Will the Trump presidency affect your investments? - Investment Commentary Nov16

Investment Commentary November 2016 How worried should you be about market reaction to news of the Trump presidency? Chief Investment Officer Damian Graham gives some tips. Transcript Will the US presidential election results affect my investments? The markets have been very focused on the US presidential election on November 8th and won by Donald Trump. So the closeness of the election reflects the fact that economic growth around the world is quite modest and it's fairly challenging to be a politician. Both candidates did focus on infrastructure spending and also a return to fiscal policy to drive economic growth in the US. Markets can be challenged by uncertainty such as elections and we did see market volatility occur through the last month or so. But we would expect markets to refocus on fundamentals in the medium term, to see the markets settle down. As always we do recommend that investors remain well diversified to manage uncertain issues such as elections and to manage the volatility that can occur with these issues. What's happening in other markets? The political uncertainty in the US did see markets sell off in October across both shares and bonds. And in addition in Australia the markets were a little bit weaker than they were overseas. We did however see some sectors of the market perform a little bit better including emerging market equities after a period of significant relative underperformance over the last few years. Why are emerging markets in the spotlight again? So emerging markets have suffered a number of years of underperformance compared to developed markets such as the US and Europe. Driving this relative underperformance have been issues such as question marks on economic growth in China, but also significant political upheaval in regions such as Brazil. Both of those issues have settled down this year where we've seen more confidence around Chinese growth and also a much more settled political situation in Brazil. And so we've seen equities in both of those areas start to perform more positively.

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