Investment Intelligence: 2024 in Review and 2025 In Focus

With 2024 drawing to a close and the new year quickly approaching, this is the ideal time to take stock of the past 12 months and to look ahead at how things will change in 2025. To that end, we held our recent webinar, AI Driven Insights: Global Market Recap, to understand how investment intelligence and the capital markets evolved in 2024 and what to expect for the next year.

We invited our Advisory Board member, Dato Neto to join our CIO Ilan Furman in a conversation about the last year and to focus on what role AI and data are playing in shaping the future of AI in finance and investment intelligence.

From the results of the election in the US, to the technological impacts on the capital markets, to the overall geopolitical volatility, the capital markets are heading into 2025 following a turbulent year. However, our expert panel sees positive trends on the horizon.

Let’s dive into all the insights:

The US Election is Already Having an Impact

While the US election came towards the end of the year, it’s already having clear results on the market. There were two very different perspectives at play over the course of the campaign and now the markets have more clarity on which one to prepare for over the next four years.

One important distinction, there is less volatility this year than following the previous Trump term:

“The approach that won the election is related to reducing taxes, to deregulation, and I think some of these factors have impacted recent performance, obviously, of US stocks over the past few weeks since the election, and may have driven, what chairman Powell brought up this week, with the [rate decision],” Neto said. “The way he addressed it popped up a bit of stress, because some uncertainty could slow down the process of bringing down interest rates in the US.

“But at the end of the day, it’s not different from what happened … after the 2016 election when Trump won for the first time. So ultimately, the current uncertainty is smaller than in 2016, since the world has already seen four years of Donald Trump as President.”

Continued Growth of Multiple Global Economic Powers

While the US still has oversized influence over the global economy, the growth of the BRICS economies and others are increasing in significance every year. Neto commented that the BRICS countries correspond to about 45% of the global population.

“Now, I never like, honestly, to treat BRICS as one group. Every country in BRICS has its own particularities. But the message is, from a consumption standpoint, 45 percent of the global population is something that needs to be addressed.

“And also, while China will maintain the pattern of leading the dynamics on global infrastructure and all the impacts that brings to commodities, etc, I’m curious how Europe will play the game next year. Europe has been struggling in many aspects. So how they manage their trades, and their global exchanges and activities, can be one thing to weigh in one direction or another.

“So, I see a world in 2025 that can be weighted and influenced, not only by the two major economic superpowers of China and the US, but also by other markets, even more so when we’re looking at the fundamentals of the global economy.”

AI is Not a Fortune Teller

During a conversation about Bridgewise’s Fundwise analysis tool for ETFs and mutual funds, Neto commented on the proper role of AI in finance and analysis.

“People have been treating, in some places, AI as some kind of fortune telling tool, as if it was able to see the future. But that has nothing to do with AI. Rather, AI is boosting rationality and not the other way around; it’s not about trying to figure out the future.

“It balances the solution, it is able to crunch a whole bunch of data, that we who lived our entire careers analyzing securities, investing and allocating capital, how much time would we have to apply in order to be able to have any consistent opinion on this amount of securities.”

How Tech will Transform Investment Intelligence and Decision Making in 2025

In his concluding statements from the webinar, Neto predicted that 2025 will serve as a milestone year in the development of AI-drive investment intelligence and will transform decision making in the field.

“The next year will definitely be the greatest transformation in investment decision processes we ever seen in the markets – through technology. 

“Investors who do not rely on technology, and its support and broadness of analysis, will definitely have an implied cost for decision making that is higher than those who use technology who use broadness of coverage of intelligence to make their own decisions – 2025 will definitely sustain that thesis.”

You can access the full recording of the webinar here. Once you’ve registered, use the following password: NtH&0o86

If you’d like to learn more about Bridgewise and our AI-driven investment intelligence solutions, sign up for a demo today.