Valentijn van Nieuwenhuijzen: What Mr. Market teaches us
Valentijn van Nieuwenhuijzen: What Mr. Market teaches us
By Valentijn van Nieuwenhuijzen, Investment Strategist and former CIO of NN Investment Partners/Goldman Sachs Asset Management
Investors aim to ‘beat’ the market. Few succeed. Those who do, follow the most basic laws of survival: they learn, adapt, and play as teams. These are the same traits that helped homo sapiens outlast neanderthals. In finance, too, adaptation is everything. Especially now, as the macro and market landscape undergoes another regime shift.
Markets don’t price declarations or single-point forecasts. They price distributions of a constantly shifting range of outcomes. They evolve without ideology, rewarding flexibility over conviction. If we listen carefully, Mr. Market helps us separate signal from noise in a world where old correlations wobble, asset classes blur, and neat narratives get mugged by price.
Different markets operate on different time horizons. Equities trade near-term cash flows and policy tailwinds such as deregulation, liquidity, or capex. FX and bond markets arbitrate credibility, external balances, and institutional durability. Gold toggles trust and tail risk. When these lenses diverge, it’s not necessarily irrational. It’s Mr. Market pricing different slices of the future.
Two broken relationships in today’s markets signal a deeper regime change. First, the post-tariff ‘risk-off’ move in the dollar and treasuries. Historically, global shocks pulled capital into the US This time, sweeping tariff talk brought a weaker dollar and softer treasuries. It suggests that global investors are reassessing America’s status as an automatic refuge when policy becomes more discretionary and less institutionally anchored.
Second, there is the coexistence of AI and gold. Tech euphoria and gold strength used to be contradictions. Now, optimism about transformative technology coexists with demand for timeless insurance. Two cohorts, two lenses: one chasing growth optionality, the other paying for simplicity amid complexity. These shifts don’t mean that financial gravity has vanished, but they do confirm that our old compass is broken. In the past, a strong US economy meant a strong dollar, and tech and gold were opposite poles. Mr. Market is updating the map faster than the narrative can follow.
Popular stories often fail the market’s reality check. Take the idea that crypto might be the next safe haven. In practice, crypto trades as high-beta risk, not as a stabilizer. Over the past decade, it has rallied with animal spirits and sold off when uncertainty spiked. The ‘inflation hedge and anti-system sanctuary’ narrative is compelling, but price action suggests speculation more than sanctuary.
Another example is French government bonds, often portrayed as a crisis flashpoint. Despite noisy politics, French debt has traded more calmly and often more firmly than headlines suggest. Markets distinguish between spectacle and solvency, between fiscal frameworks or central bank independence and those drifting from institutional anchors. Compare US, UK or Japanese fiscal metrics to France’s, and the ‘weak link’ story quickly unravels. Both cases remind us that markets are ruthless myth detectors.
When the ground is shifting, markets offer a practical diagnostic lens. To use it, investors can adopt a simple discipline. For any popular story, write down what market behaviour would disprove it. Then observe how prices evolve. If Mr. Market disagrees long enough, retire the story, no matter how elegant it sounds.
So, what is Mr. Market saying right now? We are in a new regime where government and institutional credibility is being re-priced. Yet strong earnings, policy support, and AI-driven capex are preventing a growth collapse. That’s why favoured sectors can levitate even as traditional US safe-haven trades wobble. Investors are paying up for optionality (AI) and insurance (gold). Complexity hasn’t killed risk appetite, but it has pushed it toward a barbell of innovation and protection.
And clearly institutional anchors still matter. Assets embedded in credible, rules-based frameworks, like euro-area fiscal and monetary structures, trade more calmly than their political headlines imply. Meanwhile, cherished narratives fail their price tests more often than many think. ‘Crypto as safe haven’ or ‘France as weak link’ both need rewriting.
The edge for investors today lies in humility and falsifiability. Don’t overplay your hand, form testable views, and learn from the market’s answers. Markets aren’t omniscient, but they remain the best live experiment we have for testing stories against reality.
Markets may not tell a neat story, but they reveal a shifting probability surface. If we let prices lead, rather than priors or bias, we can navigate a world where free trade and institutional stability are no longer guaranteed tailwinds. Where ‘safe’ and ‘growth’ labels must be confirmed by behaviour, not assumed by narrative. That’s how we keep our footing when the old coordinates fail. By listening to a market compass that updates faster than we do. By steering our course past the tempting voices of the storytelling Sirens.