Episode
Where Investment Themes Intersect and Beat Markets
- Podcast
- Thoughts on the Market
- Published
- Apr 20, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 305
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Summary
Our Global Head of Thematic and Sustainability Research Stephen Byrd unpacks how major investment themes for 2026 are increasingly interconnected, generating gains for investors. Read more insights from Morgan Stanley. ----- Transcript ----- Welcome to Thoughts on the Market. I’m Stephen Byrd, Morgan Stanley’s Global Head of Thematic and Sustainability Research. Today – how our 10 big thematic predictions are playing out and driving global markets. It’s Monday, April 20th at 11:30am in New York. Back in January, we laid out four key themes – AI & Tech Diffusion, the Future of Energy, a Multipolar World, and Societal Shifts. And we laid out 10 specific thematic predictions about forces shaping 2026. It is really striking to me how quickly the landscape has shifted and how significant these trends have become in just a short period of time. Even more striking is how these mega secular themes are converging. AI is driving unprecedented demand for compute and energy. Energy is becoming a strategic priority for nations. And geopolitics is shaping access to both. So, let’s start with the most important development: the acceleration of AI. Now we expected strong progress in terms of large language model development, but what we’re seeing is really a step-change upward in capability. And this is driving an extraordinary surge in demand for compute. Global AI usage has jumped sharply with weekly usage; and we measure weekly usage in terms of how many tokens are used. Tokens are really a measure of small units of text. It's a fairly standard measure of demand for compute. That token usage has risen by about 250 percent just since early January, from 6.4 trillion tokens a week to 22.7 trillion; pushing us into a world where compu…