Ben Shapiro

Shapiro says that if you are looking for a net new place to put capital to work, there is no better place in the world right now than the UAE and then Saudi Arabia. His reasoning: the region has shifted from ideological conflict to commerce-first dealmaking, Trump just locked in roughly a trillion dollars of two-way investment and defense commitments with Riyadh and Abu Dhabi, and NBS has transformed the Kingdom. He also argues investors are sanguine about Saudi Arabia precisely because it is a very wealthy kingdom that does not have to worry about the next election or the next policy thrown out for public consumption, which is the opposite of the policy whiplash investors face in the US. He is markedly less enthusiastic about Qatar, whose funding of Hamas and lobbying he treats as a real risk.

Shapiro says that if you are looking for a net new place to put capital to work, there is no better place in the world right now than the UAE and then Saudi Arabia. His reasoning: the region has shifted from ideological conflict to commerce-first dealmaking, Trump just locked in roughly a trillion dollars of two-way investment and defense commitments with Riyadh and Abu Dhabi, and NBS has transformed the Kingdom. He also argues investors are sanguine about Saudi Arabia precisely because it is a very wealthy kingdom that does not have to worry about the next election or the next policy thrown out for public consumption, which is the opposite of the policy whiplash investors face in the US. He is markedly less enthusiastic about Qatar, whose funding of Hamas and lobbying he treats as a real risk.

He took Trump's repeated tariff promises literally, so after the State of the Union he called his financial adviser and changed the stock/bond ratio in his portfolio: lighter equities, heavier Treasuries. His reasoning is that there is almost never a hidden 4D-chess motivation with Trump - when he says a thing over and over, he actually wants it to happen - so a disruptive tariff shock was a known known that equity markets had not discounted, while Treasuries would benefit from the resulting risk-off and growth scare.