Full episode description:
2026 market themes have been shaped by geopolitical realignment, the physical demands of artificial intelligence and changing assumptions about diversification. Across markets, investors are confronting several plausible futures rather than relying on a single base case.
Host Oscar Pulido is joined by Stevie Manns, producer of The Bid, to revisit conversations with BlackRock leaders and external guests. Together, they connect insights on geopolitics, retirement, AI infrastructure, market concentration, portfolio construction, Asia, digital assets and tokenization.
The discussion explores how these subjects form a broader story about preparation. Listeners will hear why AI investing increasingly involves energy and physical infrastructure, how concentration is changing the character of major equity indexes, and why a more dynamic and granular approach may be relevant as capital markets evolve.
Key insights include:
• How geopolitical shifts are influencing markets, supply chains and economic policy
• Why AI investing depends on power, data centers and infrastructure
• How stock market concentration can affect diversification assumptions
• Why portfolio construction may require multiple scenarios
• Where Asia and digital assets are broadening the opportunity set
• How tokenization could reduce friction in financial markets
Keywords: 2026 market themes, AI investing, infrastructure, portfolio construction, capital markets, digital assets, tokenization, geopolitics
This content is for informational purposes only and is not an offer or a solicitation. Reliance upon information in this material is at the sole discretion of the listener. Reference to any company or investment strategy mentioned is for illustrative purposes only and not investment advice. In the UK and non-European Economic Area countries, this is authorized and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority. In the European Economic Area, this is authorized and regulated by the Netherlands Authority for the Financial Markets. For full disclosures, visit blackrock.com/corporate/compliance/bid-disclosures.
Oscar Pulido: Welcome to The Bid, where we break down what's happening in the markets and explore the forces changing the economy and finance. I'm Oscar Pulido. Today we're doing something a little different. Instead of bringing on one guest to unpack one theme, we're looking back at some of the biggest conversations we've had on The Bid so far in 2026, and the themes that kept coming up again and again.
And to help me do that, I'm joined by someone who knows these episodes better than almost anyone, Stevie Manns, producer of the Bid,
Stevie Manns: Thank you, Oscar. And as you know, I'm usually behind the scenes, so this is a little different for me too. But as the producer of the show, I'm involved in shaping all of these episodes before we record, working with you.
I'm listening during the interviews and then listening again during the edit. And really what stood out to me this year is that even though these episodes covered so many different topics, we went through geopolitics, retirement, AI, crypto, Asia, tokenization. They were all really circling a few big themes.
Oscar Pulido: Well, Stevie, I always love having you on The Bid. You are usually a little bit in the background, but I love when our listeners get to hear you as well And you're right, this is usually the time of the year where we do a look back, and we often do a best of our, our favorite episodes. This isn't quite that exactly. This is more of a look at the story of the year and what it's been telling us through these various conversations.
Stevie Manns: And we're going to go through this chronologically because that was what I found really interesting. You can almost hear this story and these investing themes build from episode to episode, and we obviously started in Davos with geopolitical uncertainty, and then we're going to move into AI, um, as energy security has, has become a big story, then infrastructure, market concentration, we've been hearing a lot about portfolio construction, digital assets, tokenization, and then the mid-year outlook. And of course, a personal favorite of ours, the Tech Tour with Tony Kim.
Oscar Pulido: It is a favorite of ours, the tech tour with Tony Kim. Well, I hope everybody's listened to all these episodes, but just in case they missed a few don't worry, this is actually a way for those people to catch up. And for those that have listened to all those great, uh, topics and conversations that you mentioned, hopefully this gives them a new perspective on how these various themes connect.
Okay, so let's start in Davos. Stevie, this is one of the most fun trips we get to take now every year. Uh, January we go to Switzerland. We record live from the World Economic Forum. We did so again this year with Philipp Hildebrand and Tom Donilon, who are both Vice Chairmen of BlackRock. Tom is also chairman of the BlackRock Investment Institute, and this episode really sets the tone for the start of the year.
Stevie Manns: It really does, and it set the tone for the rest of the year. And that was what really struck me about this episode now looking back, is how big the framing was. It wasn't just there's so much going on in geopolitics. Tom and Philipp were really saying, 'We're living through one of those rare periods in history where the structure of the global order is shifting.'
Oscar Pulido: It's usually a long conversation with these two gentlemen. There's so much to unpack, but there was one particular phrase that, that Tom used, and it was that phrase 'hinge moment' that really stayed with me.
Tom Donilon: There are moments, in history that really do feel like hinge moments. and there have been a few of those dates, that are, that, stick with us since the end of World War II. 1945, obviously, the Arab oil embargo in 1973,1974, the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. The dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, I think 2025, 2026 is going to be one of those moments, a hinge point when really the tectonic plates geopolitically and in terms of economics really do change.
