Lessons to Take Into 2025

With the start of the new year, our Head of Corporate Credit Research Andrew Sheets looks back to look ahead at trends for credit and other markets in 2025.

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Welcome to Thoughts on the Market. I'm Andrew Sheets, Head of Corporate Credit Research at Morgan Stanley. Today I’ll be discussing the lessons we can learn from 2024 – a remarkable year that also may be easily forgotten.

It's Friday January 3rd at 2pm in London.

In 2024 I celebrated my 20th year with Morgan Stanley. Among my regrets over this time was not keeping a better journal. It’s notable how quickly events in the market that seemed large and remarkable at the time can fade in one’s memory as the years merge together. How markets that seem easy or obvious in hindsight were anything but.

I say this because many years from now, 2024 may end up being one of those relatively forgettable years. Another year where – as usually happens – the stock market went up. Another year where stocks outperformed bonds, the US dollar strengthened, and US stocks beat those abroad.

Yet what is significant about 2024 is the scale of all these trends. For anyone managing money, the question of “stocks versus bonds”, “US versus rest-of-world”, “large versus small” or “growth versus value” are some of the most fundamental strategic questions one faces.

These calls don’t always matter. But last year, they did – to a very large degree. Global stocks outperformed bonds by about 20 percent. Growth outperformed Value by practically the same amount. US stocks beat their global peers by 13 per cent. In short, one’s experience in 2024 and relative performance could have varied significantly, based on just a few relatively simple decisions.

Related to that is the second lesson. 2024 was the reminder that while Valuation is a powerful long-term force, it can be a much more frustrating 12-month guide. All of those relative relationships I just mentioned – stocks versus bonds, growth versus value, US versus International – all worked in favor of the market that was historically richer entering last year.

For our third lesson from last year, we’ll focus on Credit, where investors earned a premium over safer government bonds by lending to riskier corporate borrowers. Notable for this asset class in 2024 was, for the most part, it did its own thing; showing some encouraging independence from other markets and highlighting the value of digging into a borrower’s details.

Specifically, I think this independence showed up in a few different ways. Credit showed low correlation to government bonds, for example, delivering good excess returns despite very large swings in yields or central bank expectations. It also, even more impressively, bucked some of 2024’s biggest trends.

For example, while the outperformance of the US economy and US assets was one of the biggest stories of 2024, that wasn’t the case in Credit – where Europe and Asia credit actually did marginally better. In contrast to the equity market, smaller companies and Credit outperformed, as spreads and higher yielded loans outperformed larger Investment Grade spreads, even after adjusting for risk.

And this was true even at a more granular level. Rising corporate activity, alongside more aggressive strategies for companies to deal with their own borrowing created very dispersed outcomes driven by bond-level documentation; far removed from the macro machinations of politics and monetary policy.

This somewhat weaker connection to the broader world is central to how we think about Credit looking ahead. While big economic and political questions certainly loom in 2025, we think that Credit, for now, will be driven more by more micro, company level trends, and show somewhat lower correlation to other assets – at least through the first half of this year.

From all of us at Thoughts on the Market, we wish you a very Happy New Year, and all the best for 2025.

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