Year-End Macro Wrap | Macro Mondays: December 22, 2025

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1:05Thanks a lot.

1:13Hello out there. Welcome to Macro Mondays. Welcome to Real Vision. My name is Mikkel Rosemal. I'm your usual host. And as usual, I'm joined by Andreas. Welcome to the show, Andreas. Good to see you, Mikkel. It's the final show of the year as far as I remember, right? And Christmas is right around the corner. Tomorrow morning, I'll drive towards my in-laws and celebrate Christmas there. So that's why I'm donning my cap here. I'm ready for a vacation. And the market is green today. It is a green hat for a green day. Now, this is Europe. So obviously, we're already way past the Christmas holidays.

1:54Everyone's at home today. It seems like in the middle of Copenhagen here. So that's great. We're living up to all the prejudices there. Yeah, as you said, this is the final show for the year. It's been a great year, Andreas. We're going to shoot a little shit today, try and look back at a crazy year in global macro. I mean, we can say that every year, but this one, Andreas, there's been a lot to talk about. It hasn't been the worst year to do a macro show, I'll have to say. We'll try and reminisce some of it. Look at the best trade, worst trade, some of the best hot takes I've brought out of mind, best hot take of the year, And yeah, look at that.

2:29Just a little reminder that this is obviously our free show. We do a little sneak peek into all the research that we publish at Real Vision. Amongst other things, this week we are publishing our year-end or beginning of the year portfolio update. We're laying out our entire playbook for 2026 with our eight main investment thematics. It's a 50-page banger that you can catch. So I don't know if that's more of a scare tactic or a draw, but anyway, you can catch that with a pro subscription for Real Vision. So go check that out. That's also the way to get weekly updates on our trades and changes in our model portfolio.

3:08So that's the best way to get completely actionable here. Also, just a reminder that from January 22nd to 25th, we'll be in Miami Beach, Florida, in the U.S., for the crypto gathering, the yearly Real Vision crypto gathering. There are still tickets on sale, so be sure to check that out if you want to catch me or Andreas over there. Or just listen to us, maybe. That's perhaps more realistic or advisable. Andreas, before we get to looking back at 2025, let's just have our usual little disclaimer here. Because I think this year has proven that we've had some great trades. We've had some less than great trades.

3:45Overall, we have to say that we are... Sometimes it may be good, sometimes it may be shit. exactly that that's the way it is andres uh okay i want to hit you with something before we get to your history 2025 this has been haunting me for the past three months because i laid this out as the laugh of the week during our show uh in early october uh let's let's have the uh the tweet on the screen here or this is not a tweet it's a reddit post and it's from december 12th 2023 So it's two years old. And here he's laying out that from all-time highs to all-time highs, all-time low to all-time highs in Bitcoin, you have cycles of 1 ,064 days and then 364 days to all-time low.

4:31And that just goes. And that would put the all-time high of the cycle at October 7th, Andreas. And do you know what happened on October 7th? Yeah, it says October 6th. So it was way off. Yeah, 6th. I'm sorry. it was October 6th sorry I'm misreading this it was actually the exact day and when I brought this on the show we both had a laugh of it this was the sort of the hot take oh completely right how on earth do you do this Andreas is this just a coincidence I've been haunted by this I you know I guess if there's some fundamental merit to this it has to be linked to the halving cycle of Bitcoin right and you know So the subsequent spillovers to price action.

5:17But this is a great example of what you could call a keep it simple, stupid rule, right? In many ways, I'm a fan of such frameworks because as long as they work, they work. The issue here is that it may be that after Bitcoin has sort of matured as an asset, that it is no longer as firmly tied to this halving dynamic. And maybe it's much rather tied to the liquidity and business cycle, especially now that it's no longer just a small tech evangelist space. You've got everyone from BlackRock to retail funds to wealth funds from other countries, etc., involved in this trade, which makes it more of a macro asset than it was probably, say, in 2015.

