We continue to hope that you and your loved ones remain healthy and safe as we all adopt the new norm of staying sheltered in place.

Thanks to all of you who were able to tune in for the webinar that we held with Qontigo (Axioma), we appreciated the strong showing and thought-provoking questions. If you missed it, you can find the recorded webcast and handouts here: Managing Your Portfolio in an Extreme US Factor Environment.

We hope you’ve been weathering our new shared reality of extreme market volatility and social isolation, and that you and your loved ones remain healthy and safe.

Today, we’ll revisit last week’s topic of “Runaway Beta“ ahead of a joint webinar that we’ll be hosting alongside our partners at Qontigo (Axioma) this Wednesday (US) and Thursday (EMEA) entitled: Managing Your Portfolio in an Extreme Factor Environment.

Today we’re going to discuss a key trend in the Beta factor that has heavily impacted investor portfolios during the turbulence of the past few weeks. This is the dominant factor to keep an eye on as we’re seeing significant polarization in company exposure to Beta, resulting in a phenomenon that has hurt investors as the market both falls and rises. We’ll elaborate further on “Runaway Beta,” including some data that can help provide historical context, and discuss ways to immunize your portfolio against it. We’ll also provide our weekly market and factor update.

Today, we’re going to wrap up our series on Value in the real-life context of a massively volatile and beaten down market. We’d like to start by noting that after the turbulence of the past few weeks, our Global Market factor is flagged as “Extremely Oversold” at -2.9 standard deviations below the mean:

This weekly blog, Factor Spotlight, looks to bring issues to our readership that help to give them an edge – whether it is through fresh insights in the market or new ways to use our Omega Point tool to analyze and manage their portfolios.

As the markets have been roiled by losses stemming from concerns around COVID-19’s impact on the global economy, we wanted to provide an update on how Wolfe Research's Geopolitical Risk factor (which we introduced in our 1/28 Factor Spotlight) has trended during this time.