Robeco Asset Management Podcast

Keep questioning the consensus in 2021, do your research and stay contrarian, says Victor Verberk, Robeco’s CIO Fixed Income, in our latest podcast episode. “Bond yields are controlled, independence of central banks is out of the window. Joe Biden is going to print another USD 2 trillion in stimulus and the Fed will finance it. It’s a concerted effort to keep the economy going.” To go back to normal, we do need defaults, though, he says. Tune in.

Will value stocks make a comeback in 2021? Robeco’s Chief Quant Researcher, David Blitz, acknowledges that mean reversion isn’t always inevitable. And if it does occur, it’s difficult to predict the timing. “It will take a change of investor sentiment. But valuations cannot be detached from fundamentals forever.” Listen to the full podcast.

With several vaccines on the way, 2021 promises to be a great year for equities. Earnings could reach double-digit growth and the trend of underperformance in value stocks could grind to a hold, say Jeroen Blokland and Peter van der Welle in our latest podcast episode. It’s also a time for non-US stocks to outperform their US equivalents. Tune in to hear it all.

Covid-19 seems to have increased the speed at which trends are changing our world. Share prices of companies related to ecommerce and digitalization have surged. “The stock market is known for exaggerating every now and again, and certainly we have seen some really outrageous moves in stock prices. But there is still no reason to think that stocks should go down dramatically,” Steef Bergakker and Sam Brasser claim in our latest podcast episode. Tune in to hear the full story.

Central banks are navigating through unchartered territory. “The longer you have negative interest rate policies, the harder it will become to offset the negative side effects and to retain the positive effects of it,” says Martin van Vliet, strategist in the Global Macro team. But the Fed and BoE are still very reluctant to cross the Rubicon into below-zero rates, he argues. Meanwhile, since the money being created is not pursuing goods, the risks for inflation are well within control. Tune in.

Value has underperformed growth in the large-cap space by 43% in the past year. “The pressure on value investors to reevaluate and potentially discard their philosophy and change their processes is immense,” says Jay Feeney, CEO and CIO of Boston Partners.

Arnout van Rijn has been investing in Asia for 25 years; for more than half of this time, he has lived in Hong Kong. His experiences have taught him to embrace Daniel Kahneman’s advice to be skeptical, trade little and be patient. In this podcast episode, Arnout talks about life in Hong Kong, the lagging performance of value stocks and the digitalization race between the east and the west. Tune in.

Is rebuilding the global economy after Covid-19 an opportunity to fundamentally reboot economic systems? Proponents of the circular economy – which now accounts for 9% of the world economy – certainly think so. In our latest podcast episode, we discuss the circular economy with portfolio manager Holger Frey. Tune in. 

Is Value broken? Does a decade of disappointing performance mean that a factor has ultimately failed? The ‘lost decade’ for classic Fama-French factors like Size and Value raises some tough questions for quant researchers and portfolio managers. David Blitz and Pim van Vliet discuss a number of hot quant topics in our latest podcast episode.

“This crisis is different from previous ones because our investment teams have to deal with it by working remotely.” Almost four weeks since Covid-19 caused Europe to lock down and financial markets to fall sharply, Robeco’s Head of Investments, Peter Ferket, talks about the challenges of lack of liquidity in credit markets, outflows, and the long-term implications for the economy and the asset management industry.