Cathie Wood: How to invest for 2026

**Danni Hewson** (0:00)
Hello, once again, we thought we better bring you up to date on some of the big economic news that is moving markets as I record this on Thursday lunchtime, because we've had the interest rate decision from the Bank of England. And as expected, they held rates at 3.75%.
But what was interesting was the fact that it was an 8-1 split. So the chief economist, Hugh Peele, voted actually to raise interest rates. And in amongst this decision, we also heard from the bank that there is now the potential for inflation to get as high as 6.2% by the beginning of next year. Now, that, of course, comes on the day when the oil price spiked to $126 for a barrel of Brent crude. They're looking at it now. It has come down significantly. It's also worth mentioning that overnight, we had four big tech results from some of those hyperscalers. So we had Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, and Microsoft all delivering updates. And of course, it was all about that CAPEX spend, the huge amounts of cash which is being spent on AI. And it was kind of a 50-50 split in terms of how markets reacted to the news. The winner was absolutely Alphabet, because its Google Cloud revenue had jumped 63 percent. So it really is nibbling away a market share from the likes of Amazon and Microsoft and we saw shares jump to a record high in after hours trading.
I wasn't looking too bad for Amazon shares edged up a bit, but investors weren't as happy with Meta and Microsoft, but in particular, Meta got a bit of a whooping because it also said that it had had a drop in users. But we do know that investors are hypersensitive to these huge amounts of spending that is being spent on AI, $725 billion over this year and where companies are demonstrating that that is yielding results, that it is making money. Investors far more happy than if the opposite is the case. Now it's time for the main edition of the Money & Markets podcast.

**Dan Coatsworth** (2:34)
Hello, welcome back to the AJ Bell Money & Markets podcast. I'm Dan Coatsworth, and thanks to the magic of podcasting, you'll have just heard from my pod co-host Danni Hewson about the latest interest rate decision from the Bank of England, and a rundown of those results from the big tech companies.

**Danni Hewson** (2:50)
Yes, we're recording the main bit of the pod on Wednesday afternoon, but we wanted to make sure that you were up to date with those big bits of market influencing news. And there has certainly been no shortage of that this week, Dan.

**Dan Coatsworth** (3:04)
Yeah, very, very busy week for news. So things like the UAE pulling out of Oil Producers Cartel, OPEC. We had latest numbers from BP, you know, huge, huge profit there. Shell doing a big takeover of Canada's Arc Resources.
And that should finally put to bed speculation that it might want to snap up the aforementioned BP.

**Danni Hewson** (3:26)
There's also been more misery, I'm afraid, for the retail sector as the High Street Stalwart and Claire's Accessories has shut up shop, although concessions are still open. Plus with three aim listed companies calling in administrators in the past few weeks, we'll be discussing why companies fail.

**Dan Coatsworth** (3:46)
Now on the personal finance front, we've got the Renters' Rights Act coming to force, probably today as you listen to this, 1st May. So we sort of raised the question, is it still worth being a landlord?

**Danni Hewson** (3:58)
And we've got two fantastic chats for you, 1st with Morningstar economist, Grant Slade, assessing how markets could be impacted by a drubbing for labor in next week's local elections and the 2nd with no less than investing royalty. I've been chatting with Cathie Wood, the founder of Arc Investment Management about why she's buying Tesla stock, selling AMD, and why she thinks this week's furore around OpenAI's outlook is nothing to worry about.

**Dan Coatsworth** (4:28)
Lots to chew over again. So Danni, should we start off with that stuff about the UAE quitting OPEC? What does this actually mean? I guess probably worth putting to context, what on earth is OPEC in the first place?
Yes.

**Danni Hewson** (4:42)
Well, I made sure that I knew exactly what OPEC stood for. So if you have any kind of trivia challenge, pub quiz or whatever, this could come up. This will be handy, so pay attention. The Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, and it's been around for 60 years, and the United Arab Emirates has actually been in OPEC for almost 60 years. So it will leave 11 members when it leaves. There's also OPEC Plus, which is non-oil exporters, but they have interests in all of that.