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- [00:07]
A
Hello out there.
- [00:08]
B
Welcome to Macro Mondays. Welcome to Real Vision. My name is Miko Osman. I'm your usual host and as usual I'm joined by Andreas. Welcome to the show, Andreas.
- [00:17]
A
Good to see you Miko. It's the final show of the year as far as I remember. Right. So and you know Christmas is right around the corner to tomorrow morning. I'll drive towards my in laws and celebrate Christmas there. So that's why I'm you know donning my cap here and you know I'm, I'm ready for a vacation and the market is green today once so it.
- [00:41]
B
Is a green hat for a green day. Now this is Europe so obviously we are, we're always already way past the the Christmas holidays. Everyone's at home today. It seems like in the middle of Copenhagen here. So that's great. We're living up to all the prejudices there. Yeah. As you said this is the final show for the year. It's been a great year, Andre. We're to shoot some shoot a little today. Try and look back at a crazy year in global macro. I mean we can say that every year but this one. Andreas, there's been a lot to talk about. It hasn't been the worst year to do a macro show. I, I'll have to say we, we'll try and reminisce some of it. Look at the best trade worst trades, some of the best hot takes I've brought brought out mine best hot take of the year and yeah, look at that. Just a little reminder that we are that for this is obviously our free show we do a little sneak peek into our on all the research that we pub real vision amongst other things we are this week we are publishing our year end or beginning of the year portfolio update. We're laying out our entire playbook for 2026 with our eight main investment thematics. It's a 50 page banger that you can catch so I don't know if that's more of a scare tactic or a draw but anyway you can catch that with the pro subscription for real vision. So go check that out. That's also the way to get weekly updates on our traits and changes in our model portfolio. That's the best way to get completely actionable here. Also just a reminder that from January 22nd to 25th we'll be in Miami Beach, Florida in the US for the crypto gathering, the yearly realization crypto gathering. There are still tickets on sale so be sure to check that out if you want to catch me or Andreas over there or just listen to us. Maybe that. That's pro. Perhaps more realistic or advisable. Andre, before we get to. To looking back at 2025, let's just have our usual little disclaimer here, because I think this year has. That we've had some great traits. We've had some less than great traits. Overall, we have to say that we.
- [02:40]
A
Are sometimes maybe good summertime. It may be. Shit.
- [02:45]
B
Exactly. That's the way it is. Andreas. Okay, I want to hit you with something before we get to his history. 2025. This has been haunting me for the past three months because I laid this out as the laugh of the week during our show in early October. Let's have the tweet on the screen here. This is not a tweet, it's a Reddit post and it's from December 12, 2023. So it's two years old. And here he's laying out that from all time highs to all time highs, all time low to all time highs in Bitcoin, you have a cyclist of 1,064 days and then 364 days to all time low. And that just goes. And that would put the all time high of the cycle at October 7th, Andreas. And do you know what happened on.
- [03:33]
A
October 7th that says October 6th? So it was way off.
- [03:37]
B
Yeah. 6. I'm sorry. Yeah, it was October 6th. I'm sorry, I'm just reading this. It was actually the exact day and when I brought this on the show, we both had a laugh of it. This was the sort of the hot take. Oh, completely. Right. How on earth do you do this, Andreas? And this. Is this just a coincidence? I've been haunted by this.
- [03:57]
A
I, you know, I guess if there's some fundamental merit to this, it has to be linked to the having cycle of bitcoin. Right? And you know, the subsequent spillovers to price action. But this is a great example of what you could call a keep it simple, stupid rule. Right. In many ways, I'm a fan of such frameworks because as long as they work, they work. The issue here is that it may be that after Bitcoin has sort of matured as an asset, that it is no longer as firmly tied to this having dynamic, and maybe it's much rather tied to the liquidity and business cycle, especially now that it's no longer just a small tech evangelist space, right? You've got everyone from Blackrock to retail funds to wealth funds from other countries, et cetera, involved in this trade, which makes it more of an macro asset than it was probably in say in 2015. Right. So I personally still doubt that this pattern is just here to stay forever. If it is, oh boy, it's easy to make Money.
