Investing after COVID-19: finding lasting opportunities in the new normal

LONDON (Capital Markets in Africa) – To call 2020 “unprecedented” wouldn’t begin to do justice to the depth of challenges individuals and organizations around the world found themselves unexpectedly confronting over the past year—nor the speed with which those challenges arrived.

It was early January when news broke of a pneumonia-like virus circulating in Wuhan, China; before the end of the month, the World Health Organization had declared COVID-19 a global public health emergency, and less than six weeks later, many developed nations around the world had implemented broad-based lockdowns in an unproven attempt to contain a virus the medical community knew alarmingly little about. Businesses and schools were quickly shuttered. Those who could work from home did; those who couldn’t found themselves facing a precarious and uncertain financial future almost literally overnight.

While the cost in lives and livelihoods the virus has extracted over the past year is enormous, there is good news at hand and more on the horizon: The lethality of the virus is decidedly not as bad as some had originally feared, doctors and medical professionals have become much better at treating it, and multiple vaccines are already being administered. There are many reasons to be optimistic that 2021 won’t be a repeat of the year that has been.

But despite the near-universal desire to turn the page on 2020 and return to some version of the “old normal,” the pandemic and the changes it has brought with it will almost certainly transform societies in some lasting ways, both big and small. This paper takes a closer look at those changes, the economic and market implications they suggest, and how investors might position their portfolios to benefit from them. We break down both the short-term tactical opportunities we see unfolding as well as some of the longer-term, more permanent shifts likely to transform the economy and the way investors think about the markets.

Continuing reading at Manulife Investment Management.