Opinion

Write a prompt asking Claude to act like an investor who wants to know everything about a company. Upload the quarterly results of a business you follow. Click. Wait fifteen minutes. And there it is: an investment memo with a cash-flow model, scenario analysis, a risk overview and a valuation framework. Neatly structured.

The price of a barrel of crude oil surged past the $100 mark as the situation in the Middle East escalated further. A small price to pay, according to the president of the United States. Yet I suspect Trump is taking too narrow a view of the true cost of this new military intervention – if he is even considering those costs at all.

Within one hundred hours, American and Israeli forces struck nearly 2.000 targets in Iran. Ayatollah Khamenei and dozens of senior officials were killed. It is the largest American military operation in the Middle East since 2003. The initial market reaction was remarkably muted, but the oil price tells a different story.

I recently came across an interesting study about the Fama-French factors, those widely used risk factors that underpin how we evaluate investment performance. The findings should matter to every (institutional) investor.

Even before stock market trading in March had really gotten underway, we already knew this month would end up in the history books. You also have to be particularly creative now to write a column that does not touch on what is happening in the Middle East. So here is the expected topic, but with a twist.

Stocks follow earnings per share. Over the long term, the correlation between earnings growth and share price performance is as high as 98 percent. Everything else is noise. Macro fears, geopolitical tensions, quarterly results that fall short by a fraction — in the long run, they hardly matter. What counts is how much a company earns and how those earnings develop over time.

AI is not a bubble by definition. But the investment wave surrounding it is. The first hairline cracks are now clearly visible, and comparisons with the run-up to the global financial crisis are becoming hard to dismiss.

On the eve of the recent meeting of EU leaders on how to make the European economy more innovative, more competitive, and less dependent on foreign countries, participants were sent a note from the European Central Bank (ECB). In it, the bank outlined what it considers desirable policy to achieve those goals.

The S&P500 is virtually unchanged this year, but beneath the surface the US equity market is moving more than it has in years. More than one fifth of all stocks in the index have already risen or fallen by more than 20 percent this year. The gainers are clearly in the majority: about two out of three. Yet you do not see that reflected in the index itself. How is that possible?

Since Trump’s reelection as president of the United States, the world has been on edge. Geopolitical tensions are dominating the markets, and the role of the dollar is once again under discussion. Still, I find it difficult to translate that into the idea that this is the moment for the euro to step out of the greenback’s shadow. There are simply too many loose ends.