[The Silence of the Lambs?]
“We don’t see much action from our clients — and we wouldn’t encourage it,” says Phil Nelson, director of asset allocation at NEPC.
The Boston-based consulting firm is not alone in this stance on geopolitics. Russ Ivinjack, a senior partner at Aon, notes that he and his colleagues routinely advise allocators not to react to geopolitical events by changing their portfolios. Jay Kloepfer, director of capital markets research at Callan, similarly recommends that asset owners don’t stray from their strategic asset allocation plans.
Call it long-termism, or blame it on the time it takes to get the necessary board approval for investment actions. For a number of reasons, institutional allocators and the investment consultants who advise them largely believe that when dealing with geopolitical uncertainty, often the best course of action is to stay the course
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[**I almost chose “moon-calf” to represent “m” in my list because W.C. Fields used it memorably in The Bank Dick: “Don’t be a luddy-duddy. Don’t be a mooncalf. Don’t be a jabbernowl. You’re not those, are you?”]