So, who is jumping the queue?

SpaceX recently filed with the SEC at a target valuation of approximately $1.75 trillion, which would make it the sixth largest company in America on day one of trading. OpenAI crossed an $850 billion valuation in its most recent funding round and is expected to list in late 2026 or early 2027. Anthropic, the company behind Claude, hit an annual revenue run rate of $30 billion in April 2026, up over 200% in a single year, and is expected to follow suit.

Together these three companies represent somewhere north of $3 trillion in combined valuation, the most concentrated IPO pipeline in history and every single one of them an AI play. Apollo’s chief economist Torsten Slok has warned that if all three list this year, the top 10 holdings in the S&P 500 could approach 50% of the entire index, effectively turning the world’s most important retirement index into a highly concentrated AI thematic fund. The diversification that made passive investing so compelling in the first place shrinks, and underlying investors may not even notice until something goes very wrong.

Why was there ever a queue?

When a company first goes public, the market needs time to work out what it is worth via price discovery. Price movements can be sharp post-listing, as the business delivers (or not) against its marketed projections and a stable cap table is established.

There is also the question of liquidity. New listings typically have a small float, only a fraction of the total shares available for public trading because insiders are locked up. Forcing index funds to buy a thinly traded stock creates price pressure that can be detached from a company’s underlying value.

2026 May Ndx Changes Faq

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The waiting period gives the market time to calm down and liquidity to build naturally before the weight of passive buying takes over.

Passive plebs

Passive investing once offered a free ride on the price discovery work of active managers – low cost, low effort, market returns. But as passive money has come to dominate, the index is less a reflection of the market as it is the market. And now the rules are being re-written in favour of insiders and early investors and at the expense of broader market participants.

When SpaceX enters the Nasdaq-100 after 15 days of trading, every passive fund tracking that index will be a buyer of that stock and, importantly, price agnostic. That means hundreds of billions of dollars will be chasing a thin float of a stock after just three weeks of trading.

Supply and demand dynamics tell us the price will go up, a lot, and fast. Which is wonderful if you are an early investor sitting on a large, unrealised gain. It is less wonderful if you are a retiree whose superannuation just bought a stock at the top and provided the exit liquidity for insiders.

George Noble, a veteran Fidelity fund manager with decades of experience on Wall Street, has described the fast entry rule change as a structural manipulation of a major index.

Follow the money

Nasdaq reportedly changed its rules in part because SpaceX made fast index inclusion a condition of listing with them rather than the NYSE. The commercial incentive to win that listing is enormous, listing fees, trading volumes, prestige. The incentive to protect minority shareholders is considerably smaller.

The rules are being rewritten to benefit IPO issuers and early-stage insiders, and passive capital may be the vehicle driving those gains.

Whether that’s reason enough to step aside is another question.

From the desk of IGB

The market has been shielded by a number of supply buffers, but they are being depleted.

The demand picture

Global oil demand sits at approximately 103 million barrels per day, with transport accounting for roughly half of all consumption. Despite meaningful EV adoption, road fuel growth has slowed but not reversed. Transport remains almost entirely oil dependent and is still the single largest consumer of every barrel produced.

The new kid on the block and the fastest growing oil segment is petrochemicals. Petrochemical feedstock currently accounts for 12% of global oil demand, covering plastics, fertilisers, packaging, clothing, digital devices, medical equipment and detergents, and this share is expected to increase. Between 2019 and 2024, consumption of oil-based feedstocks increased by an estimated 2.3 million barrels per day, accounting for more than 95% of net growth in overall oil demand. By 2030, the petrochemical industry is on track to consume one in every six barrels of oil produced globally.

Even as renewables advance, oil and its derivatives remain structurally embedded in the global economy and growth in ways that cannot be unwound quickly.

Talk to me Strait (of Hormuz)

In 2025, nearly 20 million barrels per day of oil transited the Strait of Hormuz, representing approximately 20% of global oil consumption and around 34% of globally traded crude oil. Most of these exports were destined for Asia, with China and India alone accounting for 44% of all Hormuz crude flows.

To contextualise the scale: global oil demand fell 2–3% during the GFC and approximately 10% during COVID, both of which caused severe economic disruption. A closure removing 20% of global supply is without modern precedent.

A number of short-term buffers have been deployed to offset the burden, but they are being rapidly depleted. These are emergency measures and once exhausted it is not clear what other tools exist to prevent prices from moving sharply higher.

