Bond markets The main driver behind an extraordinary first half of the year 2019 has been an unexpected decline in interest rates. In fact, even the strong performance of the recovering stock markets, which had suffered from big losses towards the end of 2018, were outpaced by the falling interest rates. Just when everyone agreed […]

With a legal/tax background (Ghent University), Herman Coppens started his career at KPMG. After that, he went on to the Generale Bank, where for more than ten years he mainly occupied tax positions. “In the late 90s I was in charge of the stock listing of property investment funds,” he explains. He moved to Petercam […]

Macro Context In January, the markets showed a nice rebound after a period of a slumping global stock markets in December. This phenomena showed us an extreme of both, December 2018 was one of the worst month periods for the global stock market in the last decades whereas the following month was one of the […]

For the first time in many years, investors are facing negative returns as the global equity market has fallen sharply.

Investors looked forward to the G20 meeting last month in Buenos Aires, Argentina. The focus was not on the G20 summit itself but on the duel that took place between President Trump and Chinese President Xi Jingping. The main focus was on the trade relations between those two countries. As trade war threat between the […]

The world as we experience can often be compared to reading a financial newspaper.