Welcome to Thoughts on the Market.

I'm Andrew Sheets, Chief Cross Asset Strategy from Oregon Stanley, filling in for Mike Wilson today.

Along with my colleagues bring you a variety of perspectives,

I'll be talking about trends

across the global investment landscape and how we put those different ideas together.

It's Monday, November 18th at 2 p.m. in London.

2019 saw global growth weaken substantially and very strong markets.

2020 we think we'll see better growth but muted headline returns.

After almost 18 months of

decelerating global economic activity,

Morgan Stanley's global economics team expects growth to bottom in

this quarter and then improve from the first quarter of 2020.

This improvement will be modest by the standards of past recoveries, but will mean that a recession is avoided.

Importantly, this recovery will also be uneven with the greatest acceleration in corners of the emerging markets and

continued deceleration in the United States.

For markets, the benefits of better growth need to be balanced against what's already in the price.

Relative to past periods where gross load and then recovered,

US equity markets are significantly more expensive.

US credit spreads are tighter,

and expected volatility is already lower. Global equity valuations in contrast are closer to average.

Those varied valuations are one reason why we're entering 2020 just neutral on equities,

given forecasts that call for mid-single-digit gains across global

...