To welcome the new year, let’s take a look at the macroeconomic backdrop. Stocks soar in 2024.
We remain optimistic about the stock market outlook in 2025. Additionally, the Fed has the ability to cut interest rates from a position of strength. However, we would nuance the above comments by pointing out that after two consecutive years of global stock market gains of more than 20%, similar gains may be harder to achieve in 2025. name. We see more potential upside for SMEs.
in your Future Trends Volume 11 ReportFocusing on the key trends in 2025 and beyond, you identified several key trends that will have an impact on the market, such as artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, warehousing, renewable energy, quantum computing, etc. Can you describe how you selected these topics and briefly outline their potential impact in the coming years?
Our starting point is to seek to identify future trends that we believe have the potential to grow broadly, regardless of the economic context and regardless of the regulatory and government intervention (if any) that drives the topic. We also believe that as topics overlap, they can reinforce each other. For example, the performance of any artificial intelligence depends on its underlying data, but for that data to be of any value, it must be secure—and this is the opportunity for cybersecurity. Likewise, all forms of data need to be powered, and so too does renewable energy investment.
Furthermore, you stated in the report that “the potential of artificial intelligence has been exaggerated in the short term, while the long-term opportunities surrounding this technology have been underestimated.” Can you elaborate on this belief?
Our experience with new technologies is that they rarely evolve in a linear fashion. There’s been a lot of investment in building the “infrastructure layer” of artificial intelligence (mainly including NVIDIA’s GPU chips), but there have been few meaningful services built on top of it. Our concern is that near-term expectations for the revenue and profits generated by the AI theme may take longer to materialize than currently discounted, which could lead to disappointment, especially given that expectations are currently higher. However, in the long term, AI is likely to be deployed in ways that are currently unimaginable, resulting in potentially game-changing productivity gains.
