The writer is chief economist at Bank of Singapore

The 2020s are proving to be a disorderly decade for investors. Frequent shocks are shortening fund managers’ horizons. But the crises are also giving rise to new longer term trends. Successful asset allocation, including diversification to Asia, is therefore likely to be markedly different from the 2000s and 2010s.

Investors have spent the past few years dealing with the pandemic, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, a violent attempt to overturn the US elections and now war in the Middle East. In contrast, the first two decades of the century were also startling but the most significant events — the attacks of September 11 2001, the Iraq war, the global financial crisis, the eurozone debt crisis and China’s currency devaluation in 2015 — were more staggered.