Research on Blackrock Greater Europe Investment Trust PLC (BRGE:LON) , Mercantile Investment Trust PLC (MRC:LON) from Capital Access Group
For all the column inches taken up in recent years about the ‘Magnificent Seven' US tech companies, the increasing weight of the US in global stock market indices and the supplanting of old economy sectors by new technologies, it is clear that 2026 has been the real ‘year of AI'. Alongside more powerful and readily available AI tools and trillion-dollar-plus IPOs from SpaceX and (soon) Anthropic, we have seen stories of AI agents escaping so-called sandboxes to wreak havoc on rivals, and even predictions that the technology has a chance of wiping out humanity within the next decade. Meanwhile, Taiwanese and South Korean chipmakers have all but taken over the main emerging markets index (causing significant volatility in the past month), and every one of the top 10 stocks in the MSCI All Country World (ACWI) index is now an overt play on the wider adoption of AI technologies. Against such a backdrop, are the ‘old world' countries of Europe and the UK a historical irrelevance, or do they have an increasingly important part to play in diversifying investors' portfolios?
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