The refinery bottleneck

One of the least understood dimensions of this conflict is the operational constraint it places on oil refineries. Refineries are not taps that can be turned on and off. They are highly integrated industrial facilities operating across multiple sequential stages, distillation, conversion, treatment and blending, all of which must run simultaneously with sufficient crude flowing through to maintain precise temperature, pressure and chemical conditions at every stage.

According to the American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers, there is a technical floor known as the “turndown rate” the lowest volume of crude a refinery can process while safely keeping all units operating, which sits at approximately 65 – 7 0% of total capacity. During the early phases of the COVID-19 lockdowns, US refinery utilisation dropped to 68%, right at that technical threshold.

With supply uncertainty rising following the onset of the Iran conflict, refineries began scaling back runs within the first week. Should any refineries be forced into a full shutdown, returning idled capacity to safe operation would be so labour intensive and time consuming that any market impact would be years away, requiring machinery inspections, operating permits, staff reassembly and full supply chain reintegration. Even a diplomatic resolution tomorrow would leave the world facing months of constrained refined product supply.

Brent, which prices most internationally traded crude, is reacting directly to fears of supply disruption across the Middle East, while WTI reflects a US market with growing domestic production and relatively insulated inland supply. Brent crude futures settled at $112.78 per barrel on Monday 30 March, marking a record monthly surge of approximately 55% for March, the largest monthly gain since the contract began in 1988. WTI settled at $102.88, recording its first close above $100 since July 2022.

The spread between the two has narrowed significantly from the $10 per barrel gap seen earlier in the month, as WTI has caught up, itself a signal that even the relatively insulated US market is now feeling the pressure.

The United States is largely self-sufficient in crude oil production, running domestic refineries at 90%+ utilisation on domestic supply. However, US producers are incentivised to export crude when Brent prices rise sufficiently above the Gulf Coast price, meaning even a self-sufficient producer is not insulated from global price dynamics. For US crude exports to be economically viable, the price of Brent must be higher than the price on the US Gulf Coast, and at current levels that threshold is being met decisively.

What does this mean?

Across Asia-Pacific, governments are already in crisis mode, Pakistan has introduced a four-day work week and closed schools, Sri Lanka is rationing fuel to 15 litres per week, Thailand has intervened to stabilise prices, and the Philippines declared a national energy emergency.

Closer to home, Australia and New Zealand are more exposed than most realise. Australia holds the smallest fuel stockpiles of any IEA member nation, has only two remaining refineries, and has seen domestic oil production dwindle significantly over 25 years. New Zealand has no onshore refining capacity at all. As NZ Foreign Minister Winston Peters bluntly put it, both countries were “far too cocky” about their energy security.

The UN’s Asia-Pacific development arm estimates regional inflation could rise to 4.6% in 2026, up from 3.5% in 2025, with economic growth slowing across the region. For central banks including the RBA, this creates an impossible tension, inflation was already running hot before the conflict began, and oil above $110 per barrel makes it worse. But raising rates cannot reopen the Strait of Hormuz. The risk of stagflation is no longer theoretical; the ECB has already warned that major European economies could be pushed into technical recession by year end.

As Jeff Currie of Carlyle Group put it, the world may be about to get the energy transition forced upon it, in a very painful way, and very quickly.

From the desk of IGB

To understand what Ellison has taken on, it helps to look at who owned Warner Bros. before him.

Since 1967, the company has changed hands or undergone major structural re-organisation seven times. Each new owner arrived with what they thought was a compelling strategic thesis. Each one, within a few years, exited with considerably less capital than they brought in.

Debt, Camera, Action

Time Warner’s 1989 merger loaded the business with $10.8 billion in debt and nearly broke it within a decade. AOL’s $167 billion takeover in 2000, built on inflated dot-com valuations and advertising figures that later proved fraudulent, ended in a $99 billion write-down. AT&T paid $85 billion for WarnerMedia in 2018 and sold it four years later for $43 billion. The subsequent merger with Discovery created WBD with a 5x leverage ratio and a structural tension between its unscripted cable roots and its premium drama assets that management never fully resolved.

Now comes the combined Paramount Skydance and Warner entity, carrying a 6.6x leverage ratio, $54 billion in newly arranged debt from Apollo, Bank of America, and Citigroup, and a public commitment to $6 billion in “synergies” (code for layoffs) within three years. On the investor call after signing, Ellison told analysts: “This is not about consolidation. It’s about reinventing the business.” Fitch promptly downgraded PSKY’s debt to junk. S&P placed all PSKY debt on credit watch with negative implications.

