Welcome to Thoughts on the Market. I'm Andrew Sheets, Chief Cross Asset

Strategy for Morgan Stanley. Along with my colleagues bringing 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 Friday, February 14th at 2 p.m. in London.

From politics to public health concerns, investors are confronted by a host of uncertainties.

So today I'm going to focus on something we feel more certain about.

We see a number of reasons why returns this year could be front-loaded, with the first half

of 2020 better than the second half.

Let's start with growth.

Global growth was extremely weak last year, which has made it easier for early 2020 to show improvement

and even though recent public health concerns are likely to disrupt production

especially in Asia investors might be initially forgiving seeing this is only a temporary effect

but things get trickier as the year goes on. A disruption in growth that isn't temporary, for example,

extending into May or June would not be expected.

And even before these public health concerns,

we expected a global recovery that was going to be pretty modest by historical standards.

In the second half of the year, there's more risk that the limits of this improvement become clear.

Then there's Central Bank policy.

One reason equity markets have been so resilient this year,

especially in the US, is that the Federal Reserve is actively buying about

$60 billion worth of Treasury bills every month. While the Fed has insisted this is

...