Three months' pain for long-term gain? Tackling Q1 headwinds will lead to better times ahead

Deep Dive into UK equities

Sentiment towards UK equities has been poor since the Brexit referendum result back in 2016, and UK equities have substantially lagged their global peers over the last three-and-a-half years.

Global equity market performance has been led by 'growth' and 'momentum' styles during this period, at the expense of 'value'.  Compared with other developed equity markets, the UK is relatively overweight value-oriented sectors such as oil & gas, mining and banks, and relatively light in high growth sectors like technology. Last year, this trend was further exacerbated by the pandemic which caused several UK companies to cut dividends, with the very structure of the UK market working against it thanks to its cyclical nature. Unsurprisingly, surveys of both institutional and retail...