BNY Mellon’s US Master Trust Universe, a BNY Mellon global risk solutions fund-level tracking service, has revealed negative Q1 2020 after returning a median of -10.9 percent, reversing the trend of positive quarterly performance throughout 2019.
In aggregate, US Master Trust Universe plans reported a one-year return of -2.65 percent, trailing the three-year annualised return of +3.71 percent and a five-year annualised return of +4.01 percent, respectively.
The Q1 results also showed that less than 5 percent of plans posted positive results, and corporate plans were the highest performing plan type, benefitting from their higher allocations to US fixed income than other plan types.
Additionally, the results found that foundations underperformed other plan types due to having the lowest allocation to fixed income of any plan type.
BNY Mellon draws insight and information about the current state of asset flow, particularly in the current environment in which investors continue to react to the economic implications of COVID-19 from an investment management perspective.
Frances Barney, CFA, head of global risk solutions at BNY Mellon, said: “In the first quarter of 2020, US fixed income was the highest performing asset class, overweighting its peers by 22 percent. Due to corporate plans tendency to allocate more assets to fixed income than other plan types, this overweight resulted in corporate plans being the top performing plan type for the quarter.”
The BNY Mellon US Master Trust Universe, which is designed to provide peer comparisons by plan type and size and is comprised of 519 corporate, foundation, endowment, public, Taft-Hartley, and health care plans.
