Category: Re-Search

With inflation at elevated levels unseen in decades, partly caused by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and partly a result of continuous heightened tensions between the US and China, events in the global political and economic scenes in 2022 may lead one to question the appropriateness of past strategies in such an unfamiliar and chaotic economy. Investors are faced with unprecedented challenges as we enter a new regime where substantially higher interest rates and inflations may become a new normal. But with the right understanding and some twists in strategies, this changing environment will also bring opportunities that only happen once in a few generations.

In this special report, we take you through the developments that have been happening since we introduced our two newly identified megatrends – Indonesia 2.0 and Web 3.0.

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Luck is when opportunity meets preparation. After a painful decade of underperformance, we see the stars are aligned for Indonesia to outperform. Commodity supercycle, the rotation from growth to value stocks, investors pivoting to other markets after China tech clampdown, and rising geopolitical tension are favourable backdrops for Indonesia. Having Indonesia as our home turf allows us to see internal reforms happening at the margin that will amplify this external tailwind. Indonesia 2.0 is a rediscovery that will surprise you in many ways.

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In this special report, we introduce digital assets, blockchain technology, and other technology (enablers) such as AI, cloud, IoT, and edge computing, which can bring us from the current Web 2.0 to Web 3.0. We discuss the possible market and business implications, concluding that these technologies may first and most disrupt the financial industry and can even disrupt today’s tech giants.

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Millennials sucker-punching hedge funds, cryptocurrency becoming a “safe haven”, and tech driving decentralisation: these developments would have sounded like science fiction only a year ago. In this report, we (try) approach these and other new trends with an open mind to see if they call for a change in conviction and action. But not after revisiting the concept of “growth mindset”, which we believe is key for investment success.

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This report covers the uneven impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and how it forces governments to tackle increasing poverty and inequality. In the U.S, the fiscal response is pretty similar to the 1930s New Deal in terms of relief and colossal infrastructure spending to accelerate economic recovery. With other countries also boosting their fiscal spending, the pandemic has become a catalyst for a global surge in infrastructure construction. We ponder how the New-Deal inspired policies will be rolled out and what the possible investment implications are.

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To obtain guidance in these tumultuous times, we study past inflationary periods and economic downturns in this report and identify possible investment implications. We also focus on how precious metals investments, both the commodity and equity, performed during such periods.

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In light of the outbreak of Covid-19, we turned to disaster research and learned that larger crises and disasters can be threshold events leading to meaningful change. To help our readers, we share how investors can be resilient in these stressful times. We also identify the COVID-19 pandemic induced accelerating adoption of modern monetary theory, which we feel could lead to high inflation. Finally, we make case for investing in gold during these times.

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This report covers the current status of artificial intelligence, which is gaining more prominence and triggering debates about whether AI will benefit humanity or mark its demise. We provide several cases on how narrow AI, the early stage of AI, is currently improving life in emerging markets.

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