Covid-19 seems to have increased the speed at which trends are changing our world. Share prices of companies related to ecommerce and digitalization have surged. “The stock market is known for exaggerating every now and again, and certainly we have seen some really outrageous moves in stock prices. But there is still no reason to think that stocks should go down dramatically,” Steef Bergakker and Sam Brasser claim in our latest podcast episode. Tune in to hear the full story.

Central banks are navigating through unchartered territory. “The longer you have negative interest rate policies, the harder it will become to offset the negative side effects and to retain the positive effects of it,” says Martin van Vliet, strategist in the Global Macro team. But the Fed and BoE are still very reluctant to cross the Rubicon into below-zero rates, he argues. Meanwhile, since the money being created is not pursuing goods, the risks for inflation are well within control. Tune in.

Value has underperformed growth in the large-cap space by 43% in the past year. “The pressure on value investors to reevaluate and potentially discard their philosophy and change their processes is immense,” says Jay Feeney, CEO and CIO of Boston Partners.

Arnout van Rijn has been investing in Asia for 25 years; for more than half of this time, he has lived in Hong Kong. His experiences have taught him to embrace Daniel Kahneman’s advice to be skeptical, trade little and be patient. In this podcast episode, Arnout talks about life in Hong Kong, the lagging performance of value stocks and the digitalization race between the east and the west. Tune in.

Is rebuilding the global economy after Covid-19 an opportunity to fundamentally reboot economic systems? Proponents of the circular economy – which now accounts for 9% of the world economy – certainly think so. In our latest podcast episode, we discuss the circular economy with portfolio manager Holger Frey. Tune in.

Is Value broken? Does a decade of disappointing performance mean that a factor has ultimately failed? The ‘lost decade’ for classic Fama-French factors like Size and Value raises some tough questions for quant researchers and portfolio managers. David Blitz and Pim van Vliet discuss a number of hot quant topics in our latest podcast episode.

“This crisis is different from previous ones because our investment teams have to deal with it by working remotely.” Almost four weeks since Covid-19 caused Europe to lock down and financial markets to fall sharply, Robeco’s Head of Investments, Peter Ferket, talks about the challenges of lack of liquidity in credit markets, outflows, and the long-term implications for the economy and the asset management industry.

Is it just part of a greenwashing scheme or is it a crucial element in an integrated sustainable investing approach? Active ownership (engagement and voting) is a useful tool for investors to help companies be more sustainable but it also leads to better-informed investment decisions, say Carola van Lamoen and Peter van der Werf. A podcast masterclass on active ownership with two of Robeco’s experts.

“If you wake up and see -6%, you know what kind of day it is going to be.” In our latest podcast, Jeroen Blokland, head of Multi Asset, talks coronavirus and oil price war. “I do not think we are going to see a V-shaped recovery, but a U-shaped recovery is still possible.” Blokland still feels comfortable being underweight in risky assets. For now, the real safe have seems to be US Treasuries, he says. Tune in.

If we start investing much more towards the long term, and to sustainable solutions, things will go very, very quickly, says Robeco CEO Gilbert Van Hassel. In our latest podcast episode, he describes the industry as being in a period of soul searching and that asset managers are needing to make deliberate choices about positioning for the future. “If you focus on sustainability, you are going to be a better asset manager”