6:12So I personally still doubt that this pattern is just here to stay forever. If it is, oh boy, it's easy to make way. It is. July 25th, 2028 should be the next all-time high in crypto. So I'm not going to wait that long. I don't have patience for that. I think we're going to go there sooner, but yeah, we'll have to see, Andreas. Yes. Anyway, that's still the big picture from my head here in 2025. What are you going to remember from this year, Andreas? Obviously, we had the Trump inauguration. We had Liberation Day. We had all that stuff going on in the spring. We had the Iran-East World War through huge shockwave through the market, continued struggles with China, U.S.

6:59lockdown. What do you take away from this entire year, Andreas? So what I'm most proud of this year is the live on tape recording we did on the very morning of the DeepSeek sell-off in NVIDIA. We hosted a show, me and our CIO at the time, Alex, around this topic of AI and whether DeepSeek would wreak havoc with this whole investment cycle and CapEx cycle that was ongoing in AI. And we basically got to the conclusion that it would accelerate it. And that has been an incredibly good view. At that time, it was very commifo, as you would say in French, to say that NVIDIA was toast because DeepSeek kind of revealed that you could train your models much cheaper and so on and so forth.

7:51But in my opinion, what the DeepSeek story and that sell-off proved was that even if you commoditize AI, there'll still be a big CapEx cycle because the further we get towards commoditization, the more people will invest in it. And I couldn't stop laughing when you sent me a picture of a very small municipality here in Denmark buying their own NVIDIA rack, basically, based on, I think, the H200s. They bought some of the older ones, right? But just a small municipality because they needed a local version that you couldn't access from the outside. So my point is just even a small, clueless municipality in Denmark is buying NVIDIA chips, right?

8:42So that is, to me, a good example of the commoditization that is ongoing. Very, very good point, Andreas. And yeah, a positive, one of the things we got right. We're going to be drawing or diving into some of the things that we didn't get right here. but maybe let me add that uh you know we we had a great great great trading year uh up until mid-october and then uh we saw it up until this reddit post yeah exactly it's this anonymous bastard from resident that spoils the body um so as as i um as i wrote i think it was last week we've gone from a Lambo year I even think I talked about buying a Lambo that week so maybe I jinxed it in all honesty to what I call a Mercedes year quite literally I've just bought one you bought a Mercedes yeah but as someone commented on that you know remark at least you're not walking in dress and I think that's correct and to be honest you are walking more than you're driving, but that's a whole different story.

9:56Absolutely, Andres. And this is true. We've gone from almost 70 % up in our portfolio, I think at the high points, to where are we going to end this year in the model portfolio? About 30, 28? 35, I think. Okay, okay. That's still quite decent, Andres. That's still a very good year. So Andres, I wanted to take you through this chart you sent me earlier about performances of indices in disease. It's called in various countries. And I think I do a Danish podcast and I was asked there, which European countries can outperform the US stock market this year? And I said, only Denmark. That was obviously very, when the year started, that was obviously very, very wrong.

10:40What drove these disparities between US markets and European markets? And what did you see here, Andreas? Just for the sake of clarity, I know these are Bloomberg tickers, right? So the top of the leaderboard is basically Korea here. So I guess that's EWY is the Korean index. And, you know, it's very semiconductor heavy, obviously. and unix has had a great year with the rise of memory spot prices and so on and so forth epol is the polish etf so i guess there is some merit to this view that poland will be on the receiving end of some of the funds that will um you know flow into ukraine in terms of rebuilding there um quite surprisingly ewp is the spanish index michael and why why is that on 72 2 % and second place.

11:35It's very bank heavy. Banks have had a great year in Europe, not least, but also in Japan. And it's very cyclical. And for once, we've seen this very uniform cyclical uptick across most regions in the world at the same time. Typically what you see when the dollar weakens as well. and therefore we have to spy the S &P 500 pretty low on this leaderboard, right? So, you know, I've personally been mostly active in U.S. single names. We've been fairly active and we've had the banks trade right most of the year. We traded both Korea and Poland early. We probably sold them a little too early as well, but I've had both of these trades on as well.