Stevie Manns: And so, listening back to that now, it feels like so many of these later episodes were really unpacking what that hinge moment means. We're thinking AI, supply chains, defense, energy portfolios, and all of those stories really connect back to a world that feels much less stable and much less predictable.
Oscar Pulido: And right after Davos, we actually went to a very different but equally important topic, and that's retirement, where the theme was very much about preparation. In our Ask Me Anything episode, I spoke with Jamie Magyera, who is head of BlackRock's US Wealth Advisory and Retirement businesses. On the surface, this was a very personal finance episode, but I think it connected to the bigger theme of the year, which is how do you prepare when the future is uncertain?
Stevie Manns: Right, and Jamie gave us one of the clearest lines of the year with regard to retirement, and she said, 'Retirement isn't an ending, it's a choice.' But that choice, of course, needs to be planned for.'
Jaime Magyera: The way I think about retirement, for me, retirement is the choice to do what's next. It's the freedom to do what's next. And for people, that means many different things, right? So, it could mean the choice to start a business or the choice to go back to school or the choice to, travel the world, do charity philanthropy, but it's a choice. And in order to have that choice, you actually need to have a plan.
Oscar Pulido: And that idea of having a plan rather than trying to predict everything ends up coming back in our investment episodes too
Stevie Manns: Yes, and then the next big turn, of course, was AI, but not AI in the abstract. We're thinking AI as something that needs power, that needs infrastructure, capital, and of course, physical resources.
Oscar Pulido: So, Stevie, we had Will Su back on the show. Will is an expert in the energy sector, and he came back on to talk about AI and energy, the intersection of those two topics. And this was one of those episodes where I remember thinking, 'This is not just a technology story anymore.'
Stevie Manns: Mm-hmm. That was my reaction as well, and when I was producing that, it really stood out about how Will reframed AI. It's so easy to think of AI as just software, but Will made it really physically tangible. Power grids, natural gas, renewables, nuclear data centers, and suddenly AI became this really physical thing.
Oscar Pulido: And like some of our other guests, he also had a very memorable line, something that really stuck with me. He said, 'We've historically known that knowledge is power, but for the first time ever, power is knowledge.'
Will Su: These improvements are coming with an exponential increase in power demand. So even with some of the efficiency gains that we have made on the semiconductor side, the reality is today's AI models are more power hungry than ever to create. On our last episode, we talked about the concept of zeta flops. So let me introduce a new term. Today, we are firmly marching into the world of yottaflop compute. That's 1 trillion, trillion calculations per second. Again, just mind-bending numbers. And of course, each calculation just involves the movement of electrons between the semiconductor chips. So over time that power demand really starts to add up and grow exponentially. I like to think of it this way, since the beginning of human history, knowledge is power, but for the first time ever, power is knowledge.
Stevie Manns: And that episode was a turning point editorially. And obviously when we're planning episodes, we're not just planning singular episodes, we're planning them, um, on the whole. And after that, almost every conversation on AI had to answer the second question, not just what can AI do, but what does it take to really build it?
Oscar Pulido: So that brings us to the equity market. In episode 257 in March, I spoke with Ibrahim Kanan, who's head of the US core equity team within BlackRock's Fundamental Equities Group, and we talked about the S&P 493, or as he called it, the best of the rest
Stevie Manns: Right, and this episode was really important because it showed how the AI story was affecting the shape of the markets themselves. We had talked so much about The Magnificent Seven, but Ibrahim really helped explain what investors might be missing beneath the surface or 'under the hood', I think, as he said.
Oscar Pulido: Yes, and he also made the point that the concentration in the S&P 500 index has really reached an extreme relative to history.
Ibrahim Kanan: This is the most concentrated that the S&P has ever been. It's that simple. We've never had a period of time where the top 10 stocks were 40% of the index. And it's really important because we're used to thinking that the S&P 500 is broad and diversified, right? It's 500 companies. You think, okay, I'm getting exposure to 500 companies. But the reality today is that it's really dominated by these 10 companies.
Stevie Manns: And that clip really gets to something that we kept hearing across the year in that diversification isn't something that can be assumed anymore. Even things that may look diversified on the surface may be much more concentrated than investors realize.
Oscar Pulido: Than investors realize. Which takes us directly to episode 258 and portfolio construction in episode 258, I spoke with Vivek Paul, who is head of portfolio research and UK chief investment strategist at the BlackRock Investment Institute. This was one of those episodes that pulled a lot of our year-to-date themes together
Stevie Manns: Right. And from a listener perspective, I think this felt like the, the now what? The 'so what moment for investors.' We know geopolitics is changing, AI is changing the markets, concentration is rising. So what does it actually mean for an investor, and what should they be doing differently?
