Brookfield Portfolio Manager Says Trends Triggered by Coronavirus May Not Be Permanent

While COVID-19 has created short-term disruption and altered business and leisure routines, trends prevalent today may not necessarily remain in place for the longer term, according to Bernhard Krieg, managing director and portfolio manager on the real estate equities team for Brookfield’s Public Securities Group.Krieg noted that a valuation shift between growth and value-oriented stocks was already evident before the pandemic and has diverged further since then. However, “to a certain degree these trends are not permanent, in our view,” he said.“It’s easy sometimes to extrapolate the most recent trends and think they will not change materially…It’s our view that we are going to revert back to normal and investing globally gives us some important perspective on some of the markets where the pandemic has subsided,” Krieg said.