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The world is always moving. That much has never changed. What has changed is the speed, scale and complexity of those movements – and their impact on portfolios. This year’s macro backdrop is no exception: a split-screen world marked by simultaneous strength and fragility, clarity and contradiction.
Against this shifting landscape, our global strategies continue to do what they were built for: adapt, stay open to new leadership, and remain grounded in the macro forces shaping the next cycle.
To make sense of those forces, we turn to our 7 Super Trends for 2026 – the structural themes that define the opportunities and risks ahead for global investors in 2026 and beyond. We’ll start with Super Trends 1 & 2.
For the first time in more than a decade, the strongest cyclical impulses in the global economy are emerging outside the United States. Europe is finally stepping out of a long post-crisis fog as the South completes a brutal deleveraging cycle and the North abandons its austerity reflex. This shift is allowing investment, wages, and industrial activity to recover in a way that simply wasn’t possible during the 2010s.
Japan, meanwhile, is in the middle of a genuine economic renaissance. Its policy regime is normalizing, corporate reforms are accelerating, and shareholder returns are improving after years of stagnation. Investors who had written off the world’s third-largest economy are now forced to reconsider its role in global portfolios.
Across Asia, the story is one of reacceleration. Supply chains are reorganizing into regional hubs, domestic demand is strengthening, and export cycles are firming. Even China, long dismissed as uninvestable, is shifting policy from damage control toward stabilization. While structural challenges remain, the country’s pivot toward targeted stimulus and more predictable policymaking has helped steady the economic floor.
Commodity-linked emerging markets are benefiting as well. Years of cautious fiscal policy, credible central banks, and improving external balances have left many EM economies in far better shape than their developed market peers. Add in rising demand for metals, energy, transportation and engineering capacity, and the global growth map looks far more geographically balanced than at any point in the past decade.
In other words, a broad cast of regions that spent years lagging are now moving into leadership. This is not a temporary burst of activity but the early stages of a multi-year earnings cycle enabled by better policy foundations, healthier balance sheets and more competitive currencies.
After years of being structurally underweight, global investors are finally confronting a long-overdue rotation toward the rest of the world. Capital is beginning to flow toward Europe, Japan, and EM Asia – a shift that is still in its early innings.
Investment implications
The old macro playbook – relying primarily on monetary policy to manage the economic cycle – is gone. Around the world, governments are embracing a far more activist fiscal stance. What began as emergency stimulus during the pandemic has evolved into a structural commitment to rebuild productive capacity, reshape industries, and support household incomes.
Fiscal policy is now the dominant driver of nominal growth. Governments are deploying unprecedented amounts of capital toward infrastructure renewal, energy transition, supply chain resilience, and national industrial strategies. In the United States, Europe, and Asia, the scale of public investment is reshaping entire sectors and setting the tone for multi-year economic cycles.
This shift removes many of the deflationary pressures that defined the 2010s. Instead of relying on ultra-low rates to coax demand forward, fiscal policy is creating new sources of spending and investment. The result is a world with stronger nominal GDP, more persistent inflationary pressures, and broader corporate earnings cycles.
Equally important is the institutionalization of the government rescue reflex. Whether in banking stress, energy crises or geopolitical shocks, policymakers increasingly turn to fiscal support rather than interest rate cuts. Crises that once triggered long recessions now lead to targeted stimulus and faster recoveries.
For investors, this represents a profound regime change. The economic contours of the past decade – low growth, low inflation, low rates – are inconsistent with the fiscal-dominated world now taking shape. Public investment is creating durable demand, reshaping competitive dynamics, and driving capital toward sectors aligned with government priorities.
The investment landscape that emerges from this will not look like the 2010s. It will be more cyclical, more inflationary, and more conducive to real assets, industrials, infrastructure and companies tied to physical investment.
Investment implications
Next time: Super Trends 3 & 4: AI adopters and the revenge of the real economy.
Tyler Mordy, CFA, is CEO and CIO of Forstrong Global Asset Management Inc., engaged in top-down strategy, investment policy, and securities selection. This article first appeared in Forstrong’s Insights page. Used with permission. You can reach Tyler by phone at Forstrong Global, toll-free 1-888-419-6715, or by email at tmordy@forstrong.com. Follow Tyler on X at @TylerMordy and @ForstrongGlobal.
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Content © 2025 by Forstrong Global. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part by any means without prior written permission is prohibited. Used with permission.
The foregoing is for general information purposes only and is the opinion of the writer. The author and clients of Forstrong Global Asset Management may have positions in securities mentioned. Performance statistics are calculated from documented actual investment strategies as set by Forstrong’s Investment Committee and applied to its portfolios mandates, and are intended to provide an approximation of composite results for separately managed accounts. Actual performance of individual separate accounts may vary with average gross “composite” performance statistics presented here due to client-specific portfolio differences with respect to size, inflow/outflow history, and inception dates, as well as intra-day market volatilities versus daily closing prices. Performance numbers are net of total ETF expense ratios and custody fees, but before withholding taxes, transaction costs and other investment management and advisor fees. Commissions and management fees may be associated with exchange-traded funds. Please read the prospectus before investing. Securities mentioned carry risk of loss, and no guarantee of performance is made or implied. This information is not intended to provide specific personalized advice including, without limitation, investment, financial, legal, accounting or tax advice.
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