December rolls in, temperatures fall, and so do the market flows. Screens quiet down. Desks empty out. Most are perfectly content to let a volatile, shape-shifting year fade into the rear-view. And as the noise dies down, the familiar ritual begins: the annual moment when investors, for reasons that have more to do with the human psyche than with market structure, start wondering what the next twelve months might hold.
Anyone who spends their days immersed in this business—tracking the swings in data (or the absence of it), the ever-rotating narratives, the sudden bursts of liquidity and the equally sudden vacuum—knows how arbitrary that ritual really is. The calendar offers no extra edge. January 1st does not magically improve anyone’s visibility into the future. If anything, the market usually prefers to humble anyone who starts the year with too much conviction.
And yet, every December, we all do it anyway. We zoom out, wipe the P&L slate clean in our minds, and try to make sense of the bigger picture. Not because the date matters, but because stepping back matters, and December just happens to give everyone an excuse.
So here we are. End of December. Reflecting again. But this year, rather than returning to the usual formats that often make for an insightful read—the “26 for ‘26,” the panoramic cross-asset outlook, the greatest hits of upcoming themes—we wanted to approach this exercise from a different angle.
“Consensus Trades” are supposed to offer comfort: a large crowd seeing the same thing usually feels like validation. But the market has never cared for validation. A trade embraced too tightly, repeated too confidently, or extrapolated too linearly tends to approach its natural limits. And when everyone starts using the same language to describe the future, that’s usually the moment when the future finds a new language.
So we asked ourselves a simple question: Which consensus views have become overstated, over-owned, or over-trusted? And are we willing to take the other side?
From that came this year’s note: “Out of Consensus.”
A thematic watchlist of mispriced stories, stretched assumptions, and contrarian trades that might only matter when nobody expects them to. Maybe they won’t materialise. Perhaps only one will prove decisive. But if the past year taught us anything, it’s that preparation beats prediction, and that being slightly less wrong at the right moment is often enough.
To start, we need to determine the consensus trades. In all honesty, finding these wasn’t hard. Anyone who has spent time reading the year-ahead notes from the sell-side, coupled with social media musings, will be able to discern what the crowd believes.
So let’s get into it.
The Crowd’s Consensus
There are a handful of consensus trades markets will carry into the new year with a fair degree of confidence.
Equities — Long AI, RoW > US, underweight UK, SPX 8,000, double-digit gains
Commodities — Bullish gold, silver, copper on continued rallies, nat gas as a more recent consensus long, bearish oil on increasing surplus
FX — USD underperformance, EUR strength, long FX carry
Debasement Trades — out of fiat and into gold (making an appearance again) and alternative assets like crypto/bitcoin
Deflation and Rate Cuts — especially from the US, while the EU and UK hold more steady
“Run It Hot” — Trump “juicing” the economy ahead of midterms, alongside his sidekick, Bessent, and incoming new Fed Chair
None of this is contrived. These views come straight from headlines, strategist notes, and conversations with readers. Some are simply extensions of what worked in 2025, others are newer expressions of the same underlying instincts.
And to be clear, most of these are not easy—or even sensible—to fade. Trends persist for a reason, and many of the catalysts behind them are unlikely to unwind neatly over the next twelve months.
But every so often, a consensus becomes a little too comfortable. That’s where we’re willing to step in. For 2026, we have four views where we’re prepared to take the other side.
First up…
A Consensus Too Comfortable
The first contribution to our Out of Consensus list is the simplest one to articulate and the hardest one for markets to price correctly: Rate cuts.