Reflections on Our Global CIO Forum

What You Need to Know

We hosted 130 chief investment officers (CIOs) and senior asset allocators from around the world in Boston recently for two days of discussions about the key strategic issues they face. In this note, we summarize some of the key ideas and discussions from the event.

It will be of no surprise to readers to hear that geopolitics and Federal Reserve independence were core points of focus. Despite these existential issues, the general sense of the gathering was decisively of a pro-risk disposition—albeit with widely-held concerns about market concentration and valuation. The questions were not, generally, about whether risk assets can deliver positive returns, but instead tended to focus on the detail of exactly which kind of private asset to hold.

There was a lot of interest in allocation to active strategies, in part as an offset to the riskiness of the “passive” index, given the degree of concentration and valuation. This interest was amplified by concerns about a low-return outlook. Potential artificial intelligence (AI) profitability gains were notably pushed down the list of questions by these other topics.

For the first time at one of our CIO events, AB employed artists to visually interpret the event in “real time.” The completed work, in its original form measuring 32 feet x 8 feet, serves as a monumental aide memoire for what is on the minds of asset allocators at the beginning of 2026 (Display 1). This mural attempts to pull out the key themes from the event and those that frequently came up in questions from the audience, such as: the relative role of public and private assets in a portfolio; the interaction of geopolitics and markets; whether the dollar’s role can be de-throned; and the case for higher inflation.

For illustrative purposes only. Source: AllianceBernstein 

Additional Contributors: Robertas Stancikas and Maureen Hughes