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"The electric light did not come from the continuous improvement of candles." – Oren Harari In the year 1900, the world had a simple energy mix. One half of total energy supply came from coal and the other came from biomass. Gas, oil, and hydropower existed but paled in comparison. Fast forward 121 years, by 2021, things had changed in two key aspects. First, oil...

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“One final investment area that I’ll mention, that’s core to setting Amazon up to invent in every area of our business for many decades to come, and where we’re investing heavily, is Large Language Models (“LLMs”) and Generative AI. Machine learning has been a technology with high promise for several decades, but it’s only been the last five to ten years that it’s...

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“A new clean energy economy is emerging, and it is emerging much faster than many stakeholders, policymakers, industry players, and investors think today” – Fatih Birol, Executive Director, IEA during the Global EV Outlook 2023 press event on 26 April 2023. The International Energy Agency (IEA) published its Global Electric Vehicle Outlook for 2023 on 26 April....

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Japan1 is trading at a 33-year high, despite a challenging global macro backdrop. At 15x forward Price to Earnings (P/E) ratio, Japan has been trading at a valuation discount versus global peers, for a considerable period of time. We are finally starting to see a number of catalysts help narrow the wide valuation gap versus global peers – an improvement in...

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Is ChatGPT the ‘iPhone moment’ for artificial intelligence (AI)? The iPhone catalysed many different things all in one device: It is hard to remember a time ‘before smartphones’, but the iPhone was only introduced in 2007. Apple is one of the world’s largest companies by market capitalisation, and there are many companies that make smartphones that are also quite...

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Digital assets have had a strong early 2023 Digital asset prices, led by Bitcoin, have had a strong 2023 so far. Bitcoin is up by over 70% this year and Ether is up by over 50%1. Together, these two assets still account for over 63% of the total market cap of the digital assets space. While the US Federal Reserve (Fed) is still raising interest rates, the market...

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The following is a summary of an episode of WisdomTree’s Crypto Clarified podcast, focused on the topic of crypto. The discussion is between Benjamin Dean, Director of Digital Assets; Pierre Debru , Head of Quantitative Research & Multi Asset Solutions, Europe; and Blake Heimann , Senior Associate, Quantitative Research. Summary: Indexing is a way to track the...

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On the 10 March 2023 episode of the Behind the Markets podcast, we had the pleasure of speaking with Blake Heimann, Senior Associate, Quantitative Research at WisdomTree. Within our team, we spend a lot of time talking about artificial intelligence (AI) with Blake, especially lately. Years ago, he was bitten by the bug, gaining a passion to study such things as...

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Investing physically in most commodities is almost impossible due to operational constraints: they tend to be voluminous, expensive to store, move and insure, and can be very perishable. Most commodities investments are, therefore, made through futures contracts and therefore suffer, most of the time, from negative roll yield. However, this is not true for...

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Sugar prices have soared this year, up +21.6%1 owing to concerns about tight global supplies. Lower Indian supply coupled with weaker than expected output from Thailand, (at the second and third largest sugar exporters respectively) continue to provide a tailwind for sugar prices. While Brazil’s harvest in the coming months is expected to be strong, logistical...

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The Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries and its partners (OPEC+) producers surprised the market with a decision on Sunday 2 April 2023 to lower production limits by more than 1mn barrels per day (bpd) from May through the end of 2023. This decision was announced ahead of the OPEC+ Joint Ministerial Monitoring Committee (JMMC) meeting scheduled on 3 April...

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History never repeats itself, but it often does rhyme. The recent collapse of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) and Signature Bank in the US and the forced takeover of Credit Suisse by rival UBS have triggered concerns of contagion across the global financial system. The current stress in the banking sector is reminiscent of the 2008 financial crisis. However, unlike the...

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Since 2012, WisdomTree has been a leader in helping investors understand the impact that currency risk can have on their portfolios. When investors allocate funds internationally, there are two sources of return: the local asset return and the return from changes in foreign exchange (FX) rates. This can be problematic during periods in which foreign currencies are...

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Despite the banking industry turmoil, central banks continued to raise rates last week. This marked moves from the European Central Bank (ECB) by 50Bps, Federal Reserve (Fed) by 25Bps, Bank of England by 25Bps, Swiss National Bank by 50Bps, Norway by 25Bps, the Philippines by 25Bps, and Taiwan by 12.5Bps. Central banks appear determined to show they have the tools...

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The latter part of 2022 and the early part of 2023 have seen many developments around ‘generative AI’. The big story recently concerns the ChatGPT system. Conceptually, there is a prompt, and then the system can come up with text to match the prompt. ChatGPT has ‘gone viral’ in that many people have delighted in experimenting with different prompts to see what...

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Silver is underperforming gold. The gold-to-silver ratio is over 1 standard deviation above the historic average since 1990. In fact, the gold-to-silver ratio has not been close to its historic average since August 2021. Silver falling more than gold Gold prices in February 2023 gave back almost all its gains (-5.2%) from January 2023 (+5.8%) as the US dollar...

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Commodities have been enjoying a strong revival in recent years, with broad commodities returning 27% in 2021 and 15% in 2022. A combination of fiscal and monetary support in the early phases of the COVID-19 pandemic helped to soften the damage to demand from one of the deepest economic shocks in modern times. As COVID-19 restrictions lifted, commodity demand...

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European equities have ushered in 2023 with a strong rebound, up 7.72%1. Exchange-traded fund (ETF) flows into the European region have risen by US$13bn, in sharp contrast to the US that has seen US$9bn of outflows year-to-date (YTD)as of 27 February 2023. The confluence of China re-opening its economy and prudent management of resources during the energy crisis,...