Global fund managers continue to be overweight in equities this quarter on the back of strong corporate earnings and excess liquidity, although markets may see corrections in the near term, several foreign institutes said.
Global fund managers remain optimistic about the prospects for equities in the second quarter, as 57 percent hold an overweight view while none held an underweight view on the asset class, HSBC PLC’s quarterly survey of fund houses showed.
However, the number of optimists has dropped from 75 percent in the first quarter after noticeable advances on global bourses, the survey found.
“Emerging market equities, in particular, are back in the spotlight this quarter as over half of fund managers hold positive views, compared with 29 percent in the previous quarter,” HSBC Bank Taiwan head of wealth management Steve Chuang (莊懷德) said in a report.
DBS Bank voiced similar views, with overweight ratings particularly on US and Chinese equities that may receive further support from excess liquidity as Japan joins quantitative easing.
“The yield gap still overwhelmingly favors stocks after corporate earnings rose above their historical high,” DBS chief investment officer Lim Say Boon (林哲文) told a media briefing in Taipei yesterday.
While global bourses may see corrections in the short term, they may create wise entry opportunities, Lim said.
Lim stayed neutral on bond holdings.
However, the best times are over for gold, with the metal turning from a risk-hedge tool to a risk itself amid low inflationary pressures and receding economic uncertainty, DBS Bank said.
“Hedges work best when few people own it, but many people now own gold, making it ineffective as a hedge,” Lim said.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
MAJOR BENEFICIARY: The company benefits from TSMC’s advanced packaging scarcity, given robust demand for Nvidia AI chips, analysts said ASE Technology Holding Co (ASE, 日月光投控), the world’s biggest chip packaging and testing service provider, yesterday said it is raising its equipment capital expenditure budget by 10 percent this year to expand leading-edge and advanced packing and testing capacity amid strong artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing chip demand. This is on top of the 40 to 50 percent annual increase in its capital spending budget to more than the US$1.7 billion to announced in February. About half of the equipment capital expenditure would be spent on leading-edge and advanced packaging and testing technology, the company said. ASE is considered by analysts