Yeah.

So, uh, I grew up in a place called South Wales in the UK.

Uh, Wales is the poorest nation of the United Kingdom, and I was very entrepreneurial driven.

I would be the kid in school selling sweets.

So from then on, I've followed the traditional path, wanting to go to university, studying business management and marketing.

However, I got extremely frustrated with the course learnings.

So we were learning about IKEA and Coca-Cola marketing strategies, et cetera, which is obviously wonderful and great.

Um, how did you fund that? How did that change the economics of your business?

So how do you think about being tactical in this market?

Uh, yeah, I guess if you want to step back and think about around that volatility, what's the direction of travel, which certainly for equity markets and US equity markets in particular, still looks to be pretty positive.

And I think what, in a healthy sense, what you're seeing is not only what's happening on the tech side, both as NASDAQ and with, with, uh, Asia, but US small cap, US value.

I mean, basically the US economy and therefore kind of all swaths of US equities are doing pretty well because you have, you know, a nice environment.

And also clearly we know that the US is not as vulnerable to potentially higher oil prices because of what's going on in the Strait of Hormuz, and so it's a bit resilient from that point of view.

... gone back to some sort of Middle East conflict playbook where you just narrow the trade around some tech stocks.

Well, I think one hand, yeah, I guess you had two things.

One, I guess negative news on what's happening, uh, in the Middle East, but also then these lower interest rate expectations which always has, you know, uh, uh, an effect on, on tech stocks.

Are you much more heavy in tech than everything else, or are you leaning towards everything else because there is this potential for overheating, particularly on the tech side?

We start with, I guess, the equity allocation overall.

So equity spawns cash or overweight equities, which shouldn't be too surprising given what we still see as a good growth environment and, you know, no meaningful rate height risk yet.

Okay.

So then in terms of the, the allocations by, you know, by country or style.

So certainly like tech, both in the U S and in emerging markets.

And then you think about, okay, what about everything else? And I think what's notable or has been interesting so far this year is because the growth outlook for the US is really pretty good.

Are there parts of the market that you feel are undervalued with the market at highs that you think, I want to be making some, making sure at least that I have market weights or I want to take advantage of the fact that the market is overlooking them? because it's so fascinated with the AI trade? I don't think

see that response so far as being somewhat lacking.

The conclusion has been that Europe needs to be more autonomous.

That's been pretty clear now for a while.

And it has been taking steps.

There's a big initiative now to increase defense spending within Europe, to increase autonomy across a whole host of sectors.

So the words are there.

The efforts are there.

Do you believe that AI will ultimately prove deflationary through productivity gains or inflationary because of the enormous investment required in computing power energy infrastructure?

So strategy-wise, what do you do? Do you chase some of the room that has been left on the boards here in Europe that have now backed away from their high points from earlier in the year, or do you go with the crowd and you chase the semiconductor momentum?

Well, and I guess if we look at how our allocations are currently, I guess with a slightly longer term perspective, I mean, we're more positive really on, on US equities and, and tech in the US, and tech within emerging markets.

So instead of trying day to day, who knows what the next tweet or, or truth post is g- is gonna be, that's something that we see as a bit more sustainable through all of the news.

Uh, that said, we are focusing on particularly the strategic autonomy story within Europe because in all of this, the context in terms of the need for Europe to be more independent, [laughs] if you will, uh, from the US has just only been re-emphasized over and over by the development on, on various, uh, political fronts.

So we think that's gonna be, and has been, uh, also the key sustainable story in Europe.

Again, a very divergent picture.

Well, also that's, it, it's a bit, well, I wouldn't say puzzling, but beneath the surface, the manufacturing PMIs really across the board have, have done pretty well, which is more or less the opposite of what you would've anticipated.

Part of that, though, is the way they calculate it.

Yeah.

Uh, in terms of the allocation so far, well, we came into this, uh, overweight equities.

I think a lot of people you had, generally speaking, a, a optimistic view for the year, equities should go up.

Uh, so now that we've had our surprise, uh, which we could maybe discuss why was it a surprise, uh, 'cause it maybe shouldn't have been.

But so far we've reduced the degree of the overweight to equities, but are still overweight, and that was more risk management move, uh, than anything else.

And anticipate, uh, that, I think as everyone does, once things settle down, that you would go back to an overweight, you know, further overweight equities position.

Fundamentally, you don't think the macro picture will have changed that much, but remains to be seen.

The only strategic autonomy I know is afterthoughts, new independence.