00:00Raleigh speaking, Chinese markets are doing quite well, especially here in Hong Kong.
00:04What's the outlook for the second half?
00:06Yeah, so we're actually still quite constructive in the second half.
00:10I think a lot of the rally so far this year is reflecting the AI breakthrough.
00:18Companies have delivered on earnings.
00:20The macro is becoming more stable.
00:22It's not accelerating, but it's stable.
00:25Policy have room.
00:26So all of that, I think, has been driving the rally.
00:28And, of course, trade sentiment here and there will shift investors day to day.
00:34But it's really the fundamentals that I think it's been improving.
00:38And on that basis, we still think that the market probably has more to go in the second half of the year.
00:43I think that day to day, you will feel the trade sentiment shift back and forth.
00:47But it could be actually an opportunity for longer-term investors because you will not miss it.
00:53It probably will come every time there's a negative headline on trade.
00:56I look across a fund screen, for example, fund screen.
01:02Gold and alternatives seem to top that list year to date.
01:06Yeah.
01:06What is your advice now to clients right now at these levels for gold?
01:10And what makes sense cross-asset portfolio?
01:12What is the ideal range allocation to something like gold, for example?
01:17Yeah.
01:18So I think that gold is really broken with its historical structural drivers, which is the dollar and real interest rates.
01:27There's a very meaningful break between gold prices and real interest rates, which has really very rarely happened.
01:32And that break occurred in 2022 around the Ukraine and Russia war.
01:38So we think that what's happened is that central banks around the world are now diversifying into gold.
01:44And if you look at demand, composition of demand for gold, that's become a bigger driver over the last couple of years of global gold demand, just in total.
01:53It's outweighing the demand from ETFs, outweighing the traditional demand from an investment perspective.
01:58So that means that there's a very hard floor on gold prices.
02:01Is there a small ceiling possibly because it's run up so much?
02:05But I think that if you take the view that global central banks still are not stopping or slowing down their purchase of gold, we do think that it can very well reach 4,000 this year.
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