Markets continue to push higher despite persistent volatility beneath the surface, with investors navigating rapidly changing narratives around artificial intelligence, geopolitics, inflation, interest rates and market leadership.
BNN Bloomberg spoke with Jamie Wise, CEO at Periscope Capital, about why resilience, convexity and diversified portfolio construction are becoming increasingly important as investors contend with shifting market narratives and elevated cross-asset volatility.
Key Takeaways
- Rapidly changing market narratives have created a volatile environment despite major equity indices reaching new highs.
- Cross-asset volatility remains elevated across equities, rates, commodities and geopolitical risk, even as headline market volatility appears subdued.
- Portfolio resilience and convexity can help investors navigate both upside and downside market moves without relying on a single market outcome.
- Market leadership has broadened beyond the Magnificent Seven, with semiconductors and other sectors helping support equity gains.
- Potential mega-IPOs and ongoing AI investment trends could drive significant portfolio repositioning and market volatility in the months ahead.
Read the full transcript below:
LINDSAY: Meanwhile, shares of Nvidia are trending up on news of a new chip to bring AI directly to computers. It’s another sign that tech continues to drive the S&P 500. So, for more, let’s bring in Jamie Wise, CEO of Periscope Capital. It’s great to have you join us. Thanks so much.
JAMIE: Hi, Lindsay. Thanks so much. Nice to be here with you.
LINDSAY: Yeah, so this news of Nvidia making a new chip designