Rates, Risks, and Reality | Macro Mondays: Jan. 26, 2026 ft. Andreas Steno & Mikkel Rosenvold

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0:25Hello out there. Welcome to a very special edition of Macro Mondays. My name is Mikkel Rosenwald, and I'm sending to you from the Loves Hotel here in Miami Beach where we are gathered for the Real Vision Crypto Gathering 2026. It's been an incredible couple of days here and I really urge you to join us next year whether it's in Miami or wherever we choose to host this next year. It's been so much fun. Great talks with Raul, Andreas, all the guys, Julian, Jamie. It's just really really fun to meeting all you guys in the community. So for the others of you who joined us here in Miami thanks a lot.

1:00And for the others of you who didn't join us, well join us next year or a comment where we should throw another gathering. The Real Vision guys are really eager to do gatherings and events all over the globe so please let us know where you would like one. It could be in Copenhagen. So our grand plan was to shoot an entire episode of Macro Mondays from here. I was supposed to have Andreas next to me but he got caught at the golf course and he's still there apparently. So we figured if we had to postpone this any further today it would cut into our beach party tonight and that's not going to happen.

1:32So instead you're just going to have to do with me and a bit of a monologue here wrapping up an incredible week in geopolitics looking a bit ahead at next week. As you know this is our free show at Real Vision. We publish a lot of articles. We even published a few from over here for our Friday model portfolio update which is going very very well at the moment to be honest. And also as you know we have our usual disclaimer. You might have noticed my t-shirt here. That's a new thing for us. And as you can see here, our insights and analysis, although we try to be very, very actionable and reliable, they might be.

2:09Sometimes it may be good, sometimes it may be shit. There we go. That even works here out of Miami. So, sorry Andres couldn't join us, but let's talk some geopolitics. That gives me a chance to delve a little bit deeper into what happened last week. Also because, you have to say, it's not always possible to make money off geopolitics, but it certainly dominates markets whenever shit hits the fan. And we have been in that mode for the first few weeks of 2026. Obviously, we have the whole situation in Venezuela that's mostly taken care of by now. And then everyone's focus switched to Greenland. That affected us a lot, to be honest.

2:48Andreas and I are both Danes. But this week saw some sort of solution or end to this, at least for now. Obviously, I'm referring to the events in Davos. The World Economic Forum meeting in Davos is always a huge event. You've had some very, very important speeches there along the years. But I think this one, 2026, will go down in history as a landmark, as a milestone for the geopolitical developments that we're seeing in these decades. Let's start with Greenland. So along with a lot of other Danes and citizens of the world, essentially, I was very eager to listen to Donald Trump here at Davos.

3:25We were expecting him to announce his next steps in the Greenland process. And happily for all of us, I think, as investors and us as Danes and Americans, it seemed like Donald Trump had lost patience with the Greenland issue. So he declared that he was never going to use military force. That's a relief. And then secondly, he concluded some sort of framework deal with Mark Rutte, the general secretary of NATO. Now, to be honest with you, I'm not 100 % sure what's in that framework deal or how it's going to play out. It's very, very vague. But that's how most of these situations have played out under Trump's presidency.

4:07So to be honest with you, I'm very relieved that the Greenland situation is over for now. It might blow up in a few months' time, but I think it's very, very positive that the Trump administration are exiting this off-piste and are moving and transferring their focus to much more important areas, such as the Middle East, Ukraine, and other areas. So just to wrap up the Greenland situation quickly here, I think we have a path towards negotiations, towards giving Trump more or less what he wants. And in my view, this is not a topic we should focus on anymore as investors. What else from Davos? Well, you had the incredible speech by Canadian Prime Minister Carney.

4:52And I recommend you to watch this as one of two things to watch from Davos. Carney essentially laid out his vision for middle powers in a rupturing world order. And it was incredible in many ways, both because it was a very, very good speech, but also because it laid out the vision not only for Canada, but for other countries that have been used to bandwagoning and following the U.S., but are now trading their own ways. Canada obviously markedly held talks with China as a result of threats and insults from the U.S., and that's the path that Europe might take as well. So my takeaway from this is two things.

5:28First of all, it underscores and confirms the underlying thesis. So you could call it the secular trend of geopolitics right now, which is the move from a unipolar world to a bipolar world. We're moving from a world where the US was the preeminent power to a situation where we now have China as a near peer or even a peer power with the US. It's clear to me that the U.S. is still struggling on how to adapt to this situation and how to act in this situation. A lot of what we're seeing from Donald Trump right now reminds me of 19th century great power behavior, establishing your own sphere of influence, ruling by more hard power.

6:12But we're also seeing Donald Trump trying to establish new institutions like the Board of Peace, even though it's still a bit of a laughingstock right now. But we'll see. It could evolve into something more. So that's the overall trend in geopolitics that's very, very interesting to follow and underscores our outlook for 2026, which was that everything is going to be crystallizing around the US-China dynamic. The second thing here, which is more short term and more actionable and is going to be affected in our model portfolio over the coming weeks. So a quick break in your regular programming.

6:46If you're serious about your future, grab my free report called Prepare for 2030. I think you've got five years to make as much money as possible, and this guide will help you navigate what's coming. The link is in the description. Download it now. Now, we did have the reopening of Ukraine-Russia talks. They're talking, as we know right now, possibly in the week that's coming, in the UAE. I'm not very positive about, I'm not very optimistic about the chances of a peace now. Trump is seemingly moving his focus elsewhere. He said in a letter to the Norwegian prime minister that he might be less focused on peace from now on.

7:32And it's going to take a lot of pressure to get President Putin to the negotiating table. I was very optimistic about this during 2025, but I have to say it didn't really materialize. So in our model portfolio, we've had the rebuilding of Ukraine as a thematic throughout 2025. And it was sort of a dormant thematic that was ready to be implemented once a peace deal was reached, because I still believe that once we get a peace in Ukraine, it's going to be a great investment thematic for 2026 if we get a peace deal. But I have to say, it's not going to happen right now, I think. So what we will be doing over the next weeks is replacing that thematic or expanding that thematic into one we have dealt into before, which is European independence.

8:18Now, what does European independence mean, in short? And we'll expand on this. If you're a Real Vision subscriber, you'll see more of this in our coming shows. But what I'm seeing is that, just like Canada, Europe needs to stand on its own now. That's when it comes to military, to geopolitics, to diplomacy, and on energy. And that's going to take a lot of investment. Europe is already firmly on this path. We saw a lot of initiative during 2025, but that's going to have to be accelerated massively in 2026. Europe has also confirmed their willingness to ramp up military spending to reach the NATO goal of 5%.

8:54That's 3.5 % military spending, 1.5 % in critical infrastructure. And that means enormous investment upwards of half a trillion to$1 trillion yearly already in the coming years. So European independence, some of these stocks we already played around last year on establishing European clouding, European computing, European software, but also naturally defense is very, very interesting. The European defense stock has already caught a lot of this tailwind in the last few years. I'm not sure there's as much of upwards potential in that, but we'll dive much more into that in coming weeks. Now, the final thing I took note of, possibly the laugh of the week here from Davos, was Jared Kushner, Donald Trump's son-in-law, who held what I would call the McKinsey version of nation building.

9:49He has been put in charge of laying out the plan and the strategy for Gaza after the ceasefire there. And what he presented was exactly the same that I would present back in my management consulting days to a government office or company. A very, very nice looking spreadsheet, PowerPoint with some very, very interesting visions. I'm not sure that's going to be realistic. Jared Kushner mentioned a lot of the doubts he had. To put it very, very short, the idea is have Hamas put down their guns and then we build a new Dubai in Gaza. So I'm a bit skeptical, but it's the first time in many, many years that anyone has presented any sort of positive vision for Gaza.

10:36So I really urge you to see this presentation, first and foremost, because this is perhaps the new face of world politics, the McKinsey version of nation building. So we had an incredible week in geopolitics. We talked a lot about that. That was good for me here in Miami at the crypto gathering. Another topic that has filled a lot here has been silver. Now, silver broke the three-digit market, went above$100, and is in an enormous rally right now. we exited admittedly a few silver positions uh over the past few weeks that was obviously too early um but our take uh we'll expand more on this next week as well is that um we are in a frenzy right now in silver um a lot of the case is substantial there are fundamentally arguments for this case but we are in a frenzy and our best bet is that we're going to slowly see a rotation over into copper.

11:35Now, that's both going to be happening by speculators, but also in the industry. We're hearing many, many signs of this. Industries like solar panel producers and others who are used to using silver because it's one of the best metals out there for electric conductivity, it's simply too expensive now to use silver. So they're looking at copper alternatives. And I think that's where the market is going to be headed over the next week and weeks and months. So very, very interesting trends there. We had a lot of great talks here from a lot of experts on that. So let me round off this by looking a little bit ahead, very short term into the week that we have coming.

12:15Now, there might still be some days and weeks in the silver frenzy. I'm not going to talk against that. I've burned my hands on that too much. We're obviously going to be focused on the Fed meeting later this week. We're not going to get a rate cut, not yet, but hopefully we're going to get some indications for the next two meetings. In our view, in our now casting, inflation is absolutely under control and we are still seeing very lukewarm jobs numbers. That should pave the way for more rate cuts this summer and hopefully we get a few inclinations towards that later this week by Jay Powell. so this was a quick little wrap up of events over the past week we've had so much fun here in miami and we hope to bring a lot of this knowledge back into this show and the other stuff that we do on real vision um remember to tune in for our shows this week including all our and and also tune into the articles that we're um we're publishing we have the steno signals flagship article every monday i put i'm publishing the drill on geopolitics every wednesday and then our portfolio update every Friday.

13:29That's very much sought after. So thank you for tuning in. Thank you for tuning into this little intermets here from Miami. We'll be back next week with a full setup and much more coverage of the macro world. See you next week. You obviously enjoyed the episode because you're here with me at the end. But listen, don't forget to go to realvision.com forward slash join and grab a free membership. It's an incredible community packed with alpha, great investment ideas and the research that you need to help you unfuck your future. So get started now. Go to realvision.com forward slash join. Ever wanted to explore the world of online trading but haven't dared try?

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