- [05:16]
B
It is July 25, 2028 should be the next all time high in crypto. So I'm not going to wait that long. I don't have patience for that. I think we're going to go there sooner, but yeah, we'll have to see. Andreas, any that's still the big picture from my head here in 2025. What are you going to remember from this year, Andreas? Obviously we had the Trump inauguration, we had Liberation Day, we had all that stuff going on in the spring, we had the Iran Israel war through huge shockwaves, through the market, continued struggles with China, US lockdown. What do you take away from this entire unrest?
- [05:55]
A
So, you know what I'm most proud of this year is the live on tape recording we did on the very morning of the Deep Seq sell off in Nvidia. We hosted a show, me and our CIO at the time, Alex, around this topic of AI and whether DeepSeek would wreak havoc with this whole investment cycle and capex cycle that was ongoing in AI. And we basically got to the conclusion that it would accelerate it. And that has been an incredibly good view. At that time it was very comme il faux, as you would say in French, to say that Nvidia was toast because Deepsea kind of revealed that you could train your models much cheaper and so on and so forth. But in my opinion, what the Deep Seq story and that sell off proved was that even if you commoditize AI, there'll still be a big capex cycle because the further we get towards commoditization, the more people will invest in it. I couldn't stop laughing when you send me a picture of a very small municipality here in Denmark buying their own Nvidia rack, basically based on, I think the H2 hundreds. They bought some of the older ones, but just a small municipality because they need needed a local version that you couldn't access from the outside. So my point is just even a small clueless municipality in Denmark is buying Nvidia chips, right? So that is to me a good example of the commoditization that is ongoing.
- [07:41]
B
Very, very good point, Andreas. And yeah, a positive one of the things we got right. We're going to be drawing or diving into some of the things that we, that we didn't get right here.
- [07:53]
A
But maybe let me add that, you know, we we had a great, great, great trading year up until mid October, and then we saw a drawdown up.
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B
Until this Reddit post.
- [08:06]
A
Yeah, exactly. It's this anonymous bastard from Resident that spoiled the party. So as, as I, as I wrote, I think it was last week, we've gone from a Lambo year. I, I even think I talked about buying a Lambo that week.
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B
So you did.
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A
Maybe I jinxed it to what I call a Mercedes year, quite literally, I've just bought one.
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B
So you bought a Mercedes.
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A
Yeah, but as someone commented on that remark, at least you're not walking, Andreas, and I think that's great.
- [08:44]
B
To be honest, you are walking more than you're driving, but that's a whole different story. Absolutely, Andreas, and this is true. We've gone from almost 70% up in our portfolio, I think at the high points to where are we going to end this year in the model portfolio portfolio, about 30, 28, 35, I think. Okay, okay. That's still quite decent address. Still stay. Very good year. So, Andreas, I wanted to take you through this chart you sent me earlier about performances of indexes, indices, it's called, in various countries. And I think I do a Danish podcast. And I was asked there, which, which European countries can outperform the US Stock market this year? And I said, only Denmark. That was obviously very, when the year started, that was obviously very, very wrong. What drove these disparities between US Markets and European markets? And what did you see here, Andreas.
- [09:41]
A
Just for the sake of clarity, I know these are Bloomberg tickers, right? So the top of the leaderboard is basically Korea here. So I guess that's ew y it's a Korean index and you know, it's very semiconductor heavy. Obviously HUNX has had a great year with the rise of memory spot prices and so on and so forth. EPOL is the Polish etf. So I guess there is some merit to this view that Poland will be on the receiving end of some of the funds that will flow into Ukraine in terms of the rebuilding there. Quite surprising. The EWP is the Spanish index, Miguel. And why is that on 72%.
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B
That's incredible.
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A
Second place, right. It's very bank heavy. You know, banks have had a great year in, in Europe, not least, but also in Japan. And it's very cyclical. And you know, for once we've seen this very uniform cyclical uptick across most regions in the world at the same time, typically what you see when the dollar weakens as well, and therefore we have to spy the S&P 500 pretty low on this leaderboard.
