Investing in the dark?

October 2025 was instead notable for one thing: The US federal shutdown, which lasted the entire month and is now about to set a new record. We’ve seen shutdowns many times before, but I would not use the business-as-usual moniker here. Right now, the impasse shows no sign of being resolved.

Economists worry that the shutdown prevents or delays production of a number of important indicators from the US – which is still, indisputably, the weathercock for global financial markets. Nonfarm payrolls, the Producer Price Index, the Employment Cost Index, advance GDP figures, personal income & outlays, the international trade balance, retail sales, building permits, business inventories – and a host of other indicators that economists worry about.

These are indicators that tend to receive a lot of attention. They are being interpreted – if not over-interpreted – as perhaps yet another indication that markets are swaying this way or that. You’ll find many of them updated in my own spreadsheets, although I’m more concerned with making sense of the markets than trying to second-guess them. With these indicators absent or delayed, you might say – some did – that it more and more resembled investing in the dark. All right, twilight then.

The funny thing is that the very same markets didn’t care. Long rates were but slightly down (by six basis points across many markets), spreads inched higher, and stock investors took no notice. The MSCI World Index was up by 2.6% in local currency. The message echoed the classic motto from the humour magazine Mad: What, me worry?

We didn’t invest in the dark, though. October saw many quarterly reports being published, many of them quite encouraging too. Of course, there was no corporate shutdown in October. Our investees went about their business in the usual way, publishing their third-quarter reports as they should and had promised their investors. Some inspired optimism, some disappointed – but the necessary information was there all along.

And this, remember, is the information that primarily guides our investments in Pareto Asset Management. We need to make sense of what’s happening in the financial markets, and I do find an interested audience when I discuss some of the now missing figures with my colleagues. But the guiding lights are to be found in the company-specific information that pours in.

I suppose the very absence of a corporate shutdown attests to the quality of corporate management, discipline and continuity. In short: Many a business is far better run than the average government – or above average, for that matter.

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