Markets Happy Hour Podcast with Aoifinn Devitt

In this week's Markets Happy Hour Podcast, we are joined by Alan Dunne, founder of Archive Capital, who has written a recent white paper on the regime adaptive portfolio. It is a particularly appropriate topic given the heightened discussion of regime change that we have seen over the past week – both at the level of a specific country, as well as at a broader level as a new form of foreign policy is now emerging, fairly unpreceden...

In this first Markets Happy Hour Podcast of the New Year, we reflect on the dark turn that many of the “Year in Review and Look Ahead” commentaries took over the traditionally slow period between Christmas and New Year. Some of this related to the new financial “nihilism” and not only was there a Wall Street Journal on the topic but an X post describing a degenerate generation attained over 20 million views. This suggestion that Ge...

This week’s Markets Happy Hour Podcast comes to you the day after Christmas and is the last of 2025. We ask whether in what often seems to be a season of plenty – we are about to enter the year of “enough”. Will 2026 be the year when consumers declare that they have had enough of the productivity enhancements that technology – and particularly AI – can bring? Will they have had enough of price rises and vote with their feet accordi...

In today’s Markets Happy Hour Podcast - our last before the Christmas break, we ask ourselves how happy markets are feeling in this market are joy - and the answer is, well, a touch of Bah, Humbug. We first start with the surprise drop in UK inflation which may well serve as a welcome Christmas treat for the UK consumer. With inflation now coming in at 3.2% in the UK (and US inflation expectations of closer to 3.1%) could it be tha...

Today’s Markets Happy Hour Podcast is recorded live in St. Louis, just ahead of the holidays, and features a wide-ranging and candid conversation with Stephen Douglass, Chief Economist at NISA.

We begin with an economy “vibe check,” exploring the growing disconnect between headline inflation data and lived experience. From partisan consumer sentiment to the K-shaped reality facing households and businesses, we discuss why inflat...

Today's Markets Happy Hour Podcast is live from Miami, and was kindly accommodated by the ALTSMIA conference in Miami. We start with a discussion of an economy vibe check where one guest describes a basket of identical goods being tracked from Whole Foods, which is up a whopping 30% year on year - significantly higher inflation than is being reported in the data.

We turn then to the seemingly high probability of a US rate cut t...

In today's Markets Happy Hour Podcast we were delighted to feature David Miller, Director of Investments at Conficap based in Finland. David is a long-term commentator and markets expert, having spent years as a portfolio manager, most recently at Quilter Cheviot in London. He has written a regular market newsletter for many years, and currently it is called "Northern Lights" - always a stimulating and riveting read.

We start wi...

In today's Markets Happy Hour Podcast we are celebrating Thanksgiving Day, and noting the many things that US investors have to be thankful for - a market that pulled itself together sufficiently to end the month broadly flat, a likely incoming Fed chairman who is positively inclined towards rate cuts, and an economy that continues to show its resilience. Plus Thanksgiving staples seem to be down in price - which is good news for l...

In this special edition of the Markets Happy Hour Podcast we are joined by Paula Campbell Roberts who is the Chief Investment Strategist for the Global Wealth business and a Managing Director on KKR’s Global Macro & Asset Allocation team

As usual we debate the implications of the shifting inflationary, interest rate and equity market environments for our clients and end with a discussion of the asset mix that KKR espouses fo...

In today's Markets Happy Hour Podcast we feature the legendary Pete Drewienkiewicz of Thoughts from The Loft (TFTL) fame (of Gallagher Benefit Company, formerly Redington in the UK) and a robust discussion ensues. Starting with "Food Glorious Food" and its driver of inflation, we examine whether inflation will rest at the higher 3.6% level in the UK and what trajectory is likely in the US.

We move then to the different apparen...

In today's live podcast from Dublin we do a comparative vibe check on the Irish economy compared to the US economy. We speak about the pressure of inflation on investor portfolios and ask what investors should do to guard against that.

In looking like a now-familiar chart plotting the size of the US stock market v. the rest of the world the question is asked as to whether investors are in fact happy running that level of risk, p...

In today's Markets Happy Hour Podcast we are delighted to host Rich Nuzum, Head of OCIO at Franklin Templeton, for our usual canter through the macro drivers of investor portfolios - inflation, interest rates, equity markets, geopolitics and other asset classes.

We look at inflation firstly - and ask about expectations, which, remarkably, are diverging along political lines in the US. It seems that inflation is very much in the...

In this week's Markets Happy Hour Podcast (our second recorded this week - there will be a special episode featuring Paula Campbell Roberts from KKR released shortly), we focus on recent rumbles in markets around the integrity of the AI story, the increased concern about power costs and how our "discovery phase" around Bitcoin is continuing, with more and more clues added weekly.

We start with the usual inflation analysis and th...

In today's live recording of the Markets Happy Hour Podcast we gathered a group of allocators, hedge fund, private credit and real asset specialists to debate the changing shape of inflation and whether certain assets continued to represent paths to inflation resilience.

We also dug deeper into the private credit landscape and asked whether the recent poor performance in diversified financials firms was merited, and what might b...

In this week's Markets Happy Hour Podcast we sit down with Michael Blayney, who is General Manager, Dynamic Asset Allocation at Hesta, an Australian Superannuation fund with $100 bn AUD in assets under management. The sting in the tail is a reference to AI and the "sting" being the job losses that have moved from murmurs to full-blown company announcements, with more to come.

As always we kick off with our inflation discussion,...

In this week's Markets Happy Hour Podcast we are joined by Luba Nikulina, Head of Global Strategy for IFM Investors. She is responsible for leading the development of IFM’s global strategy with a focus on private markets solutions that meet the needs of Australian and global pension funds and their members. Luba has always thought in an orthogonal way, finding links between different factors in the economy and trying to apply a fre...

In this week's Markets Happy Hour Podcast we dig through some "anecdata" to see what is driving global markets through white knuckle moments and back again.

We are forced to rely on "anecdata" due to the ongoing shortage of data due to the US government shutdown, so are missing official inflation figures and jobs data. Anecdotally, however, CEOs (Walmart in particular) are reporting that consumers remain resilient (notable give...

In this week’s Markets Happy Hour Podcast we discuss alarm bells - where we see them, whether we are finding them where none exist and what we can do about it, if anything. We are joined by former CIO of Royal Mail, Ian McKnight.

A few weeks ago, in a podcast with John Normand of Australian Super, we asked if the US economy was actually stronger than we thought, in that US GDP growth figures looked to be revised upwards and the...