As 2025 begins, many investors are worried about the year ahead. That's not unusual: PGIM’s 2024 global risk survey, released at the start of last year, found 56 per cent of institutional investors indicated that geopolitical risks posed a major challenge to markets.
In what was labelled the “largest election year in history”, countries home to roughly half of the world’s population held national elections last year. Throw in the ongoing conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East and the potential for disruption was obvious.
Yet most of the major asset classes performed creditably through the year, save for the odd exception such as inflation-indexed government bonds. It could be that investors have become more sanguine where external risk factors are concerned (a distinct possibility given events over the past four years), but there are probably more prosaic reasons.