Investment Committee - July 2026

Broadening Out

Guest Session

This committee had the pleasure of hosting WisdomTree for a dedicated macro and strategy session, led by their research team. We're grateful for the exchange of views and look forward to continuing the dialogue.

The Dominant Theme

The macro message for July is "resilient growth, fragile disinflation." US growth remains investment-led, anchored by AI capex, but markets have shifted from debating rate cuts to debating whether hikes return — keeping term-premium risk back on the table. Inside equities, the broadening we've been positioned for played out directly: the market finally started paying attention to more than the "Magnificent 7." Our stance is unchanged from last committee — low duration, no added risk, income-generating positions, and a cash buffer held ready for the right entry point.

Macro & Central Banks

The US remains the global growth anchor, but firm labor conditions leave the Fed little urgency to ease, and energy or supply shocks could still re-ignite inflation and pull policy back toward tightening. The AI buildout itself is shifting character — the binding constraint is increasingly power and grid capacity rather than compute, moving value toward the "picks-and-shovels" layer of the trade.

Europe faces a tougher mix of soft growth and energy-linked inflation risk, with the ECB hiking on a scenario-by-scenario basis. The more durable European story is structural rather than cyclical — defense rearmament and grid/electrification capex — supporting select industrials even as headline growth stays subdued.

Asia-Pacific is bifurcated: North Asia continues to benefit from AI supply-chain demand, though here too the real constraint looks like power and infrastructure rather than chips alone, while Japan's gradual policy normalization is starting to matter for global rates.

Our house view continues to favor this baseline path over either a faster-disinflation upside or a renewed energy-shock downside, and we remain positioned to stay selective rather than complacent.

Views by Asset Class

• Equities — Selective, not broad. Favor the AI "bottleneck enabler" layer (electrical equipment, grid modernization, AI infrastructure software) and defense/energy-security names over broad tech beta; equal-weight bias to capture the ongoing rotation away from mega-cap concentration.

  
  

• Fixed Income — Low duration maintained term-premium risk keeps us cautious on the long end. Credit selectively used as ballast rather than a source of added risk.

• Commodities & Energy — Constructive on energy security and LNG/gas infrastructure as a structural theme, independent of near-term price swings.

  
  

• FX — Watching Japan's normalization and its knock-on effect on global term premia no active currency bets beyond portfolio-level cash management.

  
  

• Alternatives — Continue to contribute as diversifiers conviction remains highest in strategies demonstrating genuine adaptiveness through live results (see Skynet below).

Skynet | MarketSenseAI

A recent research paper, "Signal or Noise in Multi-Agent LLM-based Stock Recommendations?" (co-authored by George Fatouros and Kostas Metaxas), examines MarketSenseAI — the generative-AI stock-selection technology behind Skynet. Its findings are consistent with what we've observed live: the model is genuinely adaptive, with each of its four specialist agents (News, Fundamentals, Dynamics, Macro) shifting influence dynamically by market regime rather than following a fixed formula.

Key Maker: Structuring Conviction, Not Chasing Upside

Key Maker is our top-down structured-note process, turning live macro conviction into disciplined reverse-convertible strategies. The philosophy is deliberately conservative: the goal is survival above the strike, not maximum equity upside.

• Theme-to-stock mapping. Each macro theme is broken down to the specific earnings channel it drives, then matched only to companies with genuine, direct exposure — not a shared sector label.

  
  

• AI conviction, human judgment. Candidates must clear both an AI-driven conviction screen and a fundamentals check, plus a dedicated scan for hidden event risk, before ever reaching a basket.

  
  

• Risk-aware construction. Baskets are built for balanced volatility and correlation, then finalized only once pricing clears a strict return threshold.

  
  

• Active monitoring. Every trade carries defined exit rules, including a market-regime stop that pauses new issuance in adverse conditions.

A full white paper on the Key Maker methodology is forthcoming; for now, this is the process behind our latest structured-note issuance.

Conclusion

The signal beneath the surface — a market broadening out, an economy still resilient but sensitive to energy and term-premium risk, and an AI trade shifting from broad beta to bottleneck enablers — is exactly the backdrop we've positioned for. We stay disciplined and selective: low duration, income-generating positions, a cash buffer held for the right opportunity, and growing conviction in in-house strategies now proving themselves with real results.

Authors: Kostas Metaxas, Yiannis Sapountzis, Kostas Asimakopoulos