The recent earnings announcement from Nvidia was historic. It’s not often that a firm shifts revenue guidance for an upcoming quarter from $7 billion to $11 billion. Nvidia’s total market capitalisation touched $1 trillion, something very few companies ever achieve1. An overzealous valuation? Professor Aswath Damodaran of New York University2, well known for...
In our previous blog, Will AI workloads consume all the world’s energy?, we looked at the relationship between increasing processing power and an increase in energy demand, and what this means for artificial intelligence (AI) from an environmental standpoint. In this latest blog, we aim to further illuminate this discussion with a case study of the world’s biggest...
This week we learnt how vital Central Bank communication is to global financial markets. The trio of central banks – The Federal Reserve (Fed), European Central Bank (ECB) and the Bank of Japan (BOJ) held their respective meetings. Each of the central banks tried to convey how they will navigate monetary policy amidst a slowing economy and avoid a hard landing. ...
On big questions like this, almost nothing stays constant. When we consider a new technology: We cannot assume that rates of adoption or usage will remain constant—they may drop, they may even grow. We cannot assume that the technology supplying our energy needs will remain constant—there could be breakthroughs in efficiency or changes in the overall energy...
MIT Technology Review recently put on its EmTech Digital conference. It will come as no surprise that this year’s focus was generative artificial intelligence (AI). There is a sense that generative AI, in its many different forms, is important and that it will have an economic impact, but it’s not yet clear exactly how this will manifest itself in the coming...
We recently had the pleasure of speaking with Janelle Teng of Bessemer Venture Partners (BVP). Janelle is a vice president at BVP, focused primarily on cloud software, infrastructure and developer platforms. WisdomTree began working with BVP in 2020 to launch WisdomTree’s Cloud Computing Strategy which tracks the BVP Nasdaq Emerging Cloud Index. This blog is a...
Ethereum’s network keeps evolving When the ethereum network enabled withdrawal of staked Ether (ETH) and related rewards on 12 April 2023, several upgrades were made into the blockchain. Many investors wonder why the ‘Shanghai upgrade’ was rebranded as ‘Shapella upgrade’. This was due to the fact that software upgrades were made both on the execution layer of the...
The geopolitics of wheat has once again come under the spotlight. Wheat prices jumped 4%1 as news broke out that a major dam Kakhovka in southern Ukraine had been destroyed. This is not the first mishap with the dam, as both Russia and Ukraine accused each other of planning sabotage back in October 2022. In Ukraine, flooding caused by the destroyed Kakhovka dam...
"The electric light did not come from the continuous improvement of candles." – Oren Harari In the year 1900, the world had a simple energy mix. One half of total energy supply came from coal and the other came from biomass. Gas, oil, and hydropower existed but paled in comparison. Fast forward 121 years, by 2021, things had changed in two key aspects. First, oil...
“One final investment area that I’ll mention, that’s core to setting Amazon up to invent in every area of our business for many decades to come, and where we’re investing heavily, is Large Language Models (“LLMs”) and Generative AI. Machine learning has been a technology with high promise for several decades, but it’s only been the last five to ten years that it’s...
“A new clean energy economy is emerging, and it is emerging much faster than many stakeholders, policymakers, industry players, and investors think today” – Fatih Birol, Executive Director, IEA during the Global EV Outlook 2023 press event on 26 April 2023. The International Energy Agency (IEA) published its Global Electric Vehicle Outlook for 2023 on 26 April....
Japan1 is trading at a 33-year high, despite a challenging global macro backdrop. At 15x forward Price to Earnings (P/E) ratio, Japan has been trading at a valuation discount versus global peers, for a considerable period of time. We are finally starting to see a number of catalysts help narrow the wide valuation gap versus global peers – an improvement in...
Is ChatGPT the ‘iPhone moment’ for artificial intelligence (AI)? The iPhone catalysed many different things all in one device: It is hard to remember a time ‘before smartphones’, but the iPhone was only introduced in 2007. Apple is one of the world’s largest companies by market capitalisation, and there are many companies that make smartphones that are also quite...
Digital assets have had a strong early 2023 Digital asset prices, led by Bitcoin, have had a strong 2023 so far. Bitcoin is up by over 70% this year and Ether is up by over 50%1. Together, these two assets still account for over 63% of the total market cap of the digital assets space. While the US Federal Reserve (Fed) is still raising interest rates, the market...
The following is a summary of an episode of WisdomTree’s Crypto Clarified podcast, focused on the topic of crypto. The discussion is between Benjamin Dean, Director of Digital Assets; Pierre Debru , Head of Quantitative Research & Multi Asset Solutions, Europe; and Blake Heimann , Senior Associate, Quantitative Research. Summary: Indexing is a way to track the...
On the 10 March 2023 episode of the Behind the Markets podcast, we had the pleasure of speaking with Blake Heimann, Senior Associate, Quantitative Research at WisdomTree. Within our team, we spend a lot of time talking about artificial intelligence (AI) with Blake, especially lately. Years ago, he was bitten by the bug, gaining a passion to study such things as...
Investing physically in most commodities is almost impossible due to operational constraints: they tend to be voluminous, expensive to store, move and insure, and can be very perishable. Most commodities investments are, therefore, made through futures contracts and therefore suffer, most of the time, from negative roll yield. However, this is not true for...
Sugar prices have soared this year, up +21.6%1 owing to concerns about tight global supplies. Lower Indian supply coupled with weaker than expected output from Thailand, (at the second and third largest sugar exporters respectively) continue to provide a tailwind for sugar prices. While Brazil’s harvest in the coming months is expected to be strong, logistical...