Han Dieperink

Last week, during the Fund Event, I sat in a packed room around a metaphorical campfire. This time, questions didn’t come through the chat, but as paper airplanes floating through the air. Some landed in the fire and were answered immediately. Others fell into the ashes. Time to pick those up.

October has a bad reputation in the markets. The biggest crashes in history – 1929, 1987, and 2008 – all took place in October. This pattern does not appear to be a coincidence but rather the result of structural factors that make this month particularly volatile.

The Federal Reserve last week cut interest rates from 4.25–4.50 percent to 4.00–4.25 percent and will lower rates further at the remaining meetings of the FOMC, the Fed’s policy body. This comes even as financial conditions have already improved and there is still an extraordinary amount of liquidity on the sidelines.

In 1996 I came across Cisco’s annual report, which included a CD-ROM presentation by CEO John Chambers titled The internetworking takes off. At that point, there was absolutely no sign of a dot-com hype, though Alan Greenspan thought otherwise in his irrational exuberance speech of December 1996.

Jerome Powell is facing what may well be the most important speech of his career. This week, at the annual Jackson Hole symposium, the Federal Reserve chair must not only defend his policy, but also the very principle of central bank independence.

Vanguard now owns more shares in MicroStrategy than its founder despite publicly dismissing crypto as speculative. The irony is hard to miss, but the real lesson is that so-called passive investing is becoming anything but passive.

Can AI fuel the next asset bubble? Han Dieperink draws bold parallels with 1998, dotcom mania, and Fed policy.

Vietnamese finance minister Nguyen Van Thang met with representatives from FTSE Russell last week to discuss the potential reclassification of Vietnam’s capital market. This marks an important moment in Vietnam’s journey from frontier market to emerging market status in 2025—a long-awaited upgrade that has been on the table since 2018.

We are at the beginning of a fundamental transformation in wealth management. Financial decisions are increasingly being made by algorithms. Within just a few years, AI-driven applications will become the primary source of advice for retail investors, with usage expected to grow to 80 percent by 2028. This is not some distant vision of the future—it’s already happening.

Artificial intelligence continues to be underestimated—both in terms of its scale and the speed of its adoption. We’ve seen this story before. Each time, revolutionary technologies were massively underestimated by analysts, investors, and even the most optimistic visionaries. The same is happening now with artificial intelligence, but at a pace that puts all previous technological revolutions in the shade.