Opinion

Het is december en dus verschuift de aandacht naar 2026. Uiteraard vergezeld van een golf aan outlooks, die helaas vaak al deels achterhaald zijn tegen de tijd dat het nieuwe jaar begint. Toch ontvouwt zich momenteel een dynamiek die volgend jaar tot flink wat vuurwerk zou kunnen leiden.

With the pullback of the dollar and the decline in (short-term) interest rates this year, emerging markets have finally come back into favor. Well below the radar, however, frontier markets have already enjoyed growing popularity among a select audience for some time.

The ECB has given stablecoins a place in its Financial Stability Review. In a report containing the term stability assessment, you would expect the focus to be mainly on risks, but even then the ECB’s approach is striking. The unapologetic desire to favor the traditional banking sector is more than telling.

For decades, we have embraced the rise of passive investing (hammock investing) as the ultimate democratization of the financial markets. The gospel of low costs, broad diversification, and market returns seemed infallible. But while passive assets under management have climbed to astronomical levels, a wave of critical academic research reveals a troubling paradox: the instrument designed to help investors may be structurally distorting the market and ultimately diminishing their wealth.

Fund passports were built on the same vision that shaped the Schengen Zone: shared trust and borderless movement. Luxembourg remains at the center of that idea.

It was a master plan. The Sustainable Finance Disclosure Regulation was supposed to send massive private capital flows into green investments, finance the Green Deal, and allow Europe to set an example for the rest of the world. Not a nonbinding directive, but an ambitious framework meant to discipline the financial sector and crush greenwashing.

Financial markets are under pressure. Not only stocks but also other asset classes are mostly moving lower. Are we dealing with unique factors, or is there a single overarching culprit?

It was in May 2018 that the European Commission launched its highly ambitious European Sustainable Finance package. Seven years later, the political winds in Europe have shifted significantly, and sustainability ambitions are being scaled back step by step.

Nervousness around AI stocks reached a boiling point last week. Michael Burry, the investor who became famous for predicting the 2008 mortgage crisis, placed short positions on Nvidia and Palantir.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past twelve months, you can’t have missed witnessing one of the strongest gold rallies in recent decades. The number of parroted stories about gold has exploded, often relying on the same comparison. Yet it’s exactly that comparison which shows that not everyone sees the golden bull in the right perspective.