S&W The Pulse

*2019 was a buoyant year for most equity and fixed income markets perhaps surprisingly actually given the mood at the beginning of the year, but what were the main drivers of this success? *Well firstly let's look at 2019. In terms of the performance global equities were up 27% and you wouldn’t have guessed that if you looked at the earnings because earnings steadily decelerated throughout that year, and in fact there was virtually no earnings growth at all in 2019. The key driver was the Federal Reserve and other major central banks by loosening in terms of interest rates by increasing the size of their balance sheets and reversing the tightening policies that we saw at the back end of 2018. These were the key market drivers going into 2019 plus it's also worth bearing in mind that the trade protections and rhetoric that started off in 2018 and continued into early 2019, towards the back end of 2019 we saw President Trump has dialled back some of that trade protection rhetoric and indeed we might get a trade