12:20So, you know, we've had much of this right. And to be honest, I think the simple best guess, and now I will be accused of recency bias is that we'll get a similar year next year. You know, very pro-cyclical year, steeper yield curves. In many places, still rate cuts into this, which is a very interesting cocktail. Especially in the US, we'll probably get maybe, say, four or five rate cuts into, you know, a pro-cyclical setup globally, which should, well, for returns. and you know i still hold the contrarian view that we can already now see that the labor market is improving uh we have uh you know positive year and year trends in job postings in the u.s we have a lot of temporary hiring going on already and that's also the stuff you see when there's a pro cyclical environment um week of dollar credit creation flowing from private banks commercial banks across the globe.

13:20So maybe the big flip side to this was that this didn't prove to be a strong Bitcoin year, for example, right? This pro-cyclicality, this liquidity creation by commercial banks instead of central banks proved to be better for a boomer asset like banks rather than Bitcoin, right? And now we have this light QE in place from the Federal Reserve, which obviously alters the picture a little bit. But I think the real world assets will do well in 2026 as well. I also think Bitcoin will do well. But I think it's a good idea to hold banks, for example. And we do hold banks both in Europe and Japan still.

14:05So a quick break in your regular programming. If 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. Yeah. Speaking of Europe, Andreas, I think one of the big ones here is obviously the interest rates, because a lot of these countries are driving this growth or trying to drive up growth. When we talk about France or Germany via government spending, at some point we're going to have to talk about their debt levels.

14:38That's obviously very much related to interest rate, how quickly that become a topic. And then the big question is, if we see this cyclical upswing in Europe as well, will it drive jobs with it? Because if not, if we see a weaker job market development, that's going to have huge impacts politically. But we'll have to see. We have no major elections in Europe outside of Hungary and ourselves in Denmark next year. So we should have a little bit of working space for the governments, both in Germany, Spain, Italy, around the continent. Miguel, I'd like to highlight one of the single name cases for next year that we have in our portfolio, given what you just mentioned on the labor market in both the US and in Europe.

15:27Because we have seen weak hiring this year. we've seen net layoffs for example in warehousing and logistics i think that's very related to robotics industrial robotics right but what about you know going from model to agent in the artificial intelligence space you know could could we get to a point where you and i don't necessarily take all of the decisions in our fund setup for example can we get an agent to do that if we train it well enough. I think that's very likely. And the company called UiPath is very interesting because they work in that exact cross-air, if you don't want to mean, between AI and robotics.

16:13If you want to automate and you even want to go as far as automating your decision-making, which I think that's really where you can start to you know increase productivity even among those workers typically sitting in front of desktops right one thing is to automate manual services but another thing is to automate decision making and you know financial services consulting and stuff like that but we're getting there and that's why I think 2026 will still be you know an eye opener in many ways for the amount of utility cases that will arise. Absolutely, Andres. Okay, we do have a few listener questions here, Andres.

16:59We'll see how many of those we can cover because I also want to force you down memory lane a little bit and force you to pick your best winners. It doesn't have to be the biggest returns, but what were your best, the best vibe you had about an investment looking back at 2025, Andres? Which stock would you pick or ETF? have um you know if i look at it um from a return perspective the best stock that we've had in our portfolio is rigetti computing yes uh 250 or something yeah something like that yeah and um you know it's obviously one of those stocks where you're basically trading a narrative because they're not making any money they will not make any money next year um you know we're probably We're talking about a breakthrough in 2029 or something like that.

