Disclaimer: Views in this blog do not promote, and are not directly connected to any Legal & General Investment Management (LGIM) product or service. Views are from a range of LGIM investment professionals and do not necessarily reflect the views of LGIM. For investment professionals only.
The rising importance of investor sentiment
At our core, we try to be contrarian investors and stand out from the crowd. It isn’t easy, but we think its importance is on the rise as recession risks grow.

There is a logic to being a contrarian investor. If few other people have bought into our positions before us, then we benefit more when we’re right. Equally, when we’re wrong the loss tends to be smaller if few other investors are also trying to exit the idea at the same time.
It’s easier said than done, of course. Lots of people agree with the concept of being contrarian, and so being truly different from other investors is a constant challenge. To help us, we incorporate other investors’ positioning into the structured process we use for evaluating our investment ideas. To bring that to life, I can outline two recent examples.
First, at the end of 2018 we conducted an extensive review of other investors’ views and then used the outcome of that exercise to identify the most hated asset classes and regions. Doing so gave us the confidence to remain positive on equities in the medium term and also to increase the credit exposure in some funds.
Taking a second example, in some cases other parts of an investment thesis are sufficiently strong to justify a trade despite us buying into a popular position. Lars recently blogged that we entered our negative view on Eurozone equities under such conditions. Even then, though, we look for ways to mitigate the risk around entering popular positions, such as by taking an offsetting position in equally unpopular assets like UK and Japanese equities.
I explained the importance of sentiment and the role it played in these two cases in a recent CNBC interview. The time we spent discussing it on air highlights how central it is to our decision making.
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