IDAD Performance – Q1 2025
The first quarter of 2025 was relatively steady for stockmarkets, Hong Kong and China being the exception, with strong growth over the 3 months. April, however, which is not strictly covered in this commentary, has been spectacular so far. I do think things will calm over the course of the year, but maybe not all the time. It looks like China/Hong Kong will hold onto most of the gains and that area seems to have the economic strength and to have planned reasonably well to counter the buffeting from current US policy. European markets seem relatively stable in comparison to US equities, but even the US should recover lost ground over the course of 2025. The US Dollar does seem to be weakening, which will be good news not only for equity prices, but also for local (US) manufacturing and exports. It’s tough to make short term predictions that rely on US policy, but it always pays investors to take a longer-term view.
The quarter saw 140 product launches from IDAD with 90 products maturing – basically we’re still growing in terms of the number of products issued compared to a couple of years ago. The returns from the maturing products were very strong, in particular we saw some big recoveries on products with Far East exposure, including lots of ‘caught up’ coupons being paid (most of our income products come with a memory feature that catches up on previously missed coupons). This helped boost our annualised return across all products to almost 9% per annum. I perhaps don’t mention it enough, but we look at a very wide range of products for this report, some very cautious with low returns and some very risky indeed with higher potential returns but sometimes with very high losses too (these products don’t go on general offer). So to get the steady returns across the board is very pleasing. Of course lots of the markets we work in still operate commission paying models too, and these payments are also built into the products, affecting the returns.
In terms of fund performance, Future Wealth gave back some of the gains up 1.5% over the 12m period, Refined Growth remained steadier up 8.4% over the 12m period (+3.6% over the quarter) – a handy repository for nervous clients by the way.
Clive Moore, Managing Director
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