Are You Losing Money on Sitting in Cash?

It’s a common motto among investors: Cash is trash. But Oksana Aronov, head of market strategy, alternative fixed income at J.P. Morgan Asset Management, says not so fast.

“I’ve been hearing about investors losing money sitting in cash, and that cash is trash for as long as I’ve been in this industry,” she said on this week’s episode of “What Goes Up.” “But the reality is that if you have been in cash for the last five years, you’ve essentially outperformed the Bloomberg Barclays aggregate index year to date, over one year, three years, and, depending on the day, yes, even five years.”

Aronov says that risks are currently skewed to the downside, and that she and her team prefer to have a lot of liquidity in their portfolio because “it serves as a free option, essentially, on any asset class in the world.” Opportunities will come by, perhaps in the coming months. “For us, this is still a capital-preservation part of the cycle, although I think we’re closer to the end of it than we were a couple months ago.”

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