DJ Trump Truth Social Post March 31 2026
Despite the rhetoric it is more like ‘steady as she goes’ in investment markets and as we pass the quarter end it is worth taking stock of the current geopolitical situation and main investment market movements this year.
The Middle East Conflict
I checked back in with Christopher Granville at TS Lombard last night with many of his predictions of a few weeks back coming to light.
- Full regime change is now increasingly unlikely. There seems very little appetite in the US for the US casualties that would inevitably flow from any major troops on the ground invasion and despite moving some troops into the region there is nothing like the mobilisation seen in the Iraq conflict. Most commentators were correct in predicting that regime change would not be achieved by an aerial attack only. There is however sufficient shift to the military in the leadership of Iran for Trump to claim some success on this front.
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The Iran military will have been significantly weakened, reducing its threat in the short term and buying time, perhaps to achieve a more complete regime change after the dust settles in the months and years to come. Trump will continue to claim ‘tremendous success’ on this front.
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The Straits of Hormuz have been key and perhaps more influential than the US realised, some sort of deal with Iran’s new leaders looks likely to get them re opened although we have no detail on this. What’s clear is that despite Trump’s rhetoric, US consumers are absolutely not fully insulated from global oil and gas prices, fertilizer prices and other commodity prices that flow through the straits. This may be left to the rest of the world to sort out.
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It is after all a war of choice, and it will be Trump’s choice as to when the US pulls out of the current escalation. Trump still ultimately appears to listen to investment markets (more than anything else), and their message is loud and clear, they want de-escalation, not escalation in the conflict. Trump’s posturing in the last 48 hours could (you never really know with Trump) indicate he is nearly done with this conflict and yesterday’s markets reacted with a strong recovery, which is tempering s
How Have Investment Markets and Our Investment Funds Moved in 2026?
To use football parlance ‘it has been a game of two halves’. The first two months saw most investment values rising strongly, the last month has seen investment values fall, with broadly those that had risen the most falling the most.
Below are our underlying fund returns along with some benchmarks and investments we don’t own for comparison.
Apart from a 56% increase in oil prices, just looking at this table you would probably think not much was going on other than a bit of cooling off after three years of strong returns.
Looking at each asset class:
Fixed Income Funds
With a higher expectation of inflation, global bond yields have risen but the damage has been limited and now we have c.7% yields in our higher yield funds. With three quarters of the year to come, there is potential for fixed income to deliver positive returns in 2026.
It is good to see all our actively managed funds outperforming gilt and corporate bond passive index trackers. This is mainly down to them holding shorter duration bonds than the index which has protected them from rate rises.
Equity Funds
The spread of returns is much larger, and it may surprise to see many of our funds still nicely up for the year when world index is down 0.6% and the main US index down 3.6%. Only two of our eleven active managers have under-performed the S&P 500 this year so far.
What we see is that on days like yesterday when markets bounce up, the uptick in our active funds is much bigger than the index. My YouTube algorithm sends me lots of shorts on fund manager views from the US and in every one I have seen the managers interviewed favour international equity markets over domestic markets.
We are very happy to have our rest of the world and lower valuation equity weightings and it’s good to see our two US managers DeLisle and Fidelity Special situations beating the index. This is a continued strong reversal of previous years when the Mag 7 stocks were driving returns. All seven of these shares are down 5% to 25% so far in 2026 with Apple and Nvidia holding up the best, Amazon, Tesla and Microsoft the worst performers.
In our funds, the managers holding the highest valuation companies, Heriot Global (quality growth) and Montanaro Global Select (quality growth mid and small cap), are the worst performing funds.
Alternative Funds
These are helping portfolios in 2026 and all three have done better than cash and all our fixed income funds. The star performer and one of our biggest firm wide holdings is our global infrastructure fund, up 13% so far in 2026, as investors have fled to ‘hard assets’ underpinned by contractual revenues.
What we don’t own
We don’t own oil as a commodity, but we do have a much bigger exposure to energy and energy related companies than the world index dominated by US tech. As a good example DeLisle America has some 40% of its portfolio in energy related companies and is benefiting from the continued data centre spend fuelled by the Mag 7 companies’ fervour for AI.
We don’t own gold as a commodity and as a risk off asset it will have disappointed many, falling around 10% since the conflict with Iran started. We do have material exposure to mining stocks which, despite some volatility, continue to do well. As a good example Newmont Mining, a stock we own via multiple funds, is up c.14% year to date.
We don’t own any Bitcoin. Bitcoin investors are enduring the longest ‘winter’ in its history and for now the price is below the level to make mining new coins economically viable.
We will probably give back some of this weeks’ gains in our Good Friday valuations. The c.1.5% gains most of you will have seen in the first three days this week show the importance of remaining calm and staying invested. No action is invariably the right action when we get hit by global events like this.
The world isn’t over and for Monty Python fans, “Trump isn’t the Messiah, he’s just a very naughty boy’ (Life of Brian 1979).
Happy Easter.
