Understanding monetary policy, credit cycles, and financial stability is crucial for navigating financial markets effectively. Part of the Markets short course, Thinking Differently About Markets, this lecture emphasises the importance of understanding market behaviour, how central banks make interest rate decisions, and the signs that indicate shifts in asset performance and potential investment opportunities.

Markets remain fundamentally games of prediction and reaction, despite technological and financial advancements that have seen financial markets expand, introducing a vast array of investment instruments. Part of the Markets short course, Thinking Differently About Markets, this lecture explores portfolio construction in a financial landscape defined by Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity (VUCA).

The financial landscape of the next decades will differ significantly from the past 30 years. Part of the Markets short course, Thinking Differently About Markets, this lecture brings together key themes from the previous five lectures then shifts focus towards the future of investing.

Our post-program Implementation Zoominar led by consulting firm, InvestSense, drew together the key takeouts from Markets Summit 2025 and the practical implications for client portfolios, turning the insights from Markets Summit 2025 into actions.

As the ideas and tools popularised under the banner of "nudge theory" have gained traction in the public and private sectors so, too, have ethical concerns regarding their use. Critics have long questioned the ethics of nudging.

Research over the last 50+ years has questioned the ability of active fund managers to add value consistently over time. These two papers offer new methods to improve our ability to pick future winners and losers.

Ethical blindness is one answer to the question "Why do good people do bad things?" Together, these two papers strongly reinforce the idea that ethical practice requires that we regularly hit the brakes and check our ethical blind spots.

At one extreme, the whole investment decision-making process could be turned over to AI - at the other, it can just be used in data collection. These two papers capture the challenges of integrating AI into funds management and financial advice processes.

The financial services industry has long embraced the potential of AI-based systems including robo-advice. These two papers review the psychological and relational dynamics that arise from "algorithm aversion".

Powerful geopolitical, demographic, environmental, technological and sociological trends are reshaping our world, impacting investment risk and uncertainty and how best to design portfolios capable of improving the financial well-being of individuals.

Our diverse panel of asset class experts discussed and clarified the implications of four economic scenarios for the medium-term (three-year) outlook for key asset classes, and then the Investment Committee (Summit delegates) voted to determine probabilities for each of the scenarios as inputs to the Asset Allocation Roundtable.

Picking up on the inputs from the Asset Class Outlook Roundtable and the Investment Committee's views (as expressed by delegates' votes), our asset allocation panel debated the key asset allocation and implementation decisions for the hypothetical portfolio for the coming 12 months.

The Big Five model of personality traits remains the dominant framework in personality research. Increasingly, it appears that aspects of investor sentiment and decision-making can also be explained by Big Five personality traits.

Private debt has grown in popularity as an alternative source of debt financing, with the asset class tripling in size since 2008. This self-paced, two-hour online short course equips you with the expertise to navigate private debt investment confidently across diverse market conditions.

It is well-established that investors and service providers should take human behaviour into account when making financial decisions. These papers look at how two techniques drawn from psychology - financial nudging and financial mindfulness - can influence investor behaviour.

When evaluating investment performance, we generally acknowledge a fundamental distinction between skill and luck. This research paper looks at the concept of “moral luck” and finds that the outcome of an investment recommendation may shape others’ evaluations of both the skill and the morality of the investment adviser.

The idea that individuals are more sensitive to losses than to equivalent gains is critical in investment decision-making. Two recent papers highlight that loss aversion/tolerance is a more nuanced phenomenon than is commonly recognised.

Three articles provide us with insights into the impact that the growth in passive management has had on the performance of active managers; the risks taken by active managers and the general efficiency of markets; and, the behaviour of markets.

The future state of the economy and markets depends, in part, on what people expect it will be. Understanding people's expectations, and how and why they form and revise them, has important implications for portfolio construction practice.

Three investment experts offer and debate their high conviction thesis on a long-term, deep rooted structural change impacting markets over a decade or more.