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B
Right.
- [10:58]
A
So I've personally been mostly active in US single names. We've been fairly active in. We've had the banks trade right most of the year. We traded both Korea and Poland early. We probably sold them a little too early as well, but had both of these trades on as well. So we've had much of this. Right. And to be honest, I think the simple best guess, and now I will be accused of recency bias, is that we'll get a similar year next year, very pro cyclical year, steeper yield curves in many places. Still rate cuts into this, which is a very interesting cocktail, especially in the US we'll probably get maybe say 4, 5 rate cuts into a pro cyclical setup globally, which should bode well for returns. And I still hold the contrarian view that we can already now see that the labor market is improving. We have positive year on year trends in job postings in the us we have a lot of temporary hiring going on already. And that's also the stuff you see when there's a pro cyclical environment, weaker dollar credit creation flowing from private banks, commercial banks across the globe. So maybe the big flip side to this was that this didn't prove to be a strong bitcoin year, for example. Right. This pro cyclicality, this liquidity creation by commercial banks instead of central banks proved to be better for a boomer asset like banks rather than bitcoin. And now we have this light QE in place from the Federal Reserve, which obviously alters the picture a little bit. But I think the real world assets will do well in 2026 as well. I also think bitcoin will do well, but I think it's a good idea to hold banks, for example. And we do hold banks both in Europe and Japan still.
- [12:58]
B
Yeah. Speaking of Europe, Andreas, I think one of the big ones here is obviously the interest rates because a lot of these countries are driving this growth or trying to drive up growth. When we talk about France or Germany via government spending, at some point we're going to have to talk about their debt levels. That's obviously very much related to interest rate. How quickly that become a topic. And then the big question is if we see this cyclical upswing in Europe as well, will it drive jobs with it? Because if not, if we see a weaker job market development, that's going to have huge impacts politically. But we'll have to see we have no major elections in Europe outside of Hungary and ourselves in Denmark next year. So we should have A little bit of working space for the governments both in Germany, Spain, Italy, around the continent.
- [13:50]
A
Miguel, I'd like to highlight one of the single name cases for next year that we have in our portfolio, given what you just mentioned on the labor market in both the US and in Europe, because we have seen weak hiring this year. We've seen net layoffs, for example, in warehousing and logistics. I think that's very related to industrial robotics. But what about, you know, going from model to agent in the artificial intelligence space? You know, could, could we get to a point where you and I don't necessarily take all of the decisions in our fund setup? For example, can we get an agent to do that if we train it well enough? I think that's very likely. And you know, the, the company called UiPath is very interesting because they work in, in that exact, that cross area. If you don't want to mean between AI and robotics. If you want to automate and you even want to go as far as automating your decision making, which I think that that's really where you can start to, you know, increase productivity even among those workers typically sitting in front of desktops. Right. One thing is to automate manual services, but another thing is to automate decision making and, you know, services consulting and stuff like that. But we're getting there. And that's why I think 2026 will still be, you know, an eye opener in many ways for, for the amount of utility cases that will arise.
- [15:31]
B
Absolutely. Andreas. Okay, we do have a few listening questions here. Andres. We'll see how many of them, those we can cover. Because I also want to force you down memory lane a little bit and force you to, to, to pick your, your, your best winners. It doesn't have to be the biggest returns, but what were your best, the best vibe you had about an investment? Looking back at 2500s, which stock would you pick? Or ETF?
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A
You know, if I look at it from a return perspective, the best stock that we've had in our portfolio is Rigetti Computing.
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B
Yes. 250% or something.
