As 2026 unfolds, familiar investment risks are resurfacing, but with sharper edges. Interest rate expectations, AI’s evolving influence, and increasingly transactional geopolitics are creating new portfolio tensions. In his latest analysis for IFA Magazine, Fabian Wiesner, Managing Director, Omni Invest, highlights where advisers should stay alert, where opportunities may emerge, and why today’s relatively calm markets may be just a tad misleading given the nature of the underlying risks.
2025 was a paradoxical year for global markets. On one hand, it was defined by anxiety: concerns about diversification efficacy, talk of frothy valuations in the artificial intelligence space, and persistent worries about political instability, particularly in the United States. On the other hand, markets behaved like the party simply wouldn’t end. Equity indices climbed, sentiment held up, and investors continued to buy into the story of future growth.
For 2026, the concerns feel similar, but the texture feels different. This year isn’t characterised by new anxieties so much as the sense that the fuse has been burning quietly for some time. Political rhetoric is louder, consumers are more stretched, and geopolitics feels more openly transactional. Nobody is predicting a singular crisis, but few would deny that we are closer to something than we were a year ago.
Will we see cuts?
The first and most obvious headline for markets in 2026 is the trajectory of global interest rates. After two years of rapid tightening, inflation has cooled, but not completely. Central banks are signalling cuts, but the degree and timing remain uncertain. Expectations are high, and markets have already priced in a meaningful easing cycle.
If we get those cuts, it may unlock additional liquidity and offer relief to households coming off fixed rates. It should support consumers on mortgages and give businesses more space to invest.
If we don’t, disappointment could be sharp. Inflation that remains “sticky” would deny both governments and households the breathing room they’ve been waiting for. And it would complicate an already tricky generational divide with younger generations still struggling with wage growth and affordability, and older demographics benefiting more readily from accumulated wealth and higher-yield cash products.
Rate cuts are therefore both the most positive and negative risk in one. They are the most anticipated policy development of the year, and the one with the greatest potential for frustration.
AI beyond valuations
My second ‘one to watch’ is AI, but not for the usual reasons. The conversation in 2025 was dominated by valuations, capex cycles, and whether or not the “AI trade” constituted a bubble. In 2026, the more interesting question is what happens when a sector begins to feed on itself, both financially and in terms of content.
We are already seeing AI companies simultaneously acting as investors, customers, suppliers, and counterparties to each other. That creates the impression of enormous liquidity and momentum, but it also creates circularity. The capital is real, but the ecosystem resembles its own self-supporting loop.
More striking still has been the informational cannibalisation underway. AI models are increasingly training on AI-generated content, introducing distortions that would have been unthinkable – or deliberate – in academic or professional publishing ten years ago. The “hallucination” problem – once framed as a quirk – now has serious implications for trust. When an AI system invents a concept, has it created a new idea, or a new form of error? And what happens when that invented concept is then cited, published, and re-assimilated as if it were legitimate?
At the darker end of AI, we are seeing genuine social harm from falsified reports to manipulated imagery and aggressive misinformation. The Musk-Grok axis in the US has shown how rapidly AI can become a partisan force rather than a neutral technology.
The point is not that AI is a bubble destined to burst. There is real commercial utility and genuine progress being made. But the bigger question is whether 2026 becomes the year where the world begins to regulate, censor, distrust, or simply tire of AI in its current form.
The shifting geopolitical landscape
My third headline is politics – particularly the geopolitical wildcard of the US and its shifting posture under Trump. Last year revealed not only the volatility of domestic policy but also the unpredictability of US foreign behaviour. The case of Greenland has become a litmus test for whether strategic assets can now be spoken about as transactional commodities. It is extraordinary that such discussions can happen in a period of nominal peace, and even more extraordinary that they elicit so little public reaction.
Taken together, the political environment feels primed for misalignment. Markets dislike uncertainty, and 2026 promises plenty of it – tariffs, industrial policy, shifting alliances, and electoral risk.
Not if but when ‘lit fuses’ will inite
The most compelling narrative for the year ahead is not that a single hazard looms, but that multiple “lit fuses” are burning simultaneously: inflation, AI distortion, polarisation in the US, weakened globalisation, consumer indebtedness, and persistent conflicts that struggle to compete for attention.
Individually, any one of these issues would have been headline-dominating events a decade ago. Today they are viewed as background noise. Consumers have gone from using pandemic savings to relying on credit, and the gap between Wall Street and the high street continues to widen. GDP prints look healthy while households feel squeezed, and the dissonance between macro strength and micro strain is becoming harder to ignore.
The question for 2026 is not which fuse will ignite, but when one of them will.
Despite all of this, there are meaningful positives. Corporate profitability is strong across much of the developed world, capital expenditure remains elevated, and investors remain willing to fund growth. Even without the AI trade, many businesses look well-positioned to deliver decent earnings into the year.
If markets remain buoyant and rate cuts materialise, portfolios should continue to perform. For advisers and clients alike, this remains an investable environment, not a defensive one.
If there is a red flag, it is not regulatory or sector specific. It is systemic: we are building an interconnected ecosystem of small risks that could, in aggregate, produce a larger shock. There is no single fuse to watch, but many.
The world is quieter than the headlines suggest and louder than markets admit. The party may continue, but nobody should forget about the fuses quietly burning in the background.
By Fabian Wiesner, Managing Director, Omni Invest
Fabian Wiesner joined Simplybiz, part of Fintel, in September 2023 to manage its relationships with its investment strategic partners and develop and strengthen its comprehensive investment supply chain for member firms, before becoming Managing Director of Omni Invest in September 2025. He Chairs the Simplybiz Investment Committee, with a focus on strengthening its Risk Controlled offering, a proposition that is designed to help advisers manage their investment supply chain and clients’ investment portfolio risk.
He previously held the role of Strategic Partners Manager at Aviva Investors and senior relationship management positions at Aviva and Old Mutual Global Investors. He holds the IMC and Certificate in ESG Investing through the CFA Society
