A team led by Bank of America strategist Michael Hartnett, often referred to as Wall Street's most accurate forecaster, has released a report stating that even with a tentative conclusion to the latest Middle East conflict, the global commodities market rally is expected to persist for years, lasting until the end of 2030. For the broader "post-war trade" opportunity, Hartnett's team emphasizes commodities as the structural core trade, while identifying Chinese tech stocks and the global semiconductor sector as tactical offensive priorities. Global consumer stocks are also positioned to benefit broadly from potential "policy panic relief measures" by the U.S. government as it strives to avert an economic recession—a logic similarly applicable to the global consumer sector.
Hartnett's team is aggressively betting on a strategic framework they term the "post-war trade," which combines continued strength in policy-supported risk assets with a reshaped inflationary and geopolitical landscape that favors winners in resources and advanced manufacturing. Within this framework, the difficulty in systematically shorting the U.S. stock market is not entirely due to flawless fundamentals, but rather because Hartnett believes equities are viewed by policymakers at the Treasury and Federal Reserve as "too big to fail." Short sellers would only regain the upper hand in scenarios of genuine policy failure, such as a crash in the U.S. dollar or Treasury market, or a major credit event.
From the perspective of Hartnett's team, commodities represent the most logically coherent and highest-level core theme of the post-war trade. They are betting that commodities will replace stocks as the biggest winners over the coming years. The core reason is investors' urgent need to hedge against risk, inflation, and a weaker U.S. dollar, while geopolitical tensions and the global AI race are inherently intensifying competition for energy, rare earths, minerals, and critical resources. Hartnett summarizes the core logic as: whoever controls chips, rare earths, minerals, and efficient energy will win the global AI war. This implies that, in Bank of America's view, the core pricing factors for the post-war world are no longer just interest rates and earnings, but rather resource security, supply chain control, and fiscal expansion.
A steepening long-term bond yield curve, the consumer sector, the semiconductor sector, and Chinese tech stocks, coupled with a broader assessment that global equities are unlikely to enter a deep bear market under policy support, are seen by Bank of America as core investment themes within the "post-war trade" framework, second only to commodities. Looking further ahead, Hartnett's team shows a further preference for international stocks and small-cap stocks over the market's mainstream long-term focus on large-cap U.S. tech, betting that capital will gradually shift from the old order of "U.S. mega-cap tech + Treasuries" towards a new order centered on resource concentration, internationalization, manufacturing chains, and policy-benefiting assets.
The era of resource dominance is arriving! Whoever controls rare earths, energy, and chips will win the AI war, with Bank of America proclaiming "commodities will reign" for years to come. Hartnett's team wrote that investors will continue flocking to commodity markets in the coming years, primarily because the commodity theme will benefit from global geopolitical and macroeconomic instability. "Stocks will be replaced by the commodity theme as the biggest winner for the remainder of the 2020s (2026-2030), as investors actively seek hedges against risk, inflation, and dollar weakness," the Bank of America strategists stated. "U.S. government fiscal overexpansion suggests that rallies within a government bond bear market are more likely in the coming years, rather than a rare bull market."
Bank of America notes that the difficulty in completely halting Middle East geopolitical conflicts and the global AI competition are bringing heightened focus to core supply chain issues related to traditional energy. Governments are seeking to limit the impact of soaring energy and other natural resource prices on industry and consumers, while also attempting to secure supplies of critical mineral resources like rare earths, which are vital for manufacturing and technology. Since early 2025, the Bloomberg Commodity Index has surged 35%, more than double the return of the S&P 500 over the same period. The benchmark U.S. Treasury Index has gained less than 7%. Crude oil, in particular, has soared this year after Iran effectively closed the Strait of Hormuz to most shipping following the outbreak of war. Concurrently, metals from gold and silver to copper are already benefiting from tailwinds like central bank purchases and the ongoing boom in AI computing infrastructure. As illustrated, commodities have significantly outperformed benchmark stock and bond indices.
