Alternative managers are no longer constrained by investor appetite but by access to liabilities. An insurance balance sheet never redeems, replenishes itself through premiums and carries roughly ten times the equity committed to it. Every closed-end fund is born with an expiry date.
Artificial intelligence is often described as an intangible revolution. Its near-term economic footprint, however, is strikingly physical. Training and deploying frontier models requires large quantities of specialised chips, electricity, cooling, network equipment, and purpose-built data centre capacity.
The memory industry has a habit of turning shortages into gluts. Demand for dynamic random-access memory (DRAM), which holds data while processors work, has historically followed spending on PCs, smartphones and servers. When prices rise, manufacturers invest in more capacity, which can arrive just as demand weakens. Factories still carry high fixed costs, leaving profits exposed when chip prices fall.
Building a data centre in Europe takes about two years. Connecting it to the grid can take five times as long, with waits of seven to ten years in the main hubs. For hyperscalers racing to add AI capacity, that wait is now the biggest obstacle, and it has changed what is scarce in European power no longer generation, but access to the grid.
For much of the past decade, governments have borrowed for the long term at rates close to zero, with markets taking these conditions as close to a permanent feature rather than a temporary one. This assumption is breaking down. At the end of 2021, the 10-year and 30-year U.S. Treasury yielded 1.52% and 1.90%, respectively.
When lenders price a leveraged loan, they assess more than the borrower’s financial position and credit agreement. They also consider the private equity sponsor, which can influence how a portfolio company responds to distress and how aggressively it uses the flexibility contained in its loan documents.
The first space race raged between two economic superpowers one upping one another to demonstrate technological superiority. Half a century later, the space race is back on, however this time it is being led by privately owned companies rather than geopolitical superpowers.
M&A touched record levels in H1 2026, but the market was increasingly defined by scale rather than breadth. The total value of announced deals hit $2.85tn in the first six months (LSEG), up 50% YoY and the highest year-to-date total since LSEG records began in 1980. Yet the total number announced fell 9% to 24,000 so far in 2026, a six-year low.
Britain’s public markets are contracting in size. Years of underperforming listings, fund outflows, and the rise of sponsor takeovers have actively reduced the number of businesses listed in London, while at the same time the ones that remain continue to trade at a significant discount to their peers in the United States.
Download PDF Introduction The UK government will spend close to £111.2bn servicing its debt this year, more than the entire schools budget. With 30-year gilt yields at their highest since 1998 and the Chancellor’s fiscal headroom at just £23.6bn, the pressure on the public finances is not letting up. A Read more…
Download PDF Introduction “Content is where I expect much of the real money will be made on the Internet, just as it was in broadcasting.” Bill Gates wrote that in January 1996, in an essay better remembered for its three-word title, Content is King, than for the prediction itself. Three Read more…
Download PDF Introduction The AI trade is no longer behaving as one single boom, as the debate over which parts of the industry will actually capture the profits has intensified among investors. After two years in which artificial intelligence pushed valuations higher across semiconductors, cloud platforms, model labs, and enterprise Read more…
Download PDF Introduction Global humanoid robot shipments totaled approximately 13,000 units in 2025 against $10.3bn in venture funding across over 450 individual rounds. This divergence defines the analytical challenge facing the current robotics cycle. Barclays projects the global humanoid market to reach $35bn under its base case by 2035, and Read more…
Download PDF Introduction Restaurants in Japan offer a wide array of dishes that cater to different budgets and tastes, resulting in a highly diverse culinary landscape. Next to dining places that offer typical Japanese dishes, such as sushi, soba, and udon, restaurants offering Western-style food, such as hamburgers and ethnic European cuisine, Read more…
Download PDF History Unilever’s [LON: ULVR] corporate structure has historically been defined by the coexistence of food and personal care businesses, which originated from the 1929 merger between Margarine Unie and Lever Brothers. The rationale for this consolidation at that time was largely based on scale and distribution synergies, but Read more…