A new regime has arrived. The consensus that began 2026 — inflation drifting back to target, central banks cutting, global growth humming along — did not survive contact with the Middle East. The closure of the Strait of Hormuz changed the calculus for every asset class simultaneously. What Ninepoint Partners' portfolio managers deliver in their mid-year outlook is not a comfort piece1. It is a disciplined, sector-by-sector reckoning with a world that is being repriced in real time.
The Energy Shock Is Not Priced
The most urgent message in the report comes from Eric Nuttall, Partner and Senior Portfolio Manager, who argues that energy equity markets have not yet caught up to the physical reality of what the Strait closure has done to global inventories. The numbers are stark: roughly 5.7 million barrels per day of net supply removed, over one billion barrels of cumulative lost production since the conflict began, and global inventories tracking toward operational stress levels by late summer.
Yet equities, Nuttall observes, are still discounting oil closer to $65 WTI — "below our view of the floor price for oil." His case is not just about the crisis itself. It is about what happens after the Strait reopens: restocking global inventories, refilling SPRs, and sustained structural demand that he believes will underpin an $80 floor for years. The upside, in his view, has not been priced. Energy producers in stable, low-risk jurisdictions with long resource lives represent the most asymmetric opportunity in the report.
Rate Risk Is Back, and the Central Banks Are Caught
Mark Wisniewski and Etienne Bordeleau-Labrecque frame the fixed income picture with characteristic precision. Higher prices and lower growth, they note, are not problems that interest rates are well suited to solve. The Fed faces a dilemma: energy, AI capital expenditure, and tariff-driven goods price increases are all pushing inflation higher simultaneously. Bordeleau-Labrecque states plainly that "if the energy shock persists and starts spreading to core inflation, then [the Bank of Canada] will have to act, with a series of rate hikes." The team's positioning reflects this uncertainty: low duration bias, options on rates to navigate volatile policy expectations, and additional income generation while waiting for the picture to clarify. In credit markets, a wave of maple issuers has driven new Canadian issuance 60% above last year's pace, with Google and Amazon printing record corporate bond offerings in Canada. The team expects spreads to continue widening as the market digests this supply surge.
Metals, Gold, and Silver: Strategic, Not Cyclical
Senior Portfolio Manager Nawojka Wachowiak reframes the entire metals and mining thesis in this environment. Governments onshoring supply chains, securing energy independence, ramping defence spending, and building strategic stockpiles have transformed the demand story. "The underlying strength in strategic metals, amid geopolitical tension, underscores that demand for critical resources remains resilient — and that the long-term opportunity for investors remains intact," she writes.
Gold, though pulled back from January highs to around $4,500 per ounce, is operating at AISC margins near $3,000 per ounce, generating historic free cash flow. Wachowiak sees the retracement as a healthy clearing of speculative positions, not a fundamental break. Silver, meanwhile, has stabilized near $70 after its own correction, and the World Silver Survey 2026 confirms a structural supply deficit that constrained mine production cannot quickly resolve. Uranium completes the trio, with nuclear buildout demand solidifying across every major economy.
Equities: Earnings Are the Anchor
Sam Mitter and Jonathan Lo make the clearest-eyed observation in the report: the apparent contradiction of a market near all-time highs amid an energy crisis is less paradoxical than it seems. Energy and AI are operating on different parts of the income statement, in different sectors. The result is S&P 500 earnings tracking toward 26% growth in 2026 on a bottom-up basis. "The first half of 2026 demonstrated that despite the macroeconomic stress, earnings remain the most influential factor to market returns." The 10-year yield moving back above 4.5% is a risk worth watching, but the monetization curve in AI, they argue, is just beginning to steepen.
Digital Assets and Infrastructure: Two Emerging Themes
Analyst Jake Moodie frames the digital asset case with a single structural observation: "crypto has crossed the line from speculative technology to financial infrastructure." Stablecoins have grown from under $5 billion to over $300 billion. Tokenized RWAs have surpassed $30 billion, up 200% year-over-year. The gap between fundamentals and price, in Ninepoint's view, may be this cycle's defining opportunity. In infrastructure, Vice President Jeff Sayer identifies sovereignty over critical networks as the next multi-year investment theme, underpinned by NATO's commitment to 5% of GDP in defence and infrastructure spending, translating to roughly $800 billion in incremental annual spending across member nations by 2035.
5 Key Takeaways for Advisors and Investors
1. Energy equities remain undervalued relative to the physical oil market reality - the $80 WTI floor thesis, not the crisis, is the long-term opportunity.
2. Duration risk is real - the fixed income team favours low duration and rate options to navigate a Fed that is more likely on hold or hiking than cutting.
3. Gold, silver, and uranium have transitioned from commodity cycle plays to strategic portfolio holdings driven by geopolitical and energy independence imperatives.
4. Earnings, not macro headlines, remain the dominant driver of equity market returns - the AI monetization cycle is still in its early stages.
5. Crypto and infrastructure are no longer peripheral exposures - both are maturing into core allocations with multi-year structural tailwinds.
Footnote:
1 Fox, James, and John Wilson. "Letter from the Partners: Outlook for H2 2026." Unboxed: The Ninepoint Mid-Year Outlook. Ninepoint Partners LP, June 2026. Contributions by Eric Nuttall, Mark Wisniewski, Etienne Bordeleau-Labrecque, Nawojka Wachowiak, Sam Mitter, Jonathan Lo, Jeff Sayer, Jake Moodie, and John Wilson.
