Opinion

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.

There’s an ongoing debate about whether artificial intelligence is in a bubble. The more important question is whether that’s necessarily a bad thing.

Now that Trump has been taking things a bit easier over the past few weeks, stock valuations have become the topic dominating the markets. Market commentators are tripping over each other to declare how wildly overvalued the big tech names supposedly are. It’s a lot of parroting, really, while the actual numbers tell a more nuanced story.

As AI transforms fund administration, the true differentiator will not be process but people. The private-markets industry can learn from hospitality: excellence is how you make people feel.

A targeted educational intervention can break the free dividends fallacy among retail investors. The result: a lasting behavioral change that reveals how fragile—yet how malleable—the demand for dividends truly is.

Private markets no longer run in straight lines. Intermediaries are merging, data is flowing, and Luxembourg may quietly become the nerve center of the new system.