Conviction Equities Boutique

2025 is poised to be another positive yet complex year for equities. Balancing core positions in industries driven by secular trends – like semiconductors, AI hyperscalers, and the energy transition – with opportunistic exposures that can benefit from cyclical or policy-induced rebounds can help navigate the challenges ahead.

Discover how our Impact Investing team navigates economic shifts and political uncertainty to help drive sustainable change. In our sixth annual Impact Report, we reveal our strategies, methodologies, and results in investing in low-carbon solutions and smart infrastructure.

Is ESG simply a different label for quality or could quality stand as a less controversial and politically sensitive description of highly sustainable companies? The question of whether ESG characteristics of listed companies form a new independent factor and a distinctive source of returns is an important one to address.

Are stock markets poised for a good year in 2024? Jean-Louis Nakamura, head of the Convictions Equities Boutique takes a comprehensive look at the various factors that indicate it may well be.

The wave of alarming headlines can sometimes seem to dwarf the social challenges the world faces. But Impact investing addresses a wide array of important issues that may be a bit more difficult to grasp. The latest Impact Report for Vontobel’s Global Impact Equities strategy provides case studies to highlight the steps towards positive change.

The environmental crisis is undeniable, and the world needs an urgent plan. Investment firms have an important role to play. In the latest Impact Report for Vontobel’s Global Environmental Change strategy, the Impact Investing team assesses how its holdings have helped mitigate sustainability challenges, but also delves a bit deeper: find an overview of the sustainable-finance landscape and an in-depth examination of the regulatory environment into selected key developments.

Favored investment approaches, investor motivation, public and private markets, measuring impact, where the main opportunities and challenges lie.

Investors can look back at having had to navigate a difficult first half of the year. Emerging-market equities, though posting positive returns, trailed their developed-market counterparts. Could things turn around in the remainder of the year, leading to an outperformance of EM stocks?

With Egypt’s Sharm el-Sheikh being the venue of this year’s United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP), it’s worth remembering that developing economies bear most of the negative effects of emissions mainly produced in industrialized nations. Therefore, the onus is on western companies to go “net zero carbon”, but how to measure their progress? One common yardstick for investors is the carbon footprint method – or the more encompassing “potential avoided emissions” method propagated by Vontobel’s impact investing team.

The renewables industry looks set to benefit from tightening regulation in the European Union, or a recently signed US law aiming to decarbonize the US power sector. The nascent “clean energy” industry, which encompasses areas such as electric vehicles, batteries, or hydrogen produced in a sustainable manner, opens new opportunities for investors as well.

Discussing sustainability matters with Chinese companies is rewarding and challenging. Part of it is fact-finding, part of it is education. But investors need to tread with caution, and little extras such as talking Chinese help, says Hong Kong-based ESG analyst Gayle Chan. She also explains the approach of mtx Equities, citing a concrete example.