Two shocks. Which future?

We open this newsletter with an important realization.

For the past year, we tried really hard to work with traditional Private Banks across Europe, leveraging a vast network of many friends and serious professionals working in the industry.

We offered Private Bankers our AI platform (CARTESIO Studio) for free. It is a tool built to help bankers decode real-time market shifts, manage cycle risk, and actively protect their clients' portfolios. Best of all? It is transparently open to their end clients, too.

I have been myself part of an investment team in London, working every day on a trading floor, shaping our AI system to provide the answers that all investors would need.

We did it to help end-investors get a better service - smarter, adaptive allocations that fit current market conditions. And we did it at zero cost to the banks.

And still, we hit wall after wall. Private Bankers don’t care.

It isn't a performance issue - the exact same market views run our live, active ETF on the London Stock Exchange, and the strategy is doing well. The code works.

Now we understand why. We get it.
It goes against their business model.

Opacity hates transparency. Static portfolios milk high management fees with zero daily effort. Meanwhile, our market-adaptive portfolios require actual work, continuous calibration, and deep market knowledge.

It looks like traditional wealth management doesn't want a better radar to navigate and drive in any weather. They want a parked car so they can safely collect their relationship fees.

Only independent, entrepreneurial wealth advisors have answered our call - because they don't need to hide their fee structure and they genuinely care about their clients' performance without hiding behind their bank's decisions.

If your private bank is busy milking fees while leaving your wealth exposed in a frozen container, stop waiting for them to change. They won’t.

It’s time to take back your car's steering wheel.
Join the resistance.

It is the time for transparent, effortless, market-aware, adaptive investing.

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The first half of the year draws to a close. It’s been dominated by two major shocks - one from the war and its effect on oil supply, and the other one from the AI boom and its impact on demand for semiconductors.

We have already observed that the AI boom has been, and continues to be, very volatile. The AI hyper-scalers (the Mag 7 - Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia, Tesla) are out of fashion again, after a short boom cycle in Spring.

The latest Nasdaq darling - Space X - ballooned up after the IPO to then crash violently on the ground. You might remember that we side its valuation was completely exaggerated.

Our short-term momentum indicators show that the Nasdaq is in selling territory.

European staples look like a good place to hide.

Full access to our CARTESIO Studio: here

Investors have decided that the war in Iran is not meaningful anymore for market prices. Oil is down to pre-war levels ($ 72) at the time of writing. But real-world disruptions are….real, and remain in place.

With the Hormuz strait close, sea and air shipping costs have risen. You can see it on our indicators in CARTESIO Studio.

The same is true for road transport.

Similarly to what happened during Covid, supply chain bottlenecks were behind the inflation spikes of 2022. And the direction of travel is the wrong one.

If genuine normality in Hormuz and global trade will not resume asap, the only way for inflation is up.

Watch out for your long duration bonds, and for the Nasdaq - the index that suffers rate hikes the most.

Thanks

Speak soon

Nico