Chris Wallis
CEO and CIO
Vaughan Nelson Investment Management

Currently we're in our weakest point of economic growth for 2025. So when you look at the back half of 2025, it's only going to get better. We're going to see a slight pickup in inflation. We're going to see a re-acceleration of economic growth, and most importantly, we're going to see a pickup in liquidity.

Could non-US markets continue to outperform?

This is a trend we should see continue. We certainly saw it accelerate for the last 12 months, and a lot of that is the fact that we've just crowded in a lot of money from the rest of the world into US assets. Ironically right now, US investors can actually pick up yield if they hedge out yen risk and invest overseas. And what we've seen is other foreign countries start to implement soft capital controls to prevent capital from flowing into the US.

So I think it's going to happen in fits and starts, but we should see broadening economic growth around the rest of the world as the rest of the developed world increases deficits and the US starts to slowly bring theirs down. It's a much healthier environment. So yeah, I expect to see non-US equities perform better than they have for the last decade.

Are you finding attractive value in the mid-cap space?

I think the key in looking for opportunities in the market is just not US large cap. Certainly there's a select group of large cap tech companies that still have bright futures, but when we look at opportunities beyond the S&P 500 mid-caps stand out because they have the scale benefits that small caps don't. They have better valuations than large-caps and they have organic growth. And I think what we're going to see going forward is these periodic episodes of what I call ‘market violence’, where we see strong sector rotation, spikes in volatility, as we see underlying narratives start to break down. That in and of itself gives active management a real opportunity to pick off very attractive investments across multiple sectors.

What are the biggest risks you see on the horizon?

When we look at risk, it's easy to point to the geopolitical uncertainties that exist, but we need to understand those are temporary and short-lived and they'll be met with fiscal and monetary responses. I think the bigger risk is just investor complacency. There's going to be a lot of opportunities, there's going to be a lot of volatility, we're going to see rising liquidity levels that may pressure equity risk premiums in certain sectors, but that's just born out of investor complacency.