A $22 Billion Manager Bets on Shorter Covid Crisis Than 2008

(Bloomberg) --

In Scandinavia’s richest country, a former JPMorgan Chase & Co. banker overseeing $22 billion in stocks says he’s not expecting the fallout from Covid-19 to last as long as the pain that followed the 2008 meltdown.

Knut Hellandsvik, who’s now head of equities at DNB ASA’s $65 billion asset management unit in Oslo, says history suggests markets will soon recover.

“Many investors look at this as an event-driven bear market that occurs unexpectedly, like a black swan event,” he said in an interview in Oslo. “Historically, event-driven bear markets are both shorter in length and less deep than a structural bear market, such as the financial crisis we experienced during 2008-09. Although there are lots of unknowns, we believe that the market impact will be shorter than what we saw during that downturn.”

Hellandsvik joined DNB in October 2018 from a position as co-head of JPMorgan’s global cash equities business in the Nordics. He says his clients seem less worried now than in 2008, in part because of the lessons learned from the last financial meltdown.

“Generally, we find investors to be less panicky now compared to the financial crisis,” he said. “In percentage terms, we saw less outflows in March than what we did during the height of the financial crisis. We think many retail investors have learned that it is very hard to time the market and that investing in equities requires a long-term view.”

Hellandsvik says part of the continued demand for stocks lies in the abundance of cash, amid extremely low interest rates. What’s more, “the size and the speed of fiscal and monetary stimulus are unprecedented and have reduced some of the tail risk. These initiatives have been both bigger and faster than what we saw during the financial crisis and these actions have been the most important driver of the rally and acted as a backstop for the market,” he said.

Here’s what else he had to say about the current risks:

• “Although I think we’ve seen the bottom, I do believe that the risk-reward, from a tactical point of view, is more to the downside than the upside. After all, the S&P 500 is currently at the same level that it was in August last year. This is despite the fact that about 80% of the global economy is now in lockdown, causing us to experience the biggest recession in modern history. Unemployment rates have spiked to historic levels in a matter of weeks and many bankruptcies over the next few weeks are inevitable.”
• “We might be underestimating the risk for a new wave of infections as we are starting to open up societies. Clearly, the culmination of this creates big risks for the global stock market, which has gained more than 25% since the bottom hit on March 23. My point is that we might be underestimating the time it takes for the global economy to heal and return to some form of normalcy.”
• “I see three pockets of companies which will do well in the longer term: i) companies with structural growth, ii) companies with predictable and stable cash flow and dividends and iii) companies with strong balance sheets. This should continue to benefit growth over value as well as defensives over cyclicals -– similar to the regime we have experienced during the last decade.”

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