The second quarter brought a flow of good news despite a sizable drawdown related to the peak of inflation fear in the middle of May. Overall, portfolios achieved positive returns close to 1.7% across all series and risk levels.

Global equity markets climbed to new highs in the first quarter of 2021. Income growth, record household net worth and high private savings point to support for consumer spending as the pandemic constraints subside.

In 2020, despite the pandemic shortfall, the portfolios performance has remained strong year-on-year, both in absolute terms and relative to the corresponding benchmarks. In the last four quarters, we have seen around 10% return in Active portfolios and 7% in Optima, with an outperformance compared to the benchmark of 9% and 6% respectively.

Since the previous rebalance in July, all Fusion portfolios have delivered steady positive returns, varying between +1% for low risk portfolios to +2.6% for the risky ones despite close to zero returns of the corresponding benchmarks as the markets were mostly moving sideways.

Since the previous rebalance in April all Fusion portfolios delivered strong returns between 5% and 11% in line with their corresponding benchmarks performance, following the recent markets recovery.

In this note we review the performance of Fusion Model Portfolios (MPS), both Optima and Active ranges, after the unprecedented market moves during the first quarter of 2020, comparing it against selected benchmarks and wider industry offerings.

Since the last update on the 15th of March, global markets fell even further down before starting to rebound in the last week of March. At their lowest points, equity indices were down between -30% and -40% from the start of the selloff, with both corporate bonds and commodities also in disarray.

Recap of what has happened The market selloff during this month is the sharpest market move since the 1929 crash....

Since the last quarterly re-balance, while showing strong positive returns across all portfolios, the portfolios demonstrated considerable under-performance against their corresponding benchmarks.

Since the last rebalancing, during the period between 17th of July and 14th of October, all Fusion DFM portfolios outperformed their respective benchmarks with the highest outperformance of around 0.60% recorded for more risky portfolios.