Netflix’s step forward

Netflix and its CEO Ted Sarandos spent months positioning themselves as the more credible acquirer, one whose ownership would preserve HBO's standing and avoid the kind of debt-driven restructuring that had damaged the brand under previous owners.

But mounting regulatory pressure changed the calculus. The Justice Department opened an antitrust investigation. Political pressure from the White House targeted Netflix’s board composition. A Senate hearing surfaced bipartisan opposition to combining the top two streaming services into a single entity with over 450 million subscribers. Netflix ultimately declined to match or beat PSKY’s final offer.

What looked like a retreat turned out to be a sound financial outcome. Netflix shares rose 14% after the withdrawal (around $60bn of equity value gained). The company collected a $2.8 billion breakup fee (approx. 15% of its annual content budget).

A separate theory gained traction on Wall Street: that Netflix’s involvement was less about acquiring WBD and more about keeping Paramount Skydance out of it for as long as possible, buying Zaslav time to complete his planned spinoff of the Global Networks business. A WBD without that division’s cash generation would have been a less attractive target for PSKY who needed the earnings to service its mounting debt. Whether intentional or not, the effect was that PSKY paid well above its opening position and inherited obligations it will now need to justify to its lenders.

The numbers Ellison must hit

On its investor call, the combined company projected $69 billion in revenue and $18 billion in EBITDA for 2026, including $6 billion of synergies. Getting leverage down to a more sustainable 4x ratio would require closer to $16 billion in cost savings, not $6 billion. The gap between those two figures is the central financial risk of the deal.

The combined entity has already cut 2,000 jobs at Paramount. Integrating CBS News and CNN, consolidating HBO Max and Paramount+ into a single streaming product, and rationalising two large real estate portfolios will occupy management for the next two years at minimum. Ellison has also been public about pursuing AI-driven production efficiencies at scale. Whether that technology can contribute meaningfully to debt reduction while the business also tries to grow its subscriber base against a financially stronger Netflix is a question the market has not yet answered.

The one unambiguous winner

David Zaslav took over WBD in 2022 with $55 billion in inherited debt and an instruction to make it work. He cut costs aggressively, restructured the balance sheet, and then ran a sale process that attracted two serious competing bidders and drove the final price to nearly five times the stock’s pre-process trading range. He leaves with approximately $800 million. His successor takes on the leverage ratio.

Warner Bros. has been through this cycle before. The studio’s underlying intellectual property is genuine and valuable. The debt attached to it is also genuine and substantial. History suggest debt wins; will this episode be any different?

From the desk of IGB

First, we had amphetamines and cabbage soup. Then came meal replacements, lemon detoxes, skinny teas, and the occasional flirtation with actual exercise.

For decades, we wanted the results without the effort. Then GLP-1s arrived. Initially a diabetes treatment, GLP-1s have quietly morphed into the most powerful theme in global healthcare; and arguably one of the biggest economic ripples of the decade.

Financial journals estimate the global obesity-drug market could reach ~US$100–105bn by 2030, with some forecasts extending to US$150bn by the mid-2030s, assuming pricing pressure doesn’t get political first.

GLP-1s work, and the market knows it. Their popularity has been fuelled by strong efficacy, cultural acceptance of medical weight loss, and easy access through direct-to-consumer telehealth platforms. The next frontier is convenience. In early 2026, Novo Nordisk launched an oral version of Wegovy, widening the addressable market to patients unwilling to use injections and reinforcing its patent-protected dominance.

But the growth of GLP-1s is also a consumer behaviour story, and the second order effects manifest across the whole economy.

Weight loss improves fertility outcomes. If GLP-1s expand access to effective weight management, fertility clinic demand could rise. A drug designed for metabolic control could influence demographics.

Airlines have openly acknowledged that weight matters. Every kilo on board burns fuel. If average passenger weight drops meaningfully over time, it’s not crazy to think that industry fuel bills fall at the margin.

Clothing retailers have long managed complex size curves. If millions of people drop two sizes over 18 months, that’s not just a health trend, it’s a wardrobe replacement cycle.

GLP-1s could simultaneously reduce acute costs and extend liability tails in the insurance industry. Food companies are reformulating products away from mindless snacks to functional fuel. High-margin sides and alcohol, the quiet profit engines of restaurant menus, may start to lose their appeal.

The list goes on.

The obvious trade was the drug makers. But, what’s potentially more interesting now are the second-order effects most models still treat as noise. The snack margins, the insurance claims ratios, the airline fuel lines, the alcohol volumes. None of those show up neatly in next quarter’s guidance. But they compound.

