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The global pandemic (COVID-19) continues to dominate both our lives and financial markets during 2020. In this challenging environment, we are constantly monitoring the outbreak, policy actions and the economic effects on the wider economy, individual commercial sectors and our investments.

This is clearly a very serious situation and, in many ways, exceptional but it has also generated an unprecedented global response both from a fiscal and a science/research perspective. We believe that governments around the world, particularly in the UK and Europe, now have this situation under greater control medically, socially and financially and we believe there is now a far greater understanding of its impact, although there is still more to discover. Thus far, UK hospitals have not been overwhelmed by the situation and have scaled down temporary ‘emergency’ hospitals because they were not utilised in full.

Politically, since the UK is no longer part of the EU (and it was previously the second largest funder to the EU), it no longer needs to focus as much of its energies on non-UK issues. Given that the UK now has a Conservative government with an 80-seat parliamentary majority, it can focus far more on UK domestic issues in terms of funding, policies and priorities – potentially assisting decisions.

The UK Government has announced significant stimulus to directly support small businesses and massive new spending announcements on infrastructure in strategically important sectors such as energy, transport and health. We believe we are well positioned to capture some of these opportunities in the coming year.

Click here to read our Recent Market Volatility and COVID-19 – Situation – Analysis and Observations.