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A
Yeah, something like that. Yeah. And, you know, it's obviously one of those stocks where you're basically trading a narrative because they're not making any money. They will not make any money next year. You know, we're probably talking about a breakthrough in 2029 or something like that. So it is, you know, kind of a technical analysis set up. You're trading here, but it's, it's, it's, it's kind of worked as an AI levered bet in a sense this year. I, I personally think that Space Tech will be the AI lever next year. We're already seeing the first signs of that. Right. So I think that's, you know, numerically been the best trade. I probably, you know, both the best and the worst trade at the same time has probably been drone shield from Australia. Yeah, you know, we were some of the earliest guys on earth in this trade. I've actually held it since roughly a year ago also in our fund and we became a pretty large shareholder in it and then, pardon my French, those morons running the company sold all of their equity stakes more or less at once. Here was it three months ago or something like that. And the stock just fell off a cliff. I think at peak we were probably up 300% in it and now we're up 40, something like that. That's been a contributor, let me put it like that, to the volatility that we've seen in the portfolio even though we're obviously not risking everything in it. So both the good and the worst trade in the same trade. Can it be like that? I should probably have taken a bit off.
- [17:50]
B
No, I agree with the completely because I just want to show one video here if we can get it on screen. It's about drones because drones is one of our big topics for 2026 as well. Andreas, I think this is one, one thing that a lot of people underestimate. I don't know how clearly you can see this from the video. Sorry if it's a bit, but it's a video from the front line in Ukraine or just behind the front line in Ukraine. It's a city and it almost seems like you have a spider web wrapped all over it. That's the nature of warfare today. You have fiber optic cables in the tens of thousands going from roof to roof to roof to the front line. Drones are completely changing the face of modern conflict, modern conventional conflict, even high level conflict as we're seeing in Ukraine. And that's just a massive topic address. This is enormous Capex investment, if you can call it that, procurement expenses in the military that's going to be diverted towards, towards drones, both wireless drones but also wired drones. Who would have even thought this a year ago? Things are moving so fast. That's what happened. When you have a war, people have to be inventive. All your drones are being jammed by companies like drone shield and their technology. Oh well, you have, you plug a fiber optic cable in it. The Russians are mass producing 60 kilometer spools of fiber optic drones. So this is one of the, the trends that we're going to be very big on. I just wanted to throw this in here because I think this is such an incredible video. You can go search for it if, if it's not too visible on the screen here. So, so, okay, address. We've already talked a lot about our thematics for 2026. People will have to read the entire report for that. I want to bring in a question here and it's a little bit out of sympathy also because he posted a great meme with it. Casper has been asking us every single week, at least this past six months, this question. Let's get the tweet up on the screen here. When will ISM cross 50? This is an amalgamation of Trump and the vibing cat and everything. So I just had to give Casper a little bit of screen time here.
- [19:55]
A
I'll wish anyone but Casper a Merry Christmas. Joking aside, it's been a puzzle, I'd say in many ways why the ISA manufacturing has been flatlining for years now. We've actually seen a cyclical uptick in many PMIs outside of the US so. So I'd even argue that the US business cycle is probably doing a little worse than many of its peers right now. And my thesis has been that the sample of the ISM manufacturing is very, very sensitive to tariffs, since it is a sample that is mostly consists of companies with cross border operations and not least cross border production, meaning that tariffs will ultimately be a big test for sentiment in these exact companies. So the ISM PMI has undershot the S PMI which is larger sample, much more focused on domestic trends, et cetera. So I'm not necessarily sure that I worry too much about it, but let's see what it does in 2026. Casper, sorry, you cannot get me to say that it will happen next month because I've said that three, four months in a row. Sorry.
- [21:19]
B
Absolutely. Okay. And just looking 2026, what are some of your biggest fears? Because we, we get that question a lot. What are the, the next liberation days? What are the next tariff wars that, that, that, that you have on, on your radar?
