Portfolios built for the old world will be severely tested as emerging forces rewrite the rules of investing. The Fiduciary Investors Symposium heard that geopolitical and macroeconomic upheaval, together with the disruption wrought by AI, should force asset owners to rethink the structure and composition of portfolios.
Bridgewater's co-CIO Karen Karniol-Tambour warned that many investors have built up significant vulnerabilities in their portfolios over the past 15 years, in a period defined by steady growth and US exceptionalism. But the post-Liberation Day regime will be much less favourable for traditional portfolios.
Investors who are looking to build portfolio resilience better get their team on the same page first about the underlying investment objectives in play, said Bridgewater co-CIO Karen Karniol-Tambour at the Fiduciary Investors Symposium.
Integrating impact alongside risk and return is a revolution that will see more diversification among investor allocations to asset classes such as commodities. Elsewhere, it requires using multiple data sets to analyse stocks and sovereign bond allocations to see the real-world impact of a company’s product or services, and which governments are heading to net-zero. Bridgewater’s head of investment research Karen Karniol-Tambour explains.
In a rare insight into the portfolio construction process at Bridgewater, the head of investment research, Karen Karniol-Tambour discusses how to shift from only looking at risk and return to adopting a three-dimensional model that incorporates impact.
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FIS 2026 at Harvard University