Navigating Equities, Gold, and Global Risk with Absolute Strategy Research

In this episode, Jeff Marine of Absolute Strategy Research joins the IBKR Podcast to discuss how shifting macro conditions, geopolitical tensions and historical data are shaping current portfolio positioning. The conversation explores asset allocation adjustments and what investors are watching as market conditions evolve.

Summary – IBKR Podcasts Ep. 370

The following is a summary of a live audio recording and may contain errors in spelling or grammar. Although IBKR has edited for clarity no material changes have been made.

Andrew Wilkinson

Welcome to this week’s IBKR podcast. I’m Andrew Wilkinson, Director of Training Education here at Interactive Brokers, and my guest today—first time on the show—is Jeff Marine, who is the Managing Director for the Americas at Absolute Strategy Research. Welcome, Jeff. How are you?

Jeff Marine

Doing well, Andrew. Thanks for having me on today.

Andrew Wilkinson

It’s a pleasure. Now, we are going to learn a little bit more about Absolute Strategy Research, which is a renowned investment research publisher based in London but has a strong U.S. presence. The recent Asset Allocation Quarterly and webinar—we’re on April the seventh—give us an overview. Who is Absolute Strategy Research, or ASR, and what type of investor do you service?

Jeff Marine

Terrific. Thanks, Andrew. So, ASR is a macro strategy research firm, and we have five interconnected products which very much associate with each other, starting out with global/U.S. economics. The reason I say global/U.S. is because the U.S. is the most important capital market and the largest economy in the world, so it naturally demands a lot of our attention. From there, we move into asset allocation and then the strategies within the various asset classes, with a main focus on equity strategy, multi-asset strategy—which is everything else in addition to equities—and then climate macro strategy, which is a thematic product. Our client base is global, but we do have a very blue-chip client base here in the U.S., which includes everything from some of the largest institutional managers, whose names you’ll know quite well, to individual investors, RIAs, and wealth managers.

Andrew Wilkinson

And the service, to some degree, is also available to Interactive Brokers clients. Is that right?

Jeff Marine

That’s right. We do have research which is posted on the website, and we’d be very happy to show it to your clients.

Andrew Wilkinson

So, there’s been a lot happening in 2025 and 2026. What was ASR’s investment stance in 2025?

Jeff Marine

Heading into 2025, we were very much risk-on. In fact, the title of our report, which we published in December of 2024, was “Staying Risk-On into 2025.” What that meant was basically a big overweight in equities and high yield, but we were also very focused on gold and real assets. At the beginning of last year, we were max overweight gold, and we gradually reduced it to a slight overweight before, just a few weeks ago, cutting it to neutral on concerns about the near-term trajectory. Oh, sorry, Andrew—we basically publish quarterly investment strategy outlooks, starting with asset allocation, as I mentioned. In mid-March of this year, we published a note looking to reduce risk into the Iran war, which is extending longer than some initial expectations.

What that basically meant was that we took down our overweight in equities to neutral, and we raised our weighting in core fixed income—which is effectively U.S. Treasuries and other government debt—slightly. But we very much remained focused on real assets and also on non-U.S. equities. And those are some of the topics that Nick Nelson will speak about when you see him next week, hopefully.

Andrew Wilkinson

Now, Nick is your Director of Investment Research and Global Equity Strategy, right?

Jeff Marine

That’s right. Nick’s first job when he joined ASR was as the Head of Global Equity Strategy after spending close to 20 years with UBS, and before too long, he became our Director of Research as well.

Andrew Wilkinson

Now, one of the things I really like about the research that you guys put out is the style—you use a lot of charts in the process.

Jeff Marine

Absolutely. We have a chart library of, I think, 30,000 charts which have been created by the co-founders of the company. ASR has been around for 20 years, founded in 2006 by previous equity strategists at Merrill Lynch and UBS, and they’ve maintained a library and continued to grow it since then. We have some charts which date back to the beginning of the 1900s. Obviously, data is not available for everything we’d like to analyze on that basis, but we do try to offer historical perspective in addition to a forward-looking view to see how things may change going forward.

Andrew Wilkinson

All right, so for anybody who does want to join us on that live webinar—April the seventh at 10:00 AM Eastern, 3:00 in London, 4:00 in Paris—you can sign up from the Interactive Brokers website, interactivebrokers.com. Look under the Education section, which will take you to the IBKR Campus, and look under Webinars for forthcoming events.

And look out for the ASR event. It’s going to be 10 o’clock, April the seventh. Jeff, looking forward to it very much.

Jeff Marine

Likewise, Andrew. Thank you for the time, and we look forward to seeing you and hope to see some of your clients as well. I think we have a lot to add. Thank you.

Andrew Wilkinson

Thanks for joining me—and remember to the audience to subscribe wherever you download your podcasts from. Bye for now.