Those are really important questions. Before I give an answer, let me go through the skills we have as an investor.
That is, we think we have very good skill at building a diversified portfolio around the world, figuring out what the best long-term portfolio is and diversifying that. Second, we think we have developed skill at picking the right fund over the wrong fund, the right stock over the wrong stock or the right building over the wrong building in securities selection. We have great skill at diversification and securities selection. The third skill is market timing. It is one of those skills that are very elusive for investors and very hard to do. I couldn't put my hand on my heart and say that we have developed skill in telling you what the market is going to do tomorrow or even in the next quarter. We think it's a very elusive skill. We do have a macro investing team that does try to figure out shorter-term issues in markets and take advantage of those anomalies, but it's a tough skill to demonstrate.
With all of those caveats, yes, I would say that most people have been quite surprised about the rally in markets until this morning. Clearly, there's been a significant correction today in adjusting for that. Part of it has been clearly driven by the amount of stimulus that has been provided by the fiscal and monetary stimulus, including, anecdotally, in the U.S. the record number of smaller investors opening accounts and putting money into the market. We've seen extraordinary rallies in the stocks of bankrupt companies. We've seen extraordinary rallies in the stocks of well-known companies. There's some evidence that people are taking their cheques in the U.S. and putting them into brokerage accounts. I hope that doesn't end badly for a lot of people. I do hope they have been prudent in how they've invested their stimulus cheques, but it is an issue and something that we have looked at.
What can we do? We can make sure that we are really focused on our first two skills and are really focused on stress-testing the portfolio. We're really focused on making sure we have a properly diversified portfolio so that all our eggs are not in one market, one basket, one geography, one asset class or one strategy. It is properly diversified across multiple different markets, multiple different time zones and multiple different assets. If something pops in one area, then hopefully other markets are less immune to that. That's the benefit of diversification. Secondly, if we pick the right stocks over the wrong stocks, it doesn't matter if the whole market goes down; we've still made money.
Finally, as I said earlier, we run stress tests. What would happen if tomorrow the global financial crisis happened? What would happen if worse than that happened? We disclose those on page 163 or 164, I think, of the annual report. We go through those stress tests and how we shock the portfolio.