For the world’s biggest investors, 2025 is set to be a year that could generate both outrageous fortunes and embarrassing losses.
With multiple wars on the brink of either peace or escalation, US-China relations spiraling and global tariffs in play, Bloomberg News asked top executives at institutions with a total of US$2 trillion ($2.66 trillion) in assets under management how they plan to invest over the year ahead.
GIC
GIC’s outgoing chief investment officer, Jeffrey Jaensubhakij, says the Singapore sovereign wealth fund likes parts of the market where capital has been scarce. “Unfortunately this year — with the markets coming back and everybody kind of more ebullient — in the areas where a lot of people are willing to put capital in it means that returns are being squeezed,” he says.
One place gains can still be had is European real estate, as fewer buyers have been willing to enter after valuations fell. GIC CEO Lim Chow Kiat says some investment themes remain interesting for the firm, year after year — especially infrastructure. “The supply side in terms of projects and assets needs more work,” Lim says, signaling investors would be willing to buy if more come onto the market.
“Investors are, in a way, more ready than the suppliers of those assets, especially brownfield types of assets, for financial investors to take over and free up capital for governments or other owners,” Lim says, citing energy-related infrastructure as a key target. “So infrastructure would be something we continue to invest in the next 12 months.”
See also: New Zealand pitches itself as safe haven in ‘global storm’
China Asset Management
While many investors worry that President Donald Trump’s trade war will further weigh on China’s economic growth and markets this year, Richard Pan, CIO of global capital investment at China Asset Management, sees opportunities.
The Beijing-based company, backed by state-controlled Citic Securities, is the nation’s second-largest mutual fund firm.
See also: The $5 bil for market revival: Money No Enough?
According to Pan, Trump’s first-term tariffs barely dented China’s trade surplus, and the US’s chip restrictions have only helped to strengthen the domestic industry. And while investors are bullish on US stocks in light of Trump’s “America First” rhetoric, valuations there are high while Chinese assets are close to historical lows, creating “very notable investment value”, especially given low bond yields, he says.
“With all the uncertainties, I’m more willing to place my bets where it’s relatively cheap,” he says, citing China’s much lower market capitalisation relative to the size of its economy.
Local technology companies including DeepSeek and Unitree Robotics are also demonstrating China’s shift away from lower-end manufacturing and toward homegrown innovation, thanks in part to its enormous pool of domestic science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) talent, he adds.
If the Chinese government delivers stronger-than-expected measures to allow local authorities to better absorb their debt burdens and purchase more unsold homes, that may finally help arrest the property slump, boost the stock market and revive consumer confidence, Pan says.
To benefit from that potential trend, Pan is looking to high-dividend stocks like banks, and favors domestic industry leaders in batteries and home appliances that are also globally competitive. “The current valuations of Chinese assets reflect very pessimistic expectations,” Pan says. “But once confidence returns and China leaves behind the property slump, the yuan should strengthen rather than weaken, and even 5 to 1 against the dollar is possible in the long term.”
Partners Group
Unlike some of its peers, Swiss alternative asset manager Partners Group never completely soured on China. In the year ahead, the most realistic sectors to invest in there are those focused on the domestic market, such as contract manufacturers producing pharmaceuticals for locals, according to executive chairman Steffen Meister.
To stay ahead of Singapore and the region’s corporate and economic trends, click here for Latest Section
And while the firm has pumped large amounts of money into areas such as data centres — like many global investors — it now spends time looking deeper at businesses that can benefit from the data boom.
This could include firms that inspect electricity grid equipment as well as makers of gear like graphics processing unit connectors that facilitate faster data transfers.
That’s an area of key concern to artificial intelligence developers, whose models use a huge amount of processing power for training.
“The biggest problem is, if it doesn’t work, an hour’s failure means your monthly revenue is gone,” he says, referring to data centres. “What are the companies that are really helping to deliver enormous value?”
But while AI is driving rapid transformation and every company has to evaluate what its impact will be, Meister says some promising areas of the technology are still too risky for investors like Partners.
After the firm evaluated a large number of AI companies that provide software for drug discovery — a major theme across the pharmaceutical industry — it decided the risk profile was better suited to venture capitalists.
Future Fund
Australia’s sovereign wealth fund, whose AUM figure is as of Dec 31, 2024, is tilting toward a home bias. CEO Raphael Arndt sees opportunities in private credit, particularly for small- and medium-size businesses across the country.
A recent update to Future Fund’s investment mandate requires it to consider investing more in national priorities, such as housing, energy and infrastructure projects.
Arndt says he sees a lot of opportunities across infrastructure, including domestic energy networks.
“We’re seeing airports, data centres, every part of the energy system needing capital—to fund growth, to retire old assets and to reposition for lower-carbon economies,” he says. “And we’re finding quite interesting opportunities there, because there’s just a shortage of capital.”
Pictet Wealth Management
The Swiss firm’s CIO, Cesar Ruiz, sees both pitfalls and opportunities in 2025, labeling it “a year of snakes and ladders”, where careful management and sequencing — the timing of investments — will make a huge difference.
Many economists worry the Trump administration’s push for tariffs will wreak inflationary havoc, but Ruiz is confident the market will grow.
In the first half, he believes that US exceptionalism will remain strong and that stocks there will grow enough for investors to record solid gains.
Ruiz likened new Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent to former US Federal Reserve Chair Ben Bernanke, who served during the global financial crisis.
Bernanke “was the best person for the job at the right time. I can say the same about Scott Bessent,” he says. “I know him personally, and he knows what needs to be done.”
Ruiz expects massive consolidation in the US among mid-cap financial firms, making it a good time to buy shares in the likely acquirers. And with mergers and acquisitions set to surge alongside initial public offerings as Trump cuts regulation, investment banks or deal targets offer good opportunities.
“This is the year where alternatives will do well. We’ve had two years of private equity not doing very well, and there is a big investment bank that has 400 IPOs lined up,” he says. “So I’m happy to redeploy and take a bit of risk into private equity these days.”
Even so, Ruiz is hedging for surprises on both the upside and downside. If the war in Ukraine somehow ends this year and Germany achieves a grand coalition that stops the budget discord and German consumers start to spend their savings with more confidence, then his view on European equities will switch from negative to positive. That’s a base he’s covering by buying long-dated call options. Ruiz is also positive on gold. “It’s going to be a long year for us,” he says.
Aware Super
The Australian retirement fund’s CIO, Damian Graham, is looking into private equity, where he expects deal flow to improve. “I think most would expect that 2025 will be a more positive year for exits in private equity,” he says.
Graham is also turning his attention to real estate, where he says new office opportunities are appearing. Most pension funds and institutional investors globally had significant allocations in office and retail, and they are “not natural buyers,” he adds. “We’re obviously at the opposite end,” Graham says. “We’re underweight those sectors so we have more opportunity to look at them if we want to.”
