The number of investors proclaiming they’ve made millions from AI infrastructure stocks is on the rise. That’s a dubious data point that’s surely synonymous with taxi drivers sharing the same hot stock picks near the peak of the market.
Australian consumers are feeling mighty gloomy right now. It’s easy to understand why. The war in Iran, the sharp rise in fuel prices and the proposed removal of the capital gains tax discount has Australian households unusually worried about the future.
Read our latest market commentary, The Bigger Picture, which includes some timely investment lessons from Simon Turner's Camino experience in Portugal and Spain.
April confirmed what markets had begun to suspect: the global macro backdrop has changed. Higher geopolitical risk is now structurally entrenched. Markets have quickly adjusted to this unfortunate new reality across all asset classes. Geopolitical risk has reasserted itself as a primary driver of energy prices, inflation expectations, and capital flows. Investors still anchored to the old world of low inflation, cheap money, and frictionless globalisation risk being structurally mispositioned.
Australian consumers are feeling mighty gloomy right now. It’s easy to understand why. The war in Iran, the sharp rise in fuel prices and the proposed removal of the capital gains tax discount has Australian households unusually worried about the future.
Read our latest market commentary, The Bigger Picture, which includes some timely investment lessons from Simon Turner's Camino experience in Portugal and Spain.
April confirmed what markets had begun to suspect: the global macro backdrop has changed. Higher geopolitical risk is now structurally entrenched. Markets have quickly adjusted to this unfortunate new reality across all asset classes. Geopolitical risk has reasserted itself as a primary driver of energy prices, inflation expectations, and capital flows. Investors still anchored to the old world of low inflation, cheap money, and frictionless globalisation risk being structurally mispositioned.
Ray Dalio has spent much of the past decade warning that investors are misreading reality. Markets, he argues, are telling one story in nominal terms and a very different one in real money terms. Asset prices may be rising, portfolios may look healthy, and indices may be hitting new highs, but measured against the true store of value, purchasing power, many investors are quietly going backwards.
The four most dangerous words in finance have always been it’s different this time. Financial history is littered with stories of incidents and eras when investors en masse genuinely believed it was different that time. Those were times when the crowd collectively gulped down the Kool-Aid and wanted seconds.
For more than a decade, it’s rarely been wrong to be long U.S. equities. The numbers are hard to argue with: the MSCI USA index has outperformed the MSCI World index by almost 50% over the past ten years. The longer term data is even more stark: U.S. stocks have risen from 30% of the MSCI World Index in the 1990s to 75% today. For all intents and purposes, U.S. stocks now dominate global equities.
It’s hardly a secret that the countries who win the technology war will dominate the global economy. The US economy is living proof that technology leadership is the route toward economic dominance. But they are not the only superpower with the ambition of technology-led global domination. China is also aiming for technology leadership in the same market segments, such as artificial intelligence, robotics, electric vehicles, and semiconductors.
You may have come across the unique breed of individual known as a day trader in your travels. Their numbers have been on the rise for some time now, so much so that they’re reshaping the very architecture of markets along with the notion of price discovery. What was once the province of nimble derivatives players is now having systemic ramifications across global equity markets.
When Beijing throttled exports of rare-earth magnets in April 2025, carmakers from Detroit to Wolfsburg panicked. Production lines halted. Procurement experts scrambled for stock. What looked like a trade tiff was, in fact, the visible edge of a very deliberate strategy, one that has been unfolding quietly for nearly a decade.
If you’ve noticed a change in the way markets have been functioning in recent years, you’re not wrong. The exponential growth of U.S. money supply, fuelled by decades of deregulation, cheap debt, and increasingly aggressive central bank stimulus has arguably changed the very nature of investing.
Most investors think about demographics as a slow-moving structural force which is useful information, but doesn’t affect short term investment performance. However, over the next decade and beyond, demographics are likely to become a more prominent investment theme.
Ready to be shocked? The bottom half of American households, some 65 million families, now own just 2.5% of total U.S. wealth. And at the other end of the spectrum, the top 1% controls wealth that outstrips the bottom 50% by more than $US40 trillion.
If you follow the news, the world is probably feeling mighty unsafe right now, with geopolitical risks dominating the headlines. Of course, the media thrives on amplifying fear, so for investors the real question isn’t whether the news headlines are dramatic. That’s always the case. It’s whether the real geopolitical risks are material, and how they might affect investors’ portfolios looking forward.
There’s some sobering news to report. Despite being one of the world’s richest nations in personal wealth terms, Australia has slipped to 105th out of 145 countries in Harvard University’s Economic Complexity Index (ECI)
Something is in the air across global investment markets of late. It’s hard to mistake the smell: greed. Global stock markets are riding a wave of speculation not seen since the dotcom boom or the post-pandemic retail frenzy. From Wall Street to the ASX, risk appetite is back with a vengeance.
So what’s a steady-handed, long-term investor to do in the face of so much speculation?