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.

Investors need to challenge conventional wisdom around investment style, process and active share and focus on durable sources of alpha that will improve total portfolio returns.

With a more benign outlook for interest rates conditions, there is an opportunity to capitalise on the innate earnings power of infrastructure assets.

An Alternative Risk Premia (ARP) approach to investing, rooted in academic research, can deliver more stable and resilient performance even in volatile market conditions.

Within emerging market economies, there are many companies that have developed to challenge the world's best businesses. Valuations are attractive and do not reflect the underlying value of the business.

Did you ever wonder why so many pundits got their Australian house price forecasts so wrong? Real estate pricing is not driven by interest rates, population growth, or tax regimes.

The market growth and quality of private market alternatives provides investors an opportunity to meaningfully enhance 60/40 with higher returns and less volatility.

Higher rates and structural changes, such as tighter regulation, are reshaping both public and private debt markets, requiring investors to take a multi-sector and relative value approach across both.

The breadth and depth of private markets increased significantly in recent years and practitioners can no longer ignore unlisted assets when building multi-asset portfolios.

When it comes to investing in public equities, it's easy to get deterred by media headlines but it's vital to remember that stocks are not the economy.

In a higher interest rate regime, with a higher correlation between stocks and bonds, replacing public equities with private market investments makes sense.

Private Equity pooled returns have been attractive while also less volatile than investing in a single fund or fund-of-funds. Enabling investors to "buy the private market" would complement portfolios just like in public markets.

It is essential that portfolios are exposed to different, uncorrelated alternative risk factors and capture a variety of available risk premia to maximise risk-adjusted returns.

Traditional stocks and bonds have long been the mainstay of investment portfolios. However, the breadth and depth of private markets increased significantly in recent years and practitioners can no longer ignore unlisted assets. When held alongside publicly traded equities and bonds, private equity, private debt and real asset strategies may bring significant benefits to multi-asset portfolios, providing access to unique investment opportunities.

Wealth management is in a post-product, post-service stage of development – it is now a design industry. In a highly competitive marketplace, where products are widely and cheaply available, offering a differentiated experience means delivering best-of-strategies solutions for specific client needs. This session explores key challenges and opportunities in multi-asset, multi-manager portfolio construction that practitioners should be thinking about, given the whole is greater than the sum of its parts!

The widespread adoption of managed account solutions has shown a seismic shift in most investment advisers believing it is too risky to entrust just one active investment manager with building a diversified portfolio for clients.

With the body of human knowledge doubling in size every year, investors are drowning in data. Yet the emergence of artificial intelligence will increasingly help us manage the problem of cognitive overload. Indeed, such technologies are bringing about a new era, in which the logical and emotional hemispheres of the human brain are knitted back together, enabling a more holistic understanding of the world. The emergence of this superhuman consciousness will profoundly change how people think about the nature of reality – in finance, and more generally – revolutionising the way we manage risk and uncertainty.

The things that make people, people, are also the things that bind our portfolio construction methods together. Investment philosophies, beliefs and biases impact how we implement our technical skills by adjusting not only the angle of our enquiries but also how we interpret our results. As highly trained investment managers and advisers, we are impacted not only by our biases in behaviour, but also by the biases we hold that we’re not even aware we hold.

We humans by nature deal with much of our lives and memories in stories and story-like forms, to be dipped into for comfort and provide explanations. To excel academically and professionally, we need to think taxonomically, organising information in a structured hierarchy. But while these taxonomic processes help us early in our careers, they can also limit our perspective, making our thinking predictable and replicable by AI. To gain deeper insights, critical to long-term investing, we must adapt by integrating finance with other disciplines such as economics, accounting, finance, sociology, anthropology, psychology, sustainability, political science and philosophy. Adopting a holistic perspective can greatly improve problem-solving, bringing valuable benefits to our clients’ portfolios.