The opportunity isn’t in buying what’s already repriced. It’s in asking: “If this adoption curve sticks… whose earnings assumptions are quietly wrong?”

From the desk of IGB

By now, most of you will have made your way back to the office. While we took a well-deserved break, the market, and certainly Donald J. Trump, did not. Here are a handful of stories to get you back up to speed in the new year.

Markets are facing an unusually crowded news cycle, cutting across geopolitics, U.S. policy, central banking, and fast-moving technological change. We’ll begin with geopolitics, starting in the U.S.

Trump has been invoking the so-called “Donroe Doctrine” – a renaming of the 1823 Monroe Doctrine. What was once a warning to outsiders is now framed as America actively reclaiming its hemisphere. Some traditions, like creative licence, never die.

The result was a midnight visit from Uncle Sam to Venezuela’s president and his wife, achieving in 35 minutes what Putin has failed to accomplish in Ukraine over 35 months. Unlike George W. Bush, who dressed the invasion of Iraq in the language of weapons of mass destruction, Trump was disarmingly direct, mentioning “oil” more than 20 times in his Venezuela press conference, with a few dutiful nods to the alleged drug trade thrown in for balance.

I only recently learned that Venezuela has the largest oil deposits in the world. Sexy. What is not sexy, however, is the supply-demand dynamic of oil. We currently have more supply than demand, which is helping keep prices suppressed. Claudio Galimberti points out it would cost over $70 a barrel to extract oil that can only be sold for around $58 a barrel, due to the heavy crude nature of Venezuelan oil. So why do it? A flex of America’s military prowess?

As a NATO member, this is a far harder proposition. Rather than work the bureaucracy, Trump appears to have set it aside entirely. Opting instead to publicly circulate text messages from foreign governments.

Domestically, U.S. policy uncertainty is becoming more pronounced. The ongoing public targeting of Jerome Powell, the only Fed Chair in history to have markets genuinely feel sorry for him, has reopened questions around central bank independence. It also raises the very real issue of who might replace him as Chair of the Federal Reserve. This is unfolding alongside potential legal challenges, including a looming Supreme Court ruling on the legality of tariffs and a separate hearing on whether the firing of Fed Governor Lisa Cook would even be lawful. Together, these developments introduce legal and institutional risk into what is normally considered one of the market’s most stable and predictable pillars.

Further complicating the policy backdrop are proposals that blur the distinction between economic support and direct intervention. Caps on credit card interest rates are intended to relieve household pressure, but risk constraining credit availability at the margin. Separately, proposals for the U.S. government to purchase $200 billion of mortgage-backed securities, aimed at pushing mortgage rates lower, would represent a meaningful re-entry into housing market support. At the same time, efforts to limit dividends and executive pay at defence companies, alongside signalling materially higher U.S. military spending, send mixed messages on capital allocation incentives.

Technology remains a source of disruption, though it feels less overheated than it has over the past 18 months. The latest AI release from Anthropic has reignited debate around the long-term economics of software businesses. As AI capabilities accelerate, investors are questioning pricing power, margin durability, and the permanence of traditional software moats.

All of this is playing out against the steady drumbeat of quarterly earnings reports, which are offering valuable bottom-up insight into how companies are coping with higher rates, shifting demand, and rising costs. Earnings season typically provides an anchor for markets, but its stabilising influence is being challenged by the volume of macroeconomic noise.

Finally, attention is turning offshore. The Bank of Japan meets later this week against a fragile backdrop of rising JGB yields and pressure on the yen. Any hint of policy normalisation, or delay, risks spilling over into global bond and currency markets. With Japan now a meaningful buyer of U.S. Treasuries, domestic policy shifts may increasingly be reflected in U.S. rates.

This is a market driven by a collision of many narratives. The investor’s task remains unchanged: separate signal from noise, distinguish real shifts in risk from headline friction, and stay disciplined as markets tug in multiple directions. Familiar work; only with louder distractions.

From the desk of IGB

And now we have prediction markets adding fuel to the fire. Prediction markets allow anyone to “put their money where their mouth is”, betting on outcomes ranging from elections and sporting results to how many tweets Elon Musk will fire off in a given week. The breadth of liquidity is significant: more than US$3.6 billion was wagered on the 2024 US election alone, and over US$200 million is currently riding on the next Fed rate decision. And with ICE (owner of the New York Stock Exchange) recently acquiring a stake in Polymarket, these markets are beginning to converge with Wall Street’s own information ecosystem.

What does this mean for markets, and does it risk shaping trading behaviour in a more biased direction?

