Good News
Pfäffikon SZ, Switzerland – One merely has to open his or her email inbox or fold open the morning paper to be bombarded by ominous reports. Some even say we’re on the eve of a total meltdown. The doomsayers sprout up left and right when global markets are hit with a Force 6 wind. It’s worth noting that one of the richest people on earth – Bill Gates – sees things differently.
Groupthink
Last week I touched on the topic of groupthink. The list of miseries is so extensive that some banks advise you to sell “everything”. Something Gates isn’t contemplating for a second – and he’s right. The refugee crisis, Isis, teetering mountains of debt, shifting currencies, negative interest rates, ever decreasing commodity prices, Ukraine, the Crim, China – the laundry list of problems is too long to mention here.
Good news, according to Gates, is slow to start, whereas bad news falls from the sky. Moreover, good news doesn’t sell. Gates points out that the world is doing a lot better than most believe. Extreme poverty has halved since 1990. In developing countries more than ninety percent of children have access to education, not to mention the internet. Ultimately, this will undoubtedly have a positive economic effect and there isn’t an investor in the world that’s taking it into consideration.
China
Siemens CEO Joe Kaeser was remarkably positive about China this week. “The real economy in China is a lot better than people are talking about right now.” says Kaeser. There was also plenty of good news to be found at the WEF in Davos, however this is apparently hard for the media to uncover. Sometimes it’s forgotten that the average European family today, enjoys a standard of living which is equivalent to that of their richest counterparts on the planet back in the sixties. In no more than fifty years. this difference has been completely eliminated – which says a lot about the future.
France is making a stand to lift the sanctions on Russia, but this also goes unreported in the Western media. Now that France is in the deep mess it’s in, even those in Paris are starting to realize that the sanctions against Russia aren’t contributing to the solution. In Berlin they seem to have come to the same conclusion. Many investors have no idea how much good news is available. Gates is absolutely right; good news is slow to start and is not valued accurately by many.
It remains for me to wish you a good weekend.
Jan Dwarshuis is a senior asset manager at Thirteen Asset Management AG, where he is responsible for the Thirteen Diversified Fund. Dwarshuis writes his columns in a personal capacity and is not paid for them. Nor is he paying for his columns to be placed. Professionally, he holds positions in major European, American and Russian stock funds. The information in his columns is not intended as professional investment advice or a recommendation to make certain investments. At the time of writing, he has no position in the above mentioned shares and has no intention of doing so in the next 72 hours.
