INVESTMENTS
2020 : WORDS FOR AN UNPRECEDENTED YEAR
John Husselbee Co-Fund Manager DMS Verbatim Portfolio Growth Funds
Annual reviews and outlooks for a new year are always
challenging to write , with many ending up as little more than a list of market and macro events and some crystal ball gazing to finish . With 2020 , it is hard to know where to start given everything that transpired and , if anyone needed reminding , the year has also exposed the futility of economic forecasts : in December 2019 , no one was predicting a small strand of replicating protein would bring the activities of the most successful species on the planet to a near standstill for large swathes of the next 12 months . With this in mind , we have borrowed the approach of Oxford Languages , who have faced their own struggles when trying to review 2020 . In the past , the language specialist has always come up with a word of the year ( 2016 gave us post-truth for example ) but the events of the last 12 months , and the linguistic development required to capture them , has meant a whole list of words of 2020 rather than a single representative . This framework gives a good indication of how such an unprecedented year has developed ( definitely the word of the early coronavirus months , with every market review and article at pains to stress the exceptional situation ). If we go back to pre-COVID , however – or BC , which makes the list – the dominant words highlight factors that should continue to shape the future when the world can finally look past the current crisis . We came into 2020 with markets fairly buoyant on the back of positive news of a potential trade deal between the US and China , and some clarity on Brexit , two issues that had dominated headlines for the previous few years . At this point , there were only rumblings of a viral outbreak in China and the risk this would spread to the West was far from most investors ’ minds . With climate emergency Oxford Languages ’ term of 2019 , this focus continued into 2020 with bushfires a key word in January as Australia ’ s season was the worst on record . While media attention on climate change
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