Five questions for 2024

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The S&P 500 is within a percent or two of taking out the all-time high it set in late 2021. Most bond funds are likely to end the year with gains, too. Unhedged is, as a result, full of the holiday spirit.

Article originally published by The Financial Times. Hargreaves Lansdown is not responsible for its content or accuracy and may not share the author's views. News and research are not personal recommendations to deal. All investments can fall in value so you could get back less than you invest.

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19 Dec 2023

This time last year, Unhedged was in the grip of a bad forecasting error: we were firmly in the recession-in-’23 camp. What was the cause of our mistake? A lot of the trouble was down to two related problems. We were hypnotised by the inverted yield curve, historically the most reliable of recession indicators. And we were in the grips of an account of inflation as largely demand-driven; it is increasingly clear now that supply was more important. Whatever our reasons (excuses?), most of our speculations about 2023 turned out to be badly wrong. So we stagger towards 2024 with renewed humbleness.

Let us begin, therefore, with questions rather than answers. What follows is five of them that we think will be defining for markets in 2024. Some are generic questions that are important every year; others are more specific to the current