Over the past two weeks, neither the economic data flow nor financial markets have offered your economist much respite. The S&P 500 has managed to recover most of its earlier 2025 losses (in USD terms), yet this rebound has not been accompanied by a corresponding recovery in corporate earnings expectations. As a result, valuations for U.S. equities have rebounded quickly, p ...

This week, the IEA revealed its 2025 World Energy Investment report[1], which brought striking news: global energy investment will reach $3.3 trillion this year, with $2.2 trillion flowing to clean energy. That’s nearly double the amount going to fossil fuels, a milestone we anticipated in our September 2024 article[2], when clean investment first overtook fossil fuels globally ...

Buy Now, Pay Later (BNPL) has gone from a niche fintech widget to a full-blown cultural shift in how people transact. It’s in your checkout. It’s in your browser. You can now even BNPL at restaurants like Chipotle. Lunch now, pay later. Digest both slowly… And on the surface? It sounds great. No fees, no interest, no friction. Just smooth, clean consumption. But here’s the thin ...

Shares of American company Royal Caribbean Cruises were one of the better performing on the US stock market over the past week. They gained some 6% against some 1.9% for the broad market index S&P 500.   Royal Caribbean Group (RCG) is a cruise holding company that operates a global fleet of 67 ships that travel the world. It is the number two in its industry behind Carnival ...

At Ortelius, we recently had the pleasure of joining the panel at the avant-premiere of Peter Tom Jones’s new documentary Europe’s Lithium Paradox. It’s a compelling exploration of a strange contradiction: Europe has the lithium it needs for its clean energy transition, and yet, we’re still stuck on foreign dependencies. Why? One answer stood out loud and clear: social resistan ...

Let’s start with a moment we all shared last week, a moment that resonated deeply here in Belgium. The final goodbye of Kevin De Bruyne from Manchester City. It wasn’t just a farewell to a football legend; it was a powerful image of legacy.   Kevin, once again, brought his children onto the pitch, sharing that emotional moment with the next generation. And behind his incredible ...

Our Fiery Flash of the week is Wolfspeed. The stock plunged nearly 80%, hitting an intraday low of $0.83 on Wednesday. It then staged a remarkable rebound, surging 130% to hover around $1.91 by the morning of May 23, 2025. Even so, the stock is still down roughly 50% over the past five days. If that isn’t Fiery Flash material, what is? This dramatic collapse comes amid reports ...

Heat pumps made headlines again this week because of a new analysis by Belgium’s energy regulator CREG. The conclusion? Despite subsidies, heat pumps are rarely more attractive than traditional gas boilers, at least not financially. The timing couldn’t be better: it’s been exactly one year since we last updated our electricity-to-gas price ratio chart, a key metric in understan ...

While international readers likely know Antwerp for its historical role as a global trade and financial hub, flourishing as Europe’s commercial capital in the 16th century, later rising to become the world’s diamond capital, and now home to one of the largest ports on the planet. Locally, Antwerp is simply called ’t Stad, “the city”, as if no other city really matters (and yes, ...

After 37 years as an assiduous student of the markets and their convoluted movements we are still surprised how strong the force of momentum can be. It’s a law of physics applied to human behaviour. To be clear, we are not talking about so called “momentum stocks” who are more driven by hype than by fundamentals. In those cases, valuation is stratospheric or sometimes impossibl ...