Oscar Pulido: Vivek's answer was that some of the old portfolio anchors and assumptions may not work the same way…
Vivek Paul: I think the dynamic now is different. We've talked, Oscar, in the past about this being a different regime, economically. This is an environment where some of those macro anchors that we've relied upon for a generation just aren't holding in quite the same way. Think of all those things that we've just come to rely upon, like the stability of inflation, the way in which policy is conducted, on the domestic stage, on the international stage, the sort of level of indebtedness and the path of the fiscal, for many of these big governments, it's not the same environment that we have had in the past.
Stevie Manns: That episode gave us new language of being more dynamic and more granular, which is a term that Vivek used, which became really useful later on when we were talking about Asia and crypto and of course tokenization
Oscar Pulido: Well, Stevie, then we packed our bags again. We went on the road, this time somewhere a little bit warmer. We went to Miami in April for BlackRock's Latin America Investment Forum, where I spoke with Robbie Mitchnick, head of digital assets at BlackRock, and Dan Morehead, CEO of Pantera Capital.
Stevie Manns: Right, and this was also super interesting. I love producing live episodes, and crypto is one of those topics that can be really polarizing. But the conversation wasn't just, 'is crypto up or down? Is this another AI winter?' It was much more about market structure, adoption, and where digital assets might fit into portfolios in the future and now.
Oscar Pulido: Robbie, I thought, really captured the dual nature of bitcoin really well…
Robbie Mitchnick: On the one hand, it's clearly a risky asset on a standalone basis. It's, still relatively novel technology. It's volatile. On the other hand, it has a very unique set of properties that give it I would say a distinct set of long-term risk and return drivers from just about anything else in your portfolio, right? It's global, it's non sovereign, it's decentralized, it's scarce, it exists outside of any one country's political, economic, fiscal, monetary risk factors.
Stevie Manns: And Robbie's framing is probably the fairest way to talk about crypto because of course it's not risk-free, and it's also not a speculative headline anymore.
Oscar Pulido: Right. I think one of the takeaways from that episode for me is that crypto is now much more of a mainstream conversation and certainly something that we've featured more within The Bid. Well, then we packed our bags again, and if you can believe it, we went somewhere that was actually even warmer than Miami and further afield, and that's Singapore in episode 261, as mentioned, we were in Singapore. I spoke with Aarti Angara, who's head of global product solutions in the Asia Pacific Region for BlackRock
Stevie Manns: And this was one of the episodes where location really mattered, and I loved Singapore, as you know. I've told everyone how much I loved it. And you can really hear it in the conversation because Asia wasn't being discussed as this abstract future growth story or emerging markets idea. It was being discussed as something that is already central to global portfolios.
Oscar Pulido: Right. Aarti, I think, reminded people just how relevant Asia is in the context of global portfolios and the investment opportunity set, and she laid out three reasons: scale, relevance, and a change in investor mindset.
Aarti Angara: Asian countries now, make up about forty percent of global GDP, and that's up from twenty percent as recently as and interestingly, Asia's also home to more than fifty percent of the listed companies in the world. So, it really isn't a future story anymore. It really is here and now.
Stevie Manns: So, from The Bid's perspective, this was another broadening moment. The story of the year isn't just AI in the US, it's also where growth, supply chains, manufacturing, domestic consumption, and diversification are showing up much more globally
Oscar Pulido: Well, then we moved on from what investors own to how markets themselves may operate. And in episode 264, I spoke with Rob Goldstein, The Bid's original guest, and also the chief operating officer at BlackRock, and we talked about tokenization.
Stevie Manns: Rob Goldstein, The Bid's number one guest, quite literally. This was one of those episodes where the topic could sound very technical, but Rob made it very practical. It's about access, it's about efficiency, and the idea that financial market infrastructure might be entering a new phase.
Oscar Pulido: I agree with that. I think if you had told me a couple years ago we were going to talk about this topic called tokenization, I would've assumed it would be hard to follow. But I think Rob did a great job of making it very accessible, and he really framed tokenization as the next technology in a long line of technologies that reduce friction.
Rob Goldstein: You could think about the mutual fund was a technology, we spoke about the ETF being a technology several times, and the token is just another technology. The token is a concept that effectively lets you have a representation of a stock, a bond, a fund, your house, whatever it may be, as a digital certificate that could be held in a wallet.
