Over two days jam-packed with investing passion and expertise, attendees of the Morningstar Investment Conference learned that Schroders’ Richard Buxton is kept awake at night by the sovereign debt crisis (and his two new kittens), heard Old Mutual’s Stewart Cowley compare the US to an “80 times leveraged hedge fund”, and had an opportunity to contrast this with comments from Fidelity’s Trevor Greetham that Obama’s pro-growth stance is the way to go.
No fewer than 20 leading investment specialists imparted their knowledge on the past, current and future investing environments, plus additional insight into their personal areas of expertise. There was an awful lot of talk about the US economy and monetary policy. “The US is acting like an emerging banana republic,” opined M&G’s Jim Leaviss, while Stewart Cowley made his thoughts—verging on disgust—at the Obama government’s current policy firmly known, and in stark contrast Trevor Greetham applauded the US stance and instead chastised European leaders for not following in their footsteps.
The highlights are too numerous to mention but stand-out memories include HEXAM’s Bryan Collings providing a staunchly bullish view of emerging markets opportunities, in which he said it is highly unlikely that emerging market growth will lose momentum unless there is a major crisis that hits all the developing economies, and the only economies able to trigger such a crisis are developed markets. Polar Capital’s Ben Rogoff gave an impassioned presentation on the tech sector, successfully managing to make cloud computing and software as a service (SAAS) sound not only almost sexy but also like a particularly exciting area of investment. Threadneedle’s Don Jordison displayed such confidence in his team’s ability to look after clients’ money in the property space that he quipped that if a fund has “Threadneedle” at the start of its name then it’ll outperform. And, in addition to his feline experiences, Richard Buxton told the 300-strong audience that UK corporates are in notably good health and consumer-driven stocks are even starting to outperform, much to his pleasant surprise.
Full coverage of each presentation can be found at Morningstar.co.uk.