Hartnett's team indicates that the fundamental winners in the second half of this decade will be commodities vastly outperforming the U.S. dollar, and international stocks and small-cap stocks vastly outperforming U.S. stocks and large-cap stocks. He states that the core factor driving geopolitical instability is fundamentally driven by the "need to monopolize commodities." "Whoever possesses chip, rare earth, and mineral resources, along with core energy like oil, will win this globally watched AI war."
Semiconductors, consumer stocks, and Chinese tech stocks are poised for takeoff. In the view of Hartnett's team, semiconductors, consumer stocks, Chinese tech stocks, and a steepening long-term yield curve will be the more actionable tactical offensive trades with potential for excess alpha in the post-war quarters. Chinese tech stocks correspond to "Made in China" maintaining its lead in global manufacturing, continued easing of Sino-U.S. trade tensions, and potential key summit windows. Semiconductors correspond to AI hyperscalers (supercloud giants like Google, Microsoft, and Amazon) continuing their capital expenditure arms race; as long as they are "more willing to take on debt and conduct layoffs than retreat from the AI capex race" (the so-called "AI computing arms race"), the entire core semiconductor chain retains investment value. Consumer stocks are what Hartnett repeatedly emphasizes as the "best post-war trade theme," primarily because he anticipates fiscal and monetary policy will lean more towards alleviating living cost pressures and preventing a simultaneous deterioration in economic and polling trends.
Hartnett's team is beginning to list "consumer stocks" as their "most favored contrarian long" theme amid current market risk appetite fluctuations and ongoing stock market volatility due to geopolitical factors. The core logic is not that consumer fundamentals have completely bottomed, but rather Hartnett's prediction that the White House, after a de-escalation of Middle East conflict and facing recession risks, living cost pressures, and mid-term election considerations, will be forced to introduce "policy panic"-style measures to support consumer spending against a backdrop of higher energy inflation.
This Wall Street giant cites the logic of a rebound from oversold conditions based on "earnings certainty + high beta attributes," along with continuously expanding global AI expenditure, as core reasons for long-term optimism on semiconductor stocks. Bank of America strategists' latest forecast data suggests that, driven by accelerated growth in the global core AI computing产业链 (led by NVIDIA, Broadcom, TSMC, and Marvell Technology, with forward P/E ratios between 15x-20x) and areas like memory/logic chips, 2.5D/3D advanced packaging, and data center power chains, the global semiconductor market will reach a total size of $2 trillion by 2030, representing a compound annual growth rate of 20%. In contrast, the global semiconductor market size is less than $1 trillion as of at least 2025.
As model scale, inference chains, and multimodal/agentic AI workloads drive exponential expansion in computing resource consumption, the capital expenditure focus of tech giants is increasingly concentrating on AI computing infrastructure to meet soaring demand. Global investors continue to anchor the "semiconductor stock bull narrative," centered on expectations around NVIDIA, Google's TPU clusters, AMD's new product iterations, and AI cluster deliveries, as one of the most certain growth investment stories in global equity markets. This also implies that investment themes closely related to AI training/inference, such as power, liquid cooling systems, and optical interconnect supply chains, will remain among the hottest investment camps in the stock market, following leaders like NVIDIA, AMD, Broadcom, TSMC, and Micron even amid Middle East geopolitical uncertainties.
According to the latest analyst expectations compiled by institutions, Amazon, along with Alphabet (Google's parent), Meta Platforms Inc. (Facebook's parent), Oracle, and Microsoft, are projected to have cumulative AI-related capital expenditures reaching approximately $650 billion in 2026, with some analysts believing total spending could exceed $700 billion—implying a year-on-year AI capex increase potentially over 70%. Notably, these five U.S. super tech giants are expected to cumulatively invest about $1.5 trillion between 2023 and 2026 to build massive AI computing infrastructure; by comparison, their cumulative investment throughout history prior to 2022 was approximately $600 billion.
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