Investment landscape for equities in 2026 - Mid year industry ETF review

Summary

The EQT Eight Bays Global Fund has continued to perform strongly investing in global industry-based Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs) that offer exposure to sectors with high growth potential. The Fund remains constructive on sectors benefiting from structural growth themes, particularly AI infrastructure, cloud computing, healthcare innovation, electrification and energy security. While technology continues to dominate market returns, we are increasingly mindful of rising capital intensity and potential disruption within software. Portfolio positioning remains focused on industries with the strongest long-term earnings growth.

Key takeaways:

• Global equities have continued to outperform despite geopolitical and inflationary risks supported by the strong corporate earnings backdrop.

• Technology stocks continue to benefit from very strong earnings growth and positive earnings revisions while trading at reasonable valuation multiples.

• The global industry ETF universe continues to broaden while costs continue to fall allowing for efficient execution and a larger opportunity set of sub-sectors to invest in.

• As the number of ETFs rise, we caution that stringent fundamental analysis needs to be carried out on, not only the underlying industry characteristics, but also the ETF structure, as the performance of different ETFs within an industry can vary widely.
 
• The EQT Eight Bays Global Fund has unique skills to evaluate industries and ETF composition and construct a portfolio that exhibits relatively low stock specific risk.

Major sector ETFS ranked by 6-month returns