17:48So it is kind of a technical analysis set up your trading here, but it's kind of worked as an AI lever bet in a sense this year. I personally think that space tech will be the AI lever next year. We're already seeing the first signs of that, right? So I think that's numerically been the best trade. uh i i probably you know both the best and the worst trade at the same time has probably been drone shield from australia yeah you know we were some of the earliest guys on earth in this trade um i've actually held it since yeah roughly a year ago um also in our fund and um we became a pretty large shareholder in it and then uh pardon my french those morons uh running the company sold all of their equity stakes more or less at once here, was it three months ago or something like that?

18:47And the stock just fell off a cliff. I think at peak, we were probably up 300 % in it. And now we're up 40, something like that. That's been a contributor, let me put it like that, to the volatility that we've seen in the portfolio, even though we're obviously not risking everything in it. So both the good and the worst trade in the same trade Can it be like that? I should probably have taken a bit off. No, I'll give you the complete question. I just want to show one video here, if we can get it on screen. It's about drones, because drones is one of our big topics for 2026 as well, Andreas. I think this is one thing that a lot of people underestimate.

19:27I don't know how clearly you can see this from the video. Sorry if it's a bit, but it's a video from the front line in Ukraine, or just behind the front line in Ukraine. It's a city, and it almost seems like you have a spiderweb wrapped all over it. That's the nature of warfare today. You have fiber optic cables in the tens of thousands going from roof to roof to roof to the front line. Drones are completely changing the face of modern conflict, modern conventional conflict, even high-level conflict as we're seeing in Ukraine. And that's just a massive topic in Dresd. This is enormous capex investment, if you can call it that, procurement expenses in the military.

20:02that's going to be diverted towards drones, both wireless drones, but also wired drones. Who would have even thought this a year ago? Things are moving so fast. That's what happens when you have a war. People have to be inventive. All your drones are being jammed by companies like DroneShield and their technology. Oh, well, you plug a fiber optic cable in it. The Russians are mass producing 60 kilometer spools of fiber optic drones. So this is one of the trends that we're going to be very big on. I just wanted to throw this in here because I think this is such an incredible video. You can go search for it if it's not too visible on the screen here.

20:39So, okay, Adres, we've already talked a lot about our thematics for 2026. People will have to read the entire report for that. I want to bring in a question here, and it's a little bit out of sympathy also because he posted a great meme with it. Kasper has been asking us every single week, at least this past six months, this question. let's get the treat up on the screen here when will ISM cross 50 this is an amalgamation of Trump and the vibing cat and everything so I just had to give Casper a little bit of screen time here you know I'll wish anyone but Casper a Merry Christmas you know joking aside it's been It's been a puzzle, I'd say, in many ways, why the ISM manufacturing has been flatlining for years now.

21:39We've actually seen a cyclical uptick in many PMIs outside of the US. So I'd even argue that the US business cycle is probably doing a little worse than many of its peers right now. And, you know, my thesis has been that the sample of the ISM manufacturing is very, very sensitive to tariffs since it is a sample that is, you know, mostly consists of companies with cross-border operations and not least cross-border production, meaning that, you know, tariffs will ultimately be a big test for sentiment in these exact companies. So the ISN PMI has undershot the S &P PMI, which is a larger sample, much more focused on domestic trends, etc.

22:27So I'm not necessarily sure that I worry too much about it, but let's see what it does in 2026. Kasper, sorry, you cannot get me to say that it will happen next month because I've said that three, four months in a row. Sorry. Absolutely. Okay, and just looking into 2026, what are some of your biggest fears? Because we get that question a lot. What are the next liberation days? What are the next tariff wars that you have on your radar? Sure.

23:01For me, the whole AI trade is not necessarily a trade about credit markets. We had this scare, was it a week or two ago, with Oracle not being able to fund its leasing setup in Michigan with the data center there and Blue Owl Capital apparently raised the stakes in that deal to an extent that Oracle disliked. I think the first sign of one of the big hyperscalers on a rate of change basis, not investing as much in AI. That is the clue to get the fuck out of that trade. We obviously have, we've seen the exact opposite so far. And I think we'll continue to see the exact opposite at least two quarters forward from here.

