As the football (soccer for us Americans) world prepares for the World Cup semi-finals, it appears that global equity market participants knew at least some of the teams that would and wouldn’t be playing during the next couple of days.  Despite the fact that both Germany and Brazil were strong favorites entering the tournament, their equity markets performed poorly during the latest quarter producing -3.4% and -26.4% returns, respectively. On the other hand, the UK (+3.0%) and France (+0.3%) produced positive market returns in an environment in which the All Country World X U.S. Index (appropriate since the U.S. failed to make the tournament) was down -2.4% for the second quarter.

It was a difficult equity environment for most of the participants in the tournament, as Japan, Korea, Mexico, and Russia (despite an impressive run for the hosts) were also down during the last three months with each producing results that were -2.8% or worse. Given that the finalists are all European, you won’t be shocked to read that EAFE-Europe produced the best return during the second quarter (-0.9%), while EM Latin America was down -17.7% and EAFE – Far East was down -2.8%. Maybe I should pay more attention to how global equity markets are performing during the second quarter in 2022 before filling in my bracket pool.