- [21:37]
A
For me, the whole AI trade is not necessarily a trade about credit markets. We had this scare was it a week or two ago with, with Oracle not being able to fund its leasing setup in Michigan with the data center there and Blue Owl Capital apparently raised the stakes in that deal to an extent that Oracle disliked. I think the first sign of one of the big hyperscalers on a rate of change basis, not investing as much in AI. That is the clue to get the out of that trade. We obviously have. We've seen the exact opposite so far and I think we'll continue to see the exact opposite at least two quarters from forward from here. 2H26 could be where we peak in many ways. My biggest fear is that this is the last year of the economic cycle. In 2026, we'll get some juice from this easing of liquidity and CA capital requirements for US banks early on next year. That will provide the last bit of tailwind for the economic cycle. But I'm not sure that 2027 will be a strong cyclical year. I can of course be wrong, but that's kind of what my models suggest for now. And therefore I always struggle to figure out what to do when I think the cycle has peaked because I personally do not prefer to short anything. So we'll have to figure out how to allocate into that potential peak somewhere in the second half of next year. But I don't think we've peaked yet. And technically speaking, it looks very, very solid right now in the equity space. I think we'll make new all time highs very soon.
- [23:40]
B
We have time for one more question here from Daniel Holland. We're shooting the a little bit here, Andrea, so we will go a little bit off topic, but we're actually getting two of these questions. Who are you betting on to make the World cup final this summer? Slight chance Denmark will even go there. So I don't think we're.
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A
No, I, I think France.
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B
Yeah.
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A
And you know, I, I'm a big fan of. So I, I hope that Brazil will reach the final as well.
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B
That's a good one. That's a good one. Maybe one of the home countries, the U.S. or Mexico. That's going to be my better bit of a surprise over there. But we'll, we'll have to see. Any final words, Andreas, before we, we round off. It's been, it's been a crazy year. I think we've, we've had lots to talk about each, each and every week. Some of it's been good, some of it less so, but we've managed okay throughout the year. Any, any final words of wisdom for the listeners here, Andreas?
- [24:38]
A
It's actually incredibly relevant that we will see an easing of bank regulation early next year. I cannot underscore how important supplementary leverage ratios are. I've worked in a bank treasury before. I worked in a bank treasury during the time where we received a new stack of papers every single month to implement. And we're now for the first time in probably a couple of decades talking about rolling stuff back. Even in the Eurozone, we have the momentum in the opposite direction. So I'll say two things about that. The first thing is that it is incredibly pro cyclical when you ease bank regulation because banks will take more risk when they're allowed to. On the other hand, it also means that the blow off top and the subsequent bust will be worse than if you didn't make these easy regulations. So I actually think to some extent this new supplementary leverage ratio as it's called, I think it is a quite bizarre piece of legislation because it increases the risk of a financial crisis down the road, but it also increases the probability of 2026 turning into a melt up year. And I still think that's exactly what we have ahead of us. Probably six months of complete gung ho euphoria. Maniac markets with big swings back and forth, but mostly up.
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B
Yeah, and I mean that's exactly what we talked about on Europe as well. You have the whole German stimulus package. At some point we're going to have to deal with the government debt, but for now, hopefully we'll have a train to ride for next year.
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A
I'm not sure how this will work in English, but as I typically say to our Danish audience, next year's markets, if you suffer from diarrhea, then buy some buns and leave. It will be that kind of market. I think we will have big volatility both directions as we've also seen in AI over the past three months.
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B
No place for lettuce hands.
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A
That's probably a better saying in English.
- [26:42]
B
No lettuce hands out there, guys. Don't fuck this up. Okay guys, it's been a wonderful year. It's been great to complete our full migration to Real Vision. Thanks to all the subscribers from our old platform who made the move move. Also thanks to everyone who's just watching us here. We really appreciate that. Make sure to. If you're following us on YouTube you can probably subscribe. I don't know how that works. On X you can definitely follow both Real Vision, myself and Andreas and on Real Vision you can leave comments. We'll. We'll be very, very active in there also over the holidays even though we're going to take a little bit of a vacation here. Andreas. But if I know you're right, you will be posting even, even from, from, from New Year's dinner. No promises though. But I know you're well enough, Andreas. So thanks for a great year. Thanks to you, Andreas. It's been wonderful doing these shows every week. We'll keep the pace up next year, do even more on Real Vision, and hopefully we'll make a lot of money together. So thanks for a great year. Happy holidays and happy New Year's out there. We'll see you next year.
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A
Sam.