The Global Briefing: Where Capital Is Moving in 2026.

The AI Buildout Has Become the Market

AI is no longer a sector trade — it's the macro trade. Nearly $3 trillion in AI infrastructure spending is still ahead of us, and it's now the primary driver of global earnings growth, capital expenditure, and — increasingly — market concentration risk. The theme has moved past pure tech: it's showing up in bank efficiency, healthcare diagnostics, logistics, and utilities, as the fear of being left behind pushes both companies and governments to keep spending.

The opportunity and the risk are the same fact: compute demand is outpacing supply even as the technology gets more efficient, which means differentiation matters more than exposure. The firms compounding real advantage aren't just the chipmakers — they're the businesses turning AI into measurable productivity. Diversification within the AI theme, not away from it, is where discipline earns its keep this year.

Income Over Appreciation

The Fed is holding in a 3.5%–3.75% range with a genuinely uncertain forward path — new leadership has signaled less forward guidance, not more, which means rate volatility is likely to stay elevated rather than settle down. The 10-year has been trading in a 3.75%–4.5% band, and most desks now expect returns this year to come from yield, not price appreciation.

That favors quality: investment-grade corporates and agency mortgage-backed securities over stretching for yield in high-yield credit, where spreads are historically tight against rising idiosyncratic default risk. The playbook we're watching institutions favor — neutral-to-shorter duration, quality over cash, selective opportunity in non-U.S. sovereigns — reflects a market that's being paid to be patient, not aggressive.

The Dollar's New Regime

2025 was the dollar's weakest year in over a decade, and the debate for 2026 isn't whether that trend continues — it's how far it goes. The Fed's shift toward less predictable guidance, alongside a narrowing rate advantage versus Europe, has most FX desks constructive on the euro and watching for a yen recovery as the rate differential with the U.S. closes.

For a firm like ours, currency isn't a side bet — it's a lens on every cross-border position. A weaker dollar changes the calculus on international equities, commodity exposure, and emerging-market debt simultaneously, which is exactly why FX discipline sits upstream of the rest of the portfolio, not bolted on afterward.

Precision Over Direction

The clearest structural shift in markets this year isn't in stocks or bonds — it's in how people are hedging. Global exchange-traded derivatives volume was up nearly 39% year-over-year in Q1, and the growth is concentrated in options, not futures. That's not noise. It reflects a market moving away from broad directional hedges toward more precise, situational risk management — responding not just to where markets are going, but to how uncertain the path there has become.

That's the environment sound risk management is built for. When volatility itself becomes unpredictable, the firms with a real derivatives discipline — not just exposure, but structured, deliberate use of options and volatility instruments — are the ones protecting capital while everyone else is reacting.

Health, Tech, and the Next Decade of Capital

The most interesting capital right now sits at the intersection of AI and healthcare. AI-driven drug discovery has moved from thesis to funded reality — Google-backed Isomorphic Labs alone raised roughly $2.1 billion to scale AI-powered discovery built on AlphaFold's protein-structure modeling. Meanwhile, GLP-1 therapies continue expanding well past weight loss into cardiovascular and metabolic disease, driving some of the largest M&A of the past year, including Pfizer's $10 billion pursuit of Metsera.

This is the pattern worth watching across every sector we track: technology is being absorbed into the core of how industries create value, not disrupting them from the outside. That's exactly the kind of thesis that rewards patient, disciplined capital over headline-chasing.

The through-line, as always: none of this works without discipline, sound risk management, and regulatory compliance underneath it — because performance without control isn't performance you can trust.