Oliver Shale

Sep 2026: The AI boom is creating winners beyond technology. We explore where AI-driven wealth and spending may flow next.

The shale revolution transformed US oil and gas output, profoundly altering the global energy balance. If the shale boom is now over, that will have enormous geopolitical and economic consequences.

Dec 2025: Prediction markets are entering the financial mainstream, offering crowd-sourced forecasts on real world events. But could they end up adding yet more risk to the system?

Jun 2025: The Taiwan dollar’s surge in early May highlighted the risk for global investors from an unwinding of the massive unhedged exposures to US assets built up over recent years in many countries.

February 2025: Strong gains in equity markets are bolstering US consumer optimism. Yet, with asset valuations close to historical highs and return expectations looking unrealistic, this virtuous cycle could rapidly turn vicious.

Could today’s market optimism about inflation be misplaced? Oliver Shale warns we may be facing an ‘Empire Strikes Back’ moment, with a second wave of price rises on the horizon.

Traditional finance theory tells us that markets are rational. Investors incorporate all public and private information when making their investment decisions. This school of thought is grappling with the field of behavioural finance, which asserts that human psychology and biases also act in an irrational way to influence these same investment decisions.

In a world of distorted interest rates and high asset prices, protecting capital and producing strong income levels may no longer be mutually compatible.