As we continue to take precautions surrounding the COVID-19 Pandemic, we look to review the second quarter of 2020. In our previous letter we discussed how most of us wished we had moved to cash prior to the COVID-19 led bear market which occurred in Feb/March of this year. We discussed how increasingly difficult, if not impossible it is to time markets, and how time IN the market is much more important than TIMING the market. We had difficult conversations with many of our clients where we encouraged them to hang on through one of the most violent market pullbacks we’ve ever seen and asked them to remain optimistic about long term market returns. Well here we are at the end of the second quarter and those investors that remained in their seat were almost instantly rewarded.
Now, we don’t add the above paragraph to prove that we were right. No, rather to point out again that markets can and will continue to be unpredictable. To be quite honest, we would have thought you were crazy if you told us that US markets would rebound 22% in Q2 but here we are. Furthermore, the rebound in equity markets was felt globally as we saw International Developed, Emerging Markets, and Global Real Estate up 15%, 18%, and 11% respectively.