Commodity investment has always been a key component of portfolio diversification. As the global economic landscape evolves, new trends emerge that influence the target market.

This article explores the major current and future trends that are shaping investment opportunities in this area.

Meta, Microsoft, Oracle, Alphabet and many other giants fear that current technology could seriously threaten their businesses. For global big tech, artificial intelligence represents both a blessing and a curse.

As Bloomberg points out, on the one hand executives compete in showing how successfully their companies are exploiting this emerging technology, on the other hand they are aware that, in the long run, it could seriously threaten their businesses.

As Nvidia soars in the stock market, becoming the company with the highest market value in the world, investors’ more selective attitude is leading to significant corrections for some of the stocks that had seen the biggest rises in 2023.

In fact, the chip giant’s boom has dragged down the entire sector, spurring the growth of stocks with far less solid fundamentals than those of the Santa Clara, California-based company.

Only 18 months ago, at the end of 2022, most managers were predicting a decline in stocks due to the ongoing monetary tightening and possible recession. Instead, thanks to a strong economy and the AI boom that drove the stock exchanges, there has been a remarkable recovery from late 2021 levels.

Therefore, it was not easy for the managers to outperform their respective indexes, given these assumptions. In fact, 84 percent of global equity funds failed to beat the S&P World Index in 2023.

A telling example comes from Piazza Affari: with a performance of 33.4 percent, beating the index for Italian equity funds was virtually impossible, with 98 percent failing. For U.S.-focused equity funds, the percentage of those that did not beat the S&P 500 drops to 66 percent, still an overall “loss” for active managers.

The Italian stock index has a strong concentration of financial stocks, which have significantly influenced the returns of the entire basket since mid-2023.

This is similar to the S&P500 in the U.S., driven by Nvidia and a few other tech stocks.