So one thing that I’ve been hearing and I whole-heartedly agree with is this notion of “investment theme”.

Successful long-term investing is mostly identifying the right “themes” and positioning there, more so that choosing individual stocks or assets themselves.

So I’ll start 2025 by consolidating the themes I’ve identified myself – not necessarily that they are the “right” themes, but I want to organize my ideas and thoughts and keep reviewing and updating them as time goes on.

The biggest current theme – Inflation

So this is probably one of my biggest investment thesis at this point.

It’s that since 2008, the financial system has fundamentally changed, and central banks around the world, led by the U.S., have taken on the task of being the “market saver”.

They do so by controlling the money supply and pumping out liquidity whenever the market “needs” it.

Whether it’s the “right” thing to do or not is honestly beyond my understanding, but the clear reality is, the money supply has gone rampant since 2008.

Then it went totally overboard in 2020 which led to the highest inflation we have seen in years.

Although the Fed did hike rates and pull back the market, it was short-lived and now we are back into a cutting cycle.

Supposedly inflation has been “tamed” but my opinion is, they are just fudging the inflation data and they NEED to cut to manage the interest payment on the ballooning national debt.

In any case, the national deficit is pretty much an unsolvable problem and rates need to come down or else it’s going to get out of hand.

Also with Trump’s administration, there will probably be more pressure to cut then to hike, regardless of the inflation situation – and that means if inflation is high and they don’t hike, it’ll get more out of control.

So with the USD getting out of control, debasement is unavoidable and my prediction is, the rate of debasement will come faster than most people imagine, faster than what we’ve seen in recent years.

And with that in mind, the smart thing to do for an individual is – to be fully invested in risk assets.

Definitely no cash, and no fixed-income like US treasury bonds.

Gold, stocks, and bitcoin are all good places to put money in.

Real estate is also good if leveraged can be used, but you’ve got to pick the right places, so I am planning to do this but probably as a self-use investment. I’ll exclude that here as a part of my portfolio.

De-globalization

And this is an unfortunate theme, but the world is getting more separated rather than more united in recent years.

China has moved more toward authoritarian than democracy, and Russia of course is even going to wars.

And we can see the U.S. has been doing more to sanction or try to limit the powers in the east. The trade wars and tariffs with China, and cutting off Russia from the USD system.

With the Trump administration this will probably only become more extreme, with Trump’s “America First” philosophy.

Piling on top of that, there is the U.S. national debt problem that causes individual and countries to start doubting the USD dominance in coming years.

Personally my take is USD will still remain the global reserve currency for many years to come but its “strength” will fade over time.

Meanwhile, the US economy and technology advances will probably keep its global leadership as the US while other countries struggle. Which leads me to the next point.

U.S. Big Tech and AI

US is completely dominating the technological advance in recent years and will probably continue to do so for many years, as mentioned in the de-globalization theme.

(China has the potential in the tech advance space but unfortunately their policies don’t align and the U.S. will probably try to beat them down more than cooperate with them)

And in the last few years AI has surfaced to be the next big technological advance that will largely impact humanity.

Personally I believe that is the case and AI would be as much of a technological advance as the advent of the internet.

We are still in the very early stages of that though and there is a lot of money poured into thing that might not work, for sure.

But just like the internet, things that does work and contribute to huge value creation for humanity will come and the gains will follow.

So U.S. mega-caps is the way to go for US stocks. “broadening” and “rotation” stories might come out here and there, but I’ll be sticking with my conviction with big tech.

Possibly adding names if new promising ones playing in the theme emerge – for example like AVGO which provides custom chip solutions to the mega-caps.

Energy

Kind of second degree theme from Tech and AI, but energy demand will skyrocket in the coming years.

The coal and oil can only go so far and honestly if reliance on them increase, thats not a great way to go.

Thats where nuclear and green energy are needed – and there are probably a lot of technological advancements going on there.

Personally I’d like to be a part of that as well.

Portfolio Investments

Gold:

• strong inflation hedge of course with limited supply – more fiat chasing the same amount of gold
• de-globalization and central bank demand – fear of USD dominance
• can be inversely correlated with stocks (2008 financial crisis) – strong volatility mitigator against stocks

Mega-cap US Stocks

• Big tech that is invested in AI will probably see huge value creation in coming years
• Some initiatives will fail and capex will be wasted, but unlike the dot com era, these mega-caps actually have the revenue and profit to spend
• so names like AAPL, GOOGL, META and TSLA which I know understand about and actually use myself

US energy stocks

• this one is a bit more difficult, but I’ve picked CEG and VST as well as use the UTES etf to play this theme
• CEG is more nuclear focused and VST has traditional energy business but is investing heavily in green in recent years I think

JP Stocks

• de-globalization as tailwinds for Japan, only stable and friendly developed country in Asia
• exported inflation from US and liquidity will chase JP equity + real estate (already happening)
• not too sure how to play individual names so just putting the money into N225 and 1489 high-div yield ETF for now

Bitcoin

• Kind of a tech + gold story
• limited supply will make it an inflation hedge
• de-globalization might prompt central banks to buy and hold bitcoins
• a “clean” and “de-centralized” way of store of value