rethink investments.

a thematic investment framework.

rethink everything^® is the lens we apply across the global economy including technology, demography, politics, and finance as the world transitions towards a more sustainable future. As governments, consumers and businesses adapt to these shifts, we are positioning portfolios to benefit from emerging opportunities. rethink investments outlines our core convictions about these fundamental transitions through targeted thematic equity exposures. 

In 2024, we launched our thematic equity investment framework, rethink investments. Our thesis was and remains that deep societal transformations create the opportunity to map portfolios of stocks likely to exhibit greater earnings strength – which can then be integrated into strategic high-conviction equity investments for long-term investors. Particularly in times of heightened volatility – the present being a prime example, identifying profound trends allows us to capture opportunities as they appear, and to stay invested for such substantial transformations.

Previously, three societal transformations – demographic, technological, and environmental – led us to identify six high-conviction equity investment themes: rethink longevity, new gen, technology, net zero, nature, and infrastructure. The intervening years have exposed a fourth societal change: the now clear transformation of our unipolar world into a multipolar global order – characterised by less cooperative, more competitive, and even conflictual international relations, increasing the need for security. Meanwhile, it has  also become clear that the transition towards a sustainable economy must consider climate, biodiversity, resources, and social systems together. This has led us to replace our net zero and nature themes with a single theme expressing this journey: rethink transition.

2. rethink new gen.

Generations Z and Alpha are emerging as powerful drivers of global growth, reshaping consumption, technology adoption, and health trends far earlier than previous cohorts. Digitally native and socially connected, they are accelerating AI usage, social commerce, and experience‑led consumption, with emerging markets at the core of demographic and GDP growth. Meanwhile, rising obesity, mental‑health stress, and age‑related sensory disorders are redefining healthcare demand. As geopolitics fragments globalisation, ‘New Gen’‑driven demand provides a rare, internally generated growth engine, creating investment opportunities tied to demographics, culture, and health rather than cross‑border trade.

4. rethink infrastructure.

Infrastructure not only frames the feasibility of governments’ and corporates’ strategies, with infrastructure for energy, water, communication, transportation and mobility, building, space, and the AI value chain increasingly seen as a means for them to assert their dominance, economic independence, and sovereignty – but infrastructure also drives the pace of change, creating structural advantages for those investing judiciously. The increasing prevalence of armed conflicts and extreme climate events, added to the trade tensions ignited by the Trump administration’s tariff policy, have returned infrastructure to the spotlight as both an investment opportunity and a risk. This is most obvious in both security infrastructure and infrastructure security. 

6. rethink security.

Security is emerging as a defining investment theme as governments and companies prioritise sovereignty and resilience amid conflict and trade fragmentation. Vulnerabilities in food and water – from fertiliser chokepoints to stressed freshwater systems – are boosting demand for precision agriculture, local/proximity food production, resilient logistics, and water solutions such as desalination, testing, treatment, recycling, and safer distribution. Health and energy security are driving investment in outbreak surveillance, vaccine and mass-response capacity, and more diversified power systems (decentralised renewables, embedded generation for heavy industry, and flexible domestic backup supply). Finally, cyber and homeland security are accelerating, with AI-enabled cybersecurity, encryption, surveillance, air defence, counter-drone capabilities, and criticalminerals supply chains becoming strategic priorities.