If prediction markets and fast-moving probabilistic signals become a default reference point, retail investors may be less likely to engage in real fundamental analysis. It’s simply too time-consuming. Instead, many will lean on these market-implied outcomes as shortcuts for decision-making. The result is a widening gap between how institutions trade, grounded in more traditional fundamental analysis, and how retail trades, driven more by momentum and sentiment signals. Over time, this dynamic could amplify feedback loops and mispricing’s as prediction-market consensus begins to substitute for true diligence.

The National Bureau of Economic Research has shown how retail attention shapes market reactions, particularly around surprises. In a study on contrarian behaviour and momentum, it found that retail investors frequently trade against large earnings shocks, buying the dip after bad news or trimming after good news. This behaviour can feed into post-earnings-announcement drift (PEAD), where prices adjust slowly rather than instantly, as theory would predict.

Take a retail-heavy stock like Tesla. When it misses earnings and its fundamental value weakens, retail investors often step in to “buy the dip,” keeping the price temporarily inflated above where institutions see fair value. Institutional holders continue selling, but instead of a sharp repricing, the stock grinds lower over time. The result is a slow, sentiment-driven drift – an inefficiency created not by information gaps, but by the differing behaviours of retail and institutional investors.

This is significant when you consider the volume of retail participation. The chart above shows that the share of off-exchange trades has risen to 50%, a proxy for retail involvement.

Retail investors love hopping into “the next big thing,”, so markets are being shaped less by spreadsheets and more by stories. The result is a market where prices can deviate from fair value for longer, and corrections unfold over time rather than clean, immediate repricing.

In this environment, understanding the narratives that drive behaviour has become just as critical as understanding the numbers behind the trade.

From the desk of IGB

Yes, AI dominates the headlines, but there’s another force shaping this market: the relentless rise of passive capital. Sovereign wealth funds, pensions, and giant allocators are funneling extraordinary sums into passive vehicles that buy the index and its constituents with absolute indifference to fundamentals.

Passive investment funds now represent more than half of U.S. equity-fund assets, up from roughly 20% in 2005. And, with greater inflows than their active counterparts, this trend is expected to continue into the future.

Historical Fund Assets: Active vs. Passive

This creates a quiet structural bid under equities. A steady, rules-based drip-feed of capital that doesn’t read headlines, doesn’t panic, and doesn’t care about valuation.

Citi recently put out a note saying markets aren’t irrational, just more cautious than probably ever. UBS also recently held a conference and, unsurprisingly, the mood on the ground was jittery. Executives, strategists, and analysts all danced around the same theme: markets feel expensive, positioning feels crowded, and no one has been rewarded for taking the contrarian view. Among the most cautious, and the most burnt, are the institutional investors who have no choice but to participate in the exuberance. Every bull market climbs a wall of worry, and right now there are a lot of bears reluctantly squeezing into bull suits.

Which brings me to the most punished cohort of all: short sellers. GameStop set the tone back in 2021, a generational squeeze that turned hedge-fund shorts into cannon fodder for retail. The pain hasn’t gone away. Goldman’s basket of the most-shorted stocks rallied 16% in October, trouncing the S&P 500. It feels like the right time to be short. After all, the S&P 500 has just logged one of its strongest multi-quarter runs since the 1950s. But, every dip keeps getting treated as a fresh chance to BTFD*.

Michael Burry (played by a cross-eyed Christian Bale in The Big Short), the patron saint of the permabear, made headlines recently shorting Nvidia and Palantir (roughly US$1.1 billion in put-option notional across the two). Shortly after, he made headlines again… by shutting his fund. His parting message to investors: “My estimation of value in securities is not now, and has not been for some time, in sync with the Markets.”

Investors are searching for downside protection, but timing remains impossibly difficult. This market has displayed an extraordinary capacity to absorb bad news, recalibrate expectations, and continue rising. It may well continue to do so until something meaningful forces a repricing. But, identifying that catalyst remains the hardest part.

If there is one observation worth emphasising, it’s that bull markets are remarkably resilient. And the real F-word right now isn’t the one that rhymes with “duck”. It’s Fundamentals. No one is getting paid for pointing out that valuations are stretched. Instead, we’re all stuck in a slow-motion game of chicken (or Russian roulette), waiting to see what finally pulls the trigger.

Risk appetite, for now, appears robust. So, whether investors are buying every dip, shorting in frustration, or attempting the improbable task of doing both, the message is the same: this is a bull market that many do not believe in, but few can afford to sit out. And, for all the discomfort, the most dangerous position remains being left behind.