23:54The second half of 26 could be where we peak. In many ways, my biggest fear is that this is the last year of the economic cycle in 2026. We'll get some juice from this easing of liquidity and capital requirements for US banks early on next year. that will provide the last bit of tailwind for the economic cycle, but I'm not sure that 2027 will be a strong cyclical year. I can, of course, be wrong, but that's kind of what my models suggest for now. And therefore, I always struggle to figure out what to do when I think the cycle has peaked, because I personally do not prefer to short anything. So we'll have to figure out how to allocate into that potential peak somewhere in the second half of next year.

24:51But I don't think we've peaked yet. And technically speaking, it looks very, very solid right now in equity space. I think we'll make new all-time highs very soon. That's great, Andreas. We have time for one more question here from Daniel Holland. We're shooting this shit a little bit here, Andreas, so we will go a little bit off topic. But we're actually getting two of these questions. who are you betting on to make the World Cup final this summer?

25:20Slight chance Denmark will go there so I don't think we're No, I think France Yeah And, you know I'm a big fan of Carletto Ancelotti so I hope that Brazil will reach the final as well That's a good one That's a good one Maybe one of the home countries the US or Mexico So that's going to be my better bit of a surprise over there, but we'll have to see. Any final words, Andreas, before we round off? It's been a crazy year. I think we've had lots to talk about each and every week. Some of it's been good, some of it less so, but we've managed okay throughout the year. Any final words of wisdom for the listeners here, Andreas?

26:01You know, it's actually incredibly relevant that we will see an easing of bank regulation early next year. However, I cannot underscore how important supplementary leverage ratios are. I've worked in a bank treasury before. I worked in a bank treasury during the time where we received a new stack of papers every single month to implement. And we're now, for the first time in probably a couple of decades, talking about rolling stuff back. Even in the euro, so we have the momentum in the opposite direction. So I'll say two things about that. The first thing is that it is incredibly pro-cyclical when you ease bank regulation, because banks will take more risk when they're allowed to.

26:45On the other hand, it also means that the blow-off top and the subsequent bust will be worse than if you didn't make these easier regulations. So I actually think to some extent this new supplementary leverage ratio, as it's called, I think it is quite a bizarre piece of legislation because it increases the risk of financial crisis down the road. but it also increases the probability of 2026 turning into a melt-up year. And I still think that's exactly what we have ahead of us. Probably six months of complete gung-ho, euphoria, maniac markets with big swings back and forth, but mostly up. Yeah.

27:26And I mean, that's exactly what we talked about on Europe as well. You have the whole German stimulus package. At some point, we're going to have to deal with the government debt. But for now, hopefully, we'll have a train to ride for next year. I'm not sure how this will work in English, but as I typically say to our Danish audience, next year's markets, if you suffer from diarrhea, then buy some bonds and leave. It will be that kind of market. I think we will have big volatility in both directions as we've also seen in AI over the past three months. No place for lettuce hands. It's probably a better saying in English.

28:07No lettuce hands out there, guys. Don't fuck this up. Okay, guys, it's been a wonderful year. It's been great to complete our full migration to Real Vision. Thanks to all the subscribers from our old platform who made the move. Also, thanks to everyone who's just watching us here. We really appreciate that. Make sure to, if you're following us on YouTube, you can probably subscribe. I don't know how that works. On X, you can definitely follow both Real Vision, myself and Andreas. And on Real Vision, you can leave comments. will be very, very active in there also over the holidays, even though we're going to take a little bit of a vacation here, Andreas.

28:41But if I know you're right, you will be posting even from New Year's dinner. No promises, though, but I know you will enough, Andreas. So thanks for a great year. Thanks to you, Andreas. It's been wonderful doing these shows every week. We'll keep the pace up next year, do even more on Real Vision, and hopefully we'll make a lot of money together. So thanks for a great year. Happy holidays and happy New Year's out there. We'll see you next year.