Reports that a Chinese company had built and trained an open-source artificial intelligence (AI) model in record time, and at a fraction of the costs incurred by US developers, roiled US equity markets during the final week of January. Investors found themselves revisiting assumptions about the major drivers of US markets such as Nvidia, Alphabet and Meta.
Amidst a flurry of executive orders from President Donald Trump, issued in the wake of his inauguration and days after he launched a new meme coin, investors steered over $5 billion into Alternative Funds during the third week of January with over $4 billion of that total going to Cryptocurrency Funds.
The second week of January saw Americans mourning their 39th president, watching in horror as large swathes of Los Angeles burned and – along with the rest of the world – positioning themselves for the return of Donald Trump to the White House. Against this backdrop, which also included better-than-expected inflation figures from the US and UK, investors steered another $20 billion into US Equity and Bond Funds, rotated from cryptocurrencies to gold, responded strongly to the first round of financial sector earnings reports and pulled over $1.8 billion from Equity Funds with socially responsible (SRI) or environmental, social and governance (ESG) mandates.