Destra Insights

When searching for consistent yield and income, many investors turn to well known asset classes like dividend producing equities, government bonds and municipal bonds. Investors may be well served by also considering preferreds, when looking for stable, higher yields.

On June 25, the Federal Reserve released its 2020 large-bank Stress Test results. For the most part, they were as expected given the severity of the current healthcare crisis and global economic slowdown.

The world, in general, and healthcare investing continues to be a wild and crazy place. Of course, a good bit of this tumult derives from the Covid pandemic. The upcoming Presidential election has not contributed to settling things down either. There continue to be myriad opinions about the right path forward. We won’t articulate any particular view, but the fact is that we have to invest effectively for our shareholders in healthcare assets amidst a panoply of opinions and actions that have had a noticeable impact on sentiment and on the value of certain of the stocks which the Tekla Funds own.

An important key to enhancing portfolio performance and reducing risk is through more effective portfolio diversification. As the chart below shows, this can be achieved by combining asset classes that exhibit low correlations to one another.

In today’s age of digital technology, we are faced with a never-ending stream of bad news that often creates high levels of market uncertainty. The good news is that it creates a continuous stream of opportunities for astute bond investors to capitalize on (1) the economic cycle and (2) surprise events.

We’re living in strange times. The entire country has been shut down for weeks, small businesses are suffering, and unemployment has skyrocketed. Despite all the negative news, we are more bullish on community banks than we’ve been in years.

At the moment, the healthcare sector is operating within an extremely complicated and volatile macroenvironment. The coronavirus epidemic came on very quickly and has changed the way that America and the world function. This impact may ultimately reverse but, at best, is here for some time.

Closed-End Funds differ from Open-End Funds in many ways. One key difference is through pricing mechanics and terminology, such as Premium/Discount and Z-Scores.

Having registered an enticing +14% return in 2019, global high yield markets have taken barely six weeks to erode all of these gains. Experiencing the worst quarterly fall since Q4 2008 (in which global high yield (GHY) tumbled -18%), the first quarter of 2020 saw GHY markets retreat -13.63% as a realisation of the spread, scale and potential impact of COVID-19 took hold.

The sell-off in growth-sensitive risk assets and volatility in financial markets since late February is unprecedented in its pace and magnitude. Financial markets continue to be roiled by the economic and financial implications of the COVID-19 pandemic and efforts to contain its spread and the loss of life. The world’s major economies are on the brink of recession, the depth and duration of which is highly uncertain.