It is, after all, still a trader’s market – and someone, somewhere, should be enjoying it.

From the desk of IGB

You know me; I love an economically exploitable resource.

These 17 metallic elements are essential, inconvenient and messy to produce. They are also the backbone of modern life: from consumer tech (headphones, smartphones, VR gear) to industrial kit (EV drivetrains, offshore wind, robotics) and even defence hardware that relies on high-performance magnets or luminescent coatings. If it lights up, spins, or hums, it probably needs rare earths.

And, while rare earths are plentiful, very few countries actually want to produce them. Extracting and refining rare earths remains a complex and environmentally intensive process. For every tonne of rare earth material, you oust roughly 100 tonnes of other ore, leaving behind a toxic mess that’s expensive (and unpopular) to clean up.

Rare earths suffer from the same PR issue as nuclear energy. We need them for a low-carbon world, but the production process doesn’t fit neatly into the “clean and green” narrative. Square peg, round hole.

That’s why countries like China have dominated production for decades. They are willing to tolerate the environmental cost. The rest of the world isn’t.

It’s hard to believe that just a few decades ago, the U.S. was producing nearly all the world’s rare earths. But as environmental scrutiny tightened and regulations ramped up, production was largely shut down by the early 2000’s.

China stepped in to fill the void, and global dependence soon followed, cementing a strategic edge in the increasingly critical AI arms race.

Now, it seems, the West has recognised this and is scrambling to rebuild secure and transparent supply chains for these essential materials.

Australia holds significant rare earth reserves, estimated at 5.7 million metric tonnes in 2024, representing about 5.2% of the global total. The issue has never been geology; it’s been willingness to process.

Maybe what the sector really needs is a new story. Add two simple letters, “AI”, and watch the urgency grow. Australia recently inked an $8.5 billion deal with the U.S. to boost supply chain security and ramp up rare earth production. With East-West tensions always precarious and the energy transition inevitable, it seems now people are potentially more willing to get their hands dirty (whatever it takes to get that nuclear sub, Australia).

From the desk of IGB

For decades, the gold market has moved under quiet constraint. Historically, rallies would pull back before they became significant. A kind of invisible hand ensuring moderation. This stability wasn’t accidental: A quiet gold market, even at higher levels, preserves faith in the currency regime, particularly the U.S. dollar.

Gold’s recent price action, therefore, suggests that balance might be broken, and suddenly, gold is the new black.

Deal-making is roaring back. Stock indices continue to reach new highs. And Google searches for “stock market bubble” have surged to highs last seen during the post-Covid liquidity boom. So, it’s little wonder gold has returned to the front of mind.

What’s interesting this time is the scale and speed of price action, and the breadth of attention the precious metal is commanding.

Before last week’s correction, gold and silver had just posted their strongest rally in over 40 years. Gold was up nearly 70% year-to-date, far outpacing the S&P 500, while ten weeks of consecutive inflows marked the heaviest on record. The trade has become crowded.

One catalyst behind this move dates to 2022, when the U.S. and its allies froze portions of Russia’s reserves. A wake-up call for central banks. This prompted a rethink of foreign-exchange security and spurred a steady, structural bid for gold. Central banks, led by China, have since maintained near-record purchases.

Retail investors are also starting to line up; literally. In Sydney, bullion shops have seen queues stretch down the street during price surges. The appeal is easy to grasp. Nothing feels safer than metal you can hold. But between the queues, the 8% spreads, and the storage hassles, it’s hardly efficient. ETFs and futures offer the same exposure with a few clicks. That investors are still choosing the hard way might suggest something deeper; that Wall St. paranoia has entered Main St.

Gold has again become a fascinating geopolitical barometer. But does the bull case still hold? The path of least resistance appears upward, supported by strong fundamentals and momentum flows. Key trends driving this include fiscal slippage, the risk of inflation expectations becoming unanchored, and continued diversification by central banks and investors. And material catalysts to reverse these trends appear improbable, at least in the near-term.

That said, gold works best as a risk-management tool, not a runaway bet. Rebalancing, trimming after strong runs, adding after pullbacks, helps preserve its role as a portfolio stabiliser rather than a speculative swing.

And context still matters. Gold can be volatile. It was the best-performing major asset in the 1970s, but also one of the most volatile. The same duality applies today. Last week’s 5.7% one-day drop was its sharpest since 2013.

Gold’s contemporary resurgence, then, feels less like speculation and more like a recalibration of trust in money and the global order. And right now, with markets awash with liquidity and anxiety in equal measure, gold is the new black. Timeless and quietly telling us something about the mood of the moment.

