Analyse de la performance du marché en 2020 : Révélations sur l’impact du Covid-19 et les perspectives d’investissement

Imagine that since the beginning of this year, you have been on a very long vacation in a remote corner of the planet, without TV, newspapers, Internet, in short, cut off from everything. You reconnect for the first time today to look at the state of your portfolio. There, you probably tell yourself that not much has happened during this first half of the year. The market has just melted very slightly, which is completely understandable given the extreme valuations that were rife at the beginning of this year. In short, apparently nothing really new under the sun.

What you missed, however, is that the stock market collapsed by almost a quarter of its value in the space of a month, before recovering almost all of its losses in the following three months. You also forgot that half the planet was confined for several weeks, that the unemployment rates of all nations exploded as they have never done before, that companies had to be placed in intensive care, on artificial respirators fed by central banks and public money. Not to mention the 500,000 deaths in the process. Everything went to peanuts, except the market which recovered its glory, to the great delight of Donald with the golden hair and his puppet Powell.

During these six sadly historic months, my wallet was well on its way to significantly beating the market, as it came out of the crisis with a decline of just over 10%, helped by low equity exposure and the good performance of gold and treasury bonds. However, it barely took off again afterwards, while the market exploded. So I end up with a performance of -7%, while the Swiss Performance Index only fell by 3%.

Obviously, I cannot be satisfied with this underperformance. That being said, in a market in a bubble situation like it is currently, the only way to beat it is to play even crazier than it, that is to say speculate, by playing with leverage or by buying risky and/or even more overvalued securities. The fact that the market has lost a quarter of its value in four weeks reminds us that its foundations were not solid before the crisis. They are even less so now.

L'autre aspect à prendre en compte, c'est la volatilité. Celle-ci est à tort négligée par beaucoup d'investisseurs, voire pire, carrément valorisée. Il fut un temps où l'on estimait que volatilité et performance étaient corrélées. Pourtant c'est exactement le contraire qui se passe dans la réalité. Certains arguent qu'elle est intéressante parce qu'elle offre des bons points d'entrée. C'est vrai, mais on ne sait jamais là où cela peut s'arrêter. Plus le titre est volatil, plus il est difficile de choisir le bon moment et donc plus il y a de chances de se tromper. Ça devient de la loterie et donc de la spéculation. Plus le titre est volatil, plus les pertes sont susceptibles d'être importantes et plus l'investisseur risque de flipper et prendre de mauvaises décisions. Au-delà de ça, un portefeuille trop volatil est surtout préjudiciable en termes de délai pour acquérir l'indépendance financière. Comme je l'explique dans mon e-book, the more your capital fluctuates, the more wealth you need to become financially independent and therefore the longer it will take you to become an annuitant. The ideal is therefore to maximize performance, while minimizing risk. From this point of view, my wallet is doing well relative to the market (below compared to the S&P 500).

Finally, let us also note that the current market valuation is very high and therefore offers poor future prospects in terms of performance. This is all the more true given the negative medium and long-term consequences of the chinese virus on the economy are not yet fully known.

In short, if you were to go back to your desert island for the next six months, it is not certain that you would have as much luck as during this first half of the year.