Some Trends To Consider

Russ Koesterich, BlackRocks Portfolio Manager for their Global Allocation Team recently attended the Miliken Institute's global conference.  He came back from that and wrote about a few trends he thinks are important.  Below are his highlights:

Technology will remain a powerful, deflationary force for a very long time.

Russ says on an intuitive level we understand Tech's deflationary impacts based on what we see  every time we pull out our smart phones and shop online.  He thinks what is less obvious is the potential for an acceleration in this trend. he noted that one very well placed tech investor at the conference spoke about a one-million fold increase in processing power over the coming decades. That would open up fields that have hitherto remained less impacted by technology, notably health care and finance. The example he uses is the future use of robotic diagnostics and remote medicine becomes much more realistic  as computing power continues to expand.  He also thinks that finance is not immune from this trend.  

The better part of emerging market {EM} potential remains untapped.

Russ noted that emerging markets  EM is still coming off a cyclical downturn that left it with near pariah status with many investors. In he noted that, "While the stocks have rallied sharply year-to-date, the real potential lies in the future, particularly for EM infrastructure. The vast majority of emerging and frontier markets remain at a very early stage of development. Investment in EM infrastructure will be additive in almost all EM countries and offers the potential for attractive yield in a yield starved world".

Finally Russ also noted that these trends were likely to dominate over the short or even intermediate term. However,  he thinks investors should keep these in mind when regarding longer-term investment allocations and  to "remind us of the potential of new technology and new markets to change the investing landscape".

Go read the whole think below at the BlackRock Blog.  Investors should bookmark that blog as it has a ton of informative posts.  It's a good once a week review in my opinion.

Link:  What I learned At the Miliken Conference.

*Long ETFs related to healthcare, finance and emerging markets in both client and personal accounts. We reserve the right to change these investments without notice on this blog or via any other form of verbal, written or electronic communication.