

Global Fund Commentary

Provides intimate commentary on each moving part within your portfolios.