What were the winning investments in the first half of January

The year has started and there are two investment options that emerge as the winners, at least for the first half of January. It is about the Bitcoin and some of the actions of leading Argentine companies. It should be noted that this happens in the face of a certain stability of the dollar, the decline of the crawling peg at 1%, December inflation at 2.7% and the imminent lowering of rates.

On the side of the cryptocurrency It once again approached US$100,000 in January, so if the variation in the exchange rate is also calculated, it accumulates an increase of 7.3% in pesos.

Now if we take the index Merval of leading stocks, so far in January it has gained 6.7% in pesos and 6.1% in dollars.

Some stocks such as banking stocks gained up to 24% in pesos in just 15 days, as is the case of Supervielle. They also rose strongly, BBVA Bank (+21.3%) and Macro Bank (+20%).

What expectations are there for the market at the end of January?

Regarding the dollars, private reports maintained that “we believe that with the drop in the ‘crawling peg’, if the liquidation of exports (both spot and pre-financing) intensifies, more sales may appear in the coming weeks. Even so, We cannot affirm that the trend is going to be bearish given that even with prolonged stability and without disassembly of positions in pesos, the currency remains firm. at the levels at which it closed and that, without intervention from the BCRA, it could even operate higher,” they said from Outlier.

For his part, Juan Manuel Franco, chief economist of Grupo SBS, assured: “After the December inflation data, the BCRA announced that from February 1 it will reduce the crawling peg to 1% monthly from the current 2%. “This, if the BCRA reference rate is maintained in pesos, would imply a rate in dollars higher than 20%, so we believe that the monetary authority will lower the rate.”

That said, he assured that, to return to the current dollar rate level (8.6% annual effective rate, TEA), The monetary policy rate was required to drop to a TNA of 20.2% from the current 32%. “Although we do not believe that it will reduce it to that level now, we do believe that it could lower the rate to another level, implying a higher rate in dollars than the 8.6% TEA mentioned. This rate will imply a greater incentive for private companies offer dollars in the MULC, which could cause the BCRA to accelerate the pace of purchases by modifying the crawl rate,” he explained.

“That said, the risk would come from the fact that it is a carry trade scheme subject to economic agents continuing to believe that the appreciation of the real exchange rate can be maintained, for which it is key to the government avoid exchange shocks that could come from exogenous factors such as the weakness of the Brazilian real or low soybean pricesas well as an increase in capital flows to the US if Trump’s alleged policies materialize,” he concluded.