1. Chip stocks surge ahead of 2025 Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas.

Nvidia shares closed today at a new all-time high, with CEO Jensen Huang’s announcing “the ChatGPT moment for general robotics is just around the corner”.

“Agentic AI is here and next comes Physical AI.”

2. Nvidia is helping humanoid robots learn through Apple Vision Pro instruction.

CEO Jensen Huang unveiled another essential aspect of GR00T, its humanoid robotics project.

The new modality is based around imitation learning, a fundamental aspect of teaching robots a new skill. It’s doubly important in the world of humanoids, whose designs are based on the one doing the teaching. Imitation learning is what it sounds like.

A person performs an action and the robot follows suit. With “GR00T Blueprint”, users can create these actions by using Apple’s Vision Pro. The process is captured as a digital twin, which the robot can then repeatedly execute in simulation.

3. Uber and Lyft are gearing up for the robotaxi revolution.

After ending their own driverless plans, the ride-sharing companies will have driverless cars—from Alphabet’s Waymo and others—on their apps this year. In the coming months, riders in Austin, Texas, and Atlanta will be able to hail a Waymo through the Uber app.

The ride-hailing giants are reacting to growing signs that driverless technology may finally be ready to spread beyond a few experimental markets and they are competing to be the platforms on which the robotaxi technology developed by others will operate.

The robotaxi companies, such as Waymo (Tesla not yet), get access to the ride-sharing giants’ tens of millions of customers without having to advertise or build the expensive technology needed to efficiently connect cars to customers.

In August, Waymos picked up close to 500,000 passengers in California, up from fewer than 20,000 a year earlier.

4. Apple is facing an uphill battle heading in 2025.

Apple’s big promises of upending the highly competitive AI market have been very modest.

The launch of the iPhone 16 in September came with no Apple Intelligence features, though software updates since then have slowly started to drop AI tools into devices. Even then, the features haven’t been jaw-dropping.

However, Apple’s biggest problem might be outside the US. Tensions between the US and China and domestic competitors gaining ground have posed problems for Apple’s second-largest market.

The arrival of the Trump administration, which threatened a 60% tariff on Chinese goods, could worsen matters for a company that relies heavily on China to manufacture its products.

Meanwhile, Apple is trading at 10x sales, the highest valuation level in company history.

5. Is 2025 going to be good for European property stocks?

The sector is currently trading at a 31% discount to NAV, which has historically been a compelling entry point, providing on average double digit returns in the subsequent year.

Also, property stocks have been highly correlated with interest rates. Likely lower bond yields bode well for the sector.

6. Real Estate is the sector with the second highest positive earnings revisions, historically a major indicator for share price performance.

7. Gold has become a more important structural component of investors’ portfolios.

The reasons range from structurally higher geopolitical uncertainty since 2022, to persistent high uncertainty about the longer-term inflation backdrop, to concerns about “debt debasement” due to persistently high government deficits across major economies, to waning confidence in fiat currencies in certain emerging markets, and to a broader diversification away from the US dollar.

Below: Implied gold allocation as % of the stock of equities, bonds and cash held by non-bank investors globally.

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