Category: Daily Instagraph

The S&P 500 is now up 89.32% since 31 December 2022. According to Goldman Sachs, this puts the US equity market on track for one of the strongest rolling four-year return periods of the last 100 years. Mega-cap technology has probably been the main driver of this exceptional performance. This also means that the market … Continued

Financial markets have penalized France since the snap elections two years ago created parliamentary standstill. French equities have underperformed, while the spread of French OATs versus German Bunds remains at elevated levels. The market is not only reacting to political noise. The deeper issue is fiscal credibility. France is expected to run a public deficit … Continued

The AI theme is not only an American story. What is striking is the valuation gap. Alibaba trades around 16x forward earnings, versus roughly 27x for Amazon. Baidu and Tencent trade in the low teens, despite owning large-scale search, cloud, social, gaming, e-commerce and AI assets in the world’s second-largest economy. This discount is not … Continued

Semiconductors used to be a classic cyclical business: boom, overcapacity, bust, then recovery. For investors, that made the sector difficult to own over the long run. AI has clearly changed the current picture. Earnings are booming and, because profits have risen so sharply, valuations do not look obviously stretched on current numbers. The real question … Continued

The US yield curve is flattening, but this should not be read as a signal that inflation expectations are coming down. This is more a bear flattening: the long end remains elevated, with the 10-year Treasury around 4.48%, while the short end has moved higher, with the 2-year now catching up around 4.17%. In other … Continued

The chart of the day shows the strong normalization of tanker traffic through the Strait of Hormuz. After the recent geopolitical shock, the number of vessels crossing the area has sharply recovered across all major categories, including crude oil tankers, product tankers, LNG and LPG carriers. For oil, the message is quite simple. The physical … Continued

At the ECB’s annual retreat in Sintra, Portugal, Christine Lagarde argued that Europe has become more resilient to external shocks thanks to a stronger financial framework and progress on the green transition. That resilience is important. But it should also change the monetary reaction function. If external shocks have a more contained impact on the … Continued

The first half of 2026 has brought a new record in sovereign bond issuance. More than 500 billion dollars of government debt has come to market, with Italy and the UK among the largest contributors. The key message is not about one country. It is about the trend. Public finances remain under pressure, even though … Continued

An interesting observation from BCA Research. It is well known that during the bursting of the dot-com bubble, between March 2000 and May 2001, the S&P 500 Information Technology sector lost 55%, while the S&P 500 declined by 13%. What is less often remembered is that, over the same period, the S&P 500 excluding Information … Continued

The benefit of hindsight is one of the most dangerous luxuries in investing. Looking at a return table after the fact, everything looks obvious. This table shows the total returns of major asset classes in USD since 2011. What is striking this year so far is how broad the rally has been: around 90% of … Continued