Stevie Manns: And of course, when we're talking about tokenization, it connects back to crypto, but it also goes well beyond crypto. It's about the infrastructure of markets And that's been the theme that we've seen so much this year. Energy infrastructure, market infrastructure, and of course, portfolio infrastructure.
Oscar Pulido: So, by the time we got to the mid-year outlook, the conversation had evolved again. I spoke with Jean Boivin, who's head of the BlackRock Investment Institute, about this concept of scarcity versus abundance in the age of AI
Stevie Manns: And this felt very much like a checkpoint episode. In January we were asking how big could AI become? By midyear, the question had shifted to whether the system can actually supply what AI needs: power, capital, infrastructure, and labor.
Oscar Pulido: And I also remember Jean introducing another useful term, a word we don't hear very much, which is polyfurcation
Stevie Manns: Sometimes on The Bid I don't know what words mean, and I think people might have made them up. But this is a real word, and Jean used it.
Jean Boivin: So, polyfurcated really means, a different type of uncertainty that cannot be easily handled by having a base case with some uncertainty around it. You need to handle multiple scenarios always and keep track of them.
Stevie Manns: And that idea from Jean really sums up the year. It's not just uncertainty, it's multiple plausible futures all at once, and that makes the job of building portfolios even harder.
Oscar Pulido: To your point of diversification is just harder to find, and it may not be as obvious or as visible as it was in some past market regimes.
And finally, the Tech Tour. This is, uh, one of my favorite episodes. We had a chance to actually travel on the Tech Tour this year with Tony Kim and many BlackRock colleagues. Tony is, of course, the head of the global technology team within BlackRock Fundamental Equities, and we took this tour across San Francisco and Silicon Valley
Stevie Manns: Right. And this was so fun because this was the first year that you joined me on the Tech Tour. You were on the bus, and I think you were just there for a day, just on the Wednesday, and one thing that you said was, 'Wow, this is, this is a lot. These are busy days that you guys have.'
Oscar Pulido: Right. I only did one day. I know that the broader team, yourself included, did all five days. So, it really is a commitment, but, uh, part of what you get out of that is all of these great conversations with, uh, with industry leaders. And what struck me was the conversation is not just about models and software. We met with companies where we're talking about space, robotics, autonomous vehicles, energy, chips, optics, cooling, the whole stack. There's a lot of terminology. In fact, I found myself googling terminology a lot of times when we're in these meetings just to make sure I could keep up.
Stevie Manns: And to make sure they're real words and not just made up, right? And Tony also gave us one of the clearest explanations of why scarcity keeps showing up in the AI story.
Tony Kim: Everything is short. Everything is constrained. Everything is scarce. Not everything, but almost most things. And then you throw at that, these 250 Manhattan-equivalent demand over the next five years, and this is the situation we're in. That is the world of scarcity.
Oscar Pulido: So that really brings us almost full circle, Stevie. We started the year talking about hinge moments with Tom Donilon, structural shifts, and by the time of the tech tour, we were seeing those shifts show up in the physical demands of AI
Stevie Manns: Right. And looking back, what stands out to me is that these episodes weren't disconnected, and one of the reasons I felt we should do this particular episode tying them all together, they were really building on each other.
And Davos gave us that geopolitical backdrop. Will Su made AI physical. Ibrahim and Vivek showed us how markets and portfolios are adapting. Robbie, Dan, Arti, and Rob Goldstein showed how the opportunity set and the financial system are broadening. And Sean and Tony helped us understand where the debate is now in terms of scarcity, abundance, and how investors can prepare for both.
Oscar Pulido: Downie, Arti and Rob Goldstein showed how the opportunity set and the financial system are broadening. And Sean and Tony helped us understand where the debate is now in terms of scarcity, abundance, and how investors can prepare for both. I have to admit, even though I'm the host sitting in the chair recording all these episodes, this is even helping me understand how all of these distinct conversations really, really tie together.
And maybe that's the biggest takeaway from the first part of 2026. The world is changing quickly, but the job of investors hasn't changed entirely. It's still about understanding the forces shaping markets, staying disciplined, and building portfolios that can adapt
Stevie Manns: And in the producer's seat that I sit in, what I kept hearing was, 'Don't predict the future, but prepare for different versions of it,' which feels very science fiction-y and very multiverse. But I thought that was the clearest message that I've been hearing this year.
Oscar Pulido: Well, I think that's well said, this theme of preparation, and that's really what we're striving to do here in these conversations is to help our listeners prepare for all the various topics that they come across in financial markets.
Thanks, for joining us for this special behind-the-scenes episode of The Bid. If you missed any of the conversations we talked about today, you can find them in the show notes.
We'll be back with more conversations on the forces changing the economy and finance. Make sure you subscribe to the bid wherever you get your podcasts.
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