Volatility everywhere: How asset managers are dealing with Trump and the tariffs

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After Trump took office, the Trump Trades continued successfully for a while, but then tariff chaos struck. Trump escalated the trade wars with China, Mexico, and Canada, then announced tariffs on all countries on April 2nd. This was followed by a global stock market crash, most severely in the US, among tech stocks and small caps. How did the asset managers in our comparison fare?

Not a single asset manager has been able to beat our benchmark, consisting of the DAX/REX, this year. European, and especially German, stocks have had a very strong run this year. Comparing the fund managers to the MSCI World Equal Weight, it wasn't that difficult to outperform the benchmark. The underperformance in the US plays the biggest role here. The uncertainty caused by the tariff chaos is weighing most heavily on US stocks.

The best performers were invested in Europe and did not have a high US tech exposure, or these exposures were reduced in a timely manner. Funds that were among the best performers in November 2024 thanks to the Trump trade are the worst performers in our peer group year-to-date. In general, it can be said that managers who had more regionally diversified their portfolios performed better this year. Funds that have benefited from US tech in recent years are looking poor for the first time in a long time, despite a recent recovery in tech stocks. Whether the era of outperformance in US stocks is over will only become clear when there is finally clarity on the tariffs.

Of course, one could conclude from this analysis that it makes much more sense to invest in the benchmark via ETFs. However, long cycles have shown that a global and diversified portfolio structure, not concentrated in individual regions, sectors, or themes, is a more resilient structure than a local combination of fixed income and equity markets.

A detailed analysis can be performed on the asset manager comparison website . There, you can evaluate the period since the beginning of the year based on performance, volatility, Sharpe ratio, and maximum drawdown .

The Breidenbach family office of Schlieffen & Co. only analyzes asset management concepts with at least €100 million in assets under management and a five-year track record. In addition to the quantitative analysis, a qualitative analysis of the concepts is also conducted, so that inadequate or poor concepts are eliminated in advance. This leads to a "quality bias," meaning that the worst managers in the analysis do not reflect the worst managers in the market. Currently, 187 asset management concepts are represented. The data source is Reuters , and the data is processed using Qplix ( www.qplix.de ). Accordingly, volatility is calculated using the Qplix method (250 days).

The performance data does NOT take into account custody and transaction costs.

Source: The data was kindly provided by Dr. Marc Breidenbach of the Breidenbach Family Office von Schlieffen & Co. You can download the complete comparison as a PDF file here .