Allocation to defensive equity income funds, offering stable dividends, would also have benefited investors, according to Hassan.
Infrastructure is becoming interesting, but Husselbee warns against ramping up allocations: "Any political push or tax incentive will help any asset class, but retail investors do not need anything too risky."
In terms of cash, most managers are not cash-heavy either, despite rates on money market and deposit accounts looking more favourable than anytime in the past decade.
In a long-term, diversified portfolio, consensus is a cash consideration should not really be any more than a year out in terms of maturity.
Favoured sectors and pain points
Of course, during pandemics, favoured sectors and pain points can emerge for allocators.
For example, Hoppe says Franklin Templeton has been investing in technology and health care, which benefited post-Covid from the accelerated digital transformation and increased demand for medical services.
Others, such as energy and tourism, suffered in the aftermath of the pandemic from the collapse in oil prices and travel restrictions, and were therefore less promising as investments.
He says: "None of this could have been anticipated, but did present opportunities to redeploy assets.
"Few areas were totally immune to the pandemic, but areas that had limited sensitivity to the underlying economy fared better.
"However, even investments such as insurance-linked bonds (which are exposed to other natural disaster perils, such as hurricanes and earthquakes) faced stress as market liquidity dried up.
"For brave investors, such liquidity dislocations represented buying opportunities. These were found even in the relative safety of government bonds, notably in inflation-linked issues."
Hassan agrees with Husselbee that Covid-19 has taught us there is no need to get too bolshy with asset allocation.
He says: "You need to think about what could hurt you. If the world is not normal – and since the pandemic, it has not been normal – what can hurt you?"
For him, pain points in such scenarios would come from highly leveraged companies, such as small-caps, or low-liquidity asset allocation to assets such as open-ended property funds.
Style and currency
There are other ways of diversifying portfolios other than by geography, asset class and duration, and these elements also have taken on a fresh meaning post-Covid.
There is the style narrative, whereby the heady days of growth-style investing may be out of fashion, and quality and value have emerged as front-runners.
Hassan is a keen believer in quality: "Value is good, as long as the world isn't imploding. Basically, coming out of the Covid crisis, the quality part of the UK market became much larger."
