New High … for Everything

As S&P and BTC hit new recent highs, so do many other assets

Photo Credit: King World News

It seems that the capital market in June 2018 is yet again on a frenzy, with SP500 hitting a new historical record high, and Bitcoin breaking the 10000 dollar mark again.

However, do not just fixate your eyes on the darling of the stock market or crypto currency, like Microsoft and Bitcoin. If we take a look at a broader class of assets, it may not look so rosy.

In particular, we should take a look at those “safe haven” assets, i.e. the type of investments that are expected to retain or increase in value during times of market uncertainty and turbulence, especially when a potential downturn or recession is on the horizon, at lease in the view of most investors.

Safe Haven Assets

We first enumerate the most common safe haven asset classes. These asset classes are very liquid and easy to invest for the institutional and retail investors alike:

Gold Swiss Franc and Japanese Yen US Bond Defensive stocks (as relative to the full stock market index)

Performance in the last 3 months

Below we plot the price plot for the indices of these asset classes: