It's not the easiest time to invest money.

Since mid-November, when many asset classes reached their previous highs, they have lost significantly in value: Whether stocks, bonds or even the fashionable crypto investments - wherever you look, there only seems to be losses.

Martin Hock

Editor in Business.

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On the one hand, this is not enormously surprising, after all, wherever you looked before, there seemed to be only profits.

Both impressions do not deceive, even if it is not quite so simple in detail.

To cite just one metric, the last five-year moving average gains on America's S&P 500 index were as high for as long as they have been since 2013 in the 1950s. That means a phase of weaker returns must begin at some point , is only logical – even if investors like to deceive themselves about it.

The only question is whether the stock market is going through a normal, more medium-term bull-bear cycle, or whether it is experiencing what is being described elsewhere today as the keyword of a turning point.

What is difficult about the latter is that they are only clearly recognizable at the earliest when the new times have actually dawned.

Until then, however, not only do opinions and analyzes differ, but also the investment strategies.

A characteristic of a turning point is a high degree of uncertainty, and the current situation can be interpreted in this way for that reason alone.

But there are also definitely harder signs of significantly changed framework conditions.

One has to ask oneself what actually characterized the economic world that has existed since the last turning point: If one looks back at the stock exchange, it is not difficult to see that it entered a new phase in the early 1980s when prices fell entered an extended bull market after a long period of weak to no gains.

It was the time when a new globalized world began to form from the rubble of the collapsed Bretton Woods system.

The Cold War entered its final phase and ended, China began to open up, the GATT became the World Trade Organization,

Since the turn of the millennium, momentum initially began to flag because the easy gains had been made and the issues became more difficult.

The controversies grew and as always when disputes arise and grow, it ends with more and more participants seeing little benefit from the debates.

Trump's isolationism, Brexit, Hungary's thwarting of the EU, the criminal attack on Ukraine - the list of indicators is long.

It couldn't be more unsafe

But there are also signs of this on the stock market.

Technically, the S&P 500 index is not yet in a bear market with a price loss of less than 20 percent since the November high, but the Nasdaq 100, whose technology stocks have been a major driver of price development in recent years, is.

What distinguishes this downturn from previous ones is the development of the bond markets.

For the first time since the bear market of the early 1980s, US government bond prices are trending negatively in line with the stock markets.

For the Bund future, which has existed since the end of 1990, this is the first time at all.