From the desk of IGB

Mixed amongst these technology heavyweights are the most direct AI-plays: OpenAI, NVIDIA, Oracle, Intel, and (more recently) AMD, whose roles overlap in complex (and strategic) ways.

Who’s Who in the Zoo.

· OpenAI develops the large language models powering consumer and enterprise tools.

· NVIDIA designs the GPUs that make large-scale AI computation possible.

· Oracle provides the cloud capacity that keeps these models running.

· Intel supplies CPUs essential for the everyday processing that underpins AI infrastructure.

· AMD competes across both GPU and CPU markets, offering an alternative source of computing power.

The Incestual Entanglement

NVIDIA has reportedly signed a US$100 billion letter of intent to invest in OpenAI over the coming years. To put it in perspective, it’s more than the annual GDP of some countries. The scale of this commitment reflects an effort to extend its reach beyond hardware supply.

OpenAI has also agreed to purchase roughly US$300 billion in cloud computing capacity from Oracle over five years. The goal is to help expand data-centre infrastructure at a pace that matches the computational requirements of AI.

NVIDIA also just put US$5 billion into Intel equity. On paper they’re rivals. So, why invest? The simplest answer is supply-chain risk: securing capacity and influence across the CPU stack.

At the same time, OpenAI finalised a multi-billion-dollar supply agreement with AMD, including warrants for up to 10% of AMD’s shares if performance milestones are met. The arrangement gives OpenAI redundancy in GPU sourcing and leverage in price negotiations.

A Closed Financial Loop

The web of investment between these firms has created what some analysts call a closed financial loop. Each company is simultaneously a supplier, customer, and investor in the others. That structure supports rapid scaling but also raises questions about long-term return on capital if projected demand softens.

The map below illustrates just how circular the AI ecosystem has become.

Show Me the ROI

We’ve seen the money, now show me the ROI!

A sceptic might call this “vendor financing” of future customers, great while growth is roaring but vulnerable if returns disappoint. If the market starts to doubt the payoff, the unwind could be abrupt. It boils down to the trillion-dollar question: will AI deliver enough productivity and revenue to meet lofty expectations?

We know that AI integration sits at the top of many board agendas. They may not know why, and certainly not how, but they do know when, and the answer is now.

If this all feels familiar, it’s because we’ve seen something like this before. During the late ’90s dot-com bubble, everyone rushed to add “.com” to their name. Many of those companies failed. But the period also marked the birth of many corporate giants like Amazon, as the internet evolved into the backbone of modern life.

AI may prove similar. We often misjudge timing. Bill Gates put it best: we overestimate the change that will occur in two years and underestimate the change that will occur in ten. Not every startup, cloud deal, or investment will succeed, but AI is likely to define the next era of business and technology. And it may be that the trillion-dollar question isn’t answered this year, but over the next decade.

From the desk of IGB

It’s the age of the K-shaped economy, where the wealth distribution gap grows wider by the day.

While many households are struggling with rent, oversized mortgages, and school fees, a privileged few are living la vida loca — booking cruises, ticking off holidays, and jumping on podcasts to reveal their ‘wealth hack’ to financial freedom. For them, it’s a discretionary-spend dream. For everyone else, it feels like the baseline has shifted to something impossible to match.

We see the same phenomenon playing out in capital markets. A small group of mega-cap stocks now dominate the S&P 500 to a degree rarely seen historically. By early 2025, the top 10 companies in the S&P 500 made up nearly 40% of the index. By comparison, historically (from about 1880 to 2010) the top 10 stocks averaged only about 24% of the index’s market cap. Capital flows are concentrating into fewer and fewer names, amplifying their influence while leaving a long tail of companies that drift quietly into irrelevance.

Part of the issue is how the modern economy operates. We live in an age where speed, scale and attention dominate. Not long ago, businesses needed a generation to go global. Today, platforms like TikTok, Canva, or Uber scale to hundreds of millions of users in just a few years. These are “winner-takes-most” markets, where a handful of players capture extraordinary gains while latecomers barely get a foothold. With distribution costs collapsing and markets opening instantly, expectations of fast wealth creation have become normalised. If companies can scale overnight, the question many people quietly ask is: why can’t individuals do the same? That mindset, and the disappointment when reality intrudes, is the trap.

Take OnlyFans as an example. It looks like the ultimate “get rich quick” story, a democratised platform where anyone can monetise their following. But as with anything, the divide is brutal. The top 0.1% of creators capture 76% of all revenue, while the average content producers earn just $150 – $180 a month. The dazzling outliers dominate the headlines; the median reality is sobering.

This mirrors the wealth conversation everywhere. A fraction of winners receives disproportionate gains, while the majority sit within the fat middle of the normal distribution. Most of us, regardless of what our mothers think, are in that middle band. The Pareto principle plays out again and again – 20% reap 80% of the rewards.

The divide, then, is not just between rich and poor. It’s also between perception and reality, between headline stories and the statistical truth. Social media amplifies the outliers, pushing us to believe the lived experience of a very small minority is par for course. Meanwhile, capital markets themselves are becoming more concentrated, handing even greater influence to a handful of giants while a growing graveyard of companies quietly falls away.

Perhaps the real ‘wealth hack’, then, isn’t in finding a shortcut to the top 1%, rather it’s in refusing to live as if we’re already there. To stop ‘keeping up with the Joneses’ and start making peace with the median.

From the desk of IGB

In September 1995, Peter Lynch told Worth Magazine:

“Far more money has been lost by investors preparing for corrections, or trying to anticipate corrections, than has been lost in the corrections themselves.”

It’s an interesting concept, borne out in the data. Investors who sell too early or under-allocate during volatile periods often trail the index significantly. JP Morgan calculated that $10,000 invested in the S&P 500 between January 2003 and December 2022 would have returned 9.8% annually — but missing just the 10 best days would have slashed that to 5.6%. The kicker? As Pippa Stevens noted to Business Insider, seven of those 10 best days occurred within 15 days of the 10 worst.

Timing the market isn’t just hard, then — it’s nearly impossible – like finding a needle in a haystack. To find that needle, a multitude of events would need to go right. The same is true in the economy: it takes a multitude of things going wrong for the market to truly collapse.

It tends not to be one factor in isolation that causes the house of cards to fall. Take the TGA (Treasury General Account) as an example. This is the U.S. Treasury’s cash balance held at the Federal Reserve, which has existed for decades but became a much more prominent policy tool after the Global Financial Crisis. At present, the Treasury is issuing debt to rebuild the TGA balance. This can withdraw liquidity from the system and mimic the effects of quantitative tightening, but it has not been sufficient to bring markets down in of itself.

Historically, collapses have occurred when multiple stresses converged. For example, in mid-2023 when the Treasury rebuilt the TGA after the debt-ceiling standoff, it withdrew nearly a trillion dollars of liquidity from the system in just a few months. On its own, that might not have been destabilising. But layered on top of aggressive Federal Reserve rate hikes, ongoing quantitative tightening, and vulnerabilities in regional banks’ balance sheets, it contributed to the regional banking crisis that saw institutions like Silicon Valley Bank, Signature Bank, and First Republic fail. It was the combination of these factors, not the TGA alone, that created the shock.

This brings us back to the “needle in a haystack” point: successfully predicting all these events aligning requires a certain amount of luck, something anyone who has ever called a drawdown correctly will admit.

Stanley Druckenmiller has admitted that part of his early success came from his youth and inexperience — he was named Director of Research of Pittsburgh National Bank, in part because his boss believed he was too naïve not to charge into a secular bull market when veterans, scarred by a decade of losses, couldn’t. Experience builds caution, but it can also anchor investors to fear. Kahneman and Tversky’s prospect theory explains why: losses sting more than gains please, a bias magnified for professional managers handling billions.

Today, though, the investor base looks different. Financial literacy is no longer reserved for the college-educated “Chad” it’s accessible to anyone who wants it, and even to those who don’t actively seek it. Simply buying and holding the “Magnificent Seven” stocks would have served investors extremely well over the past five years. These are household names that people not only know but also use and understand in their daily lives.

In the past, markets would often wait for what was called “capitulation” the point when investors, particularly retail, collectively give up on holding risk assets and sell en masse, usually after prolonged losses. It has often marked a sentiment bottom. I question whether that will be the case in the future; with financial literacy where it is, retail understand the importance of buy and hold. Which means, if the labour market remains resilient and people aren’t forced to sell, perhaps the very notion of retail capitulation fades away.

Still, market history warns against complacency. The GFC saw the S&P 500 fall 57% from 2007 peak to 2009 trough, taking approximately six years to recover. Those who lived through it haven’t forgotten. So where does that leave us today? Are we in an era where structural resilience, retail literacy, and buy-and-hold discipline mean markets can grind higher for longer? Or is this just the set-up for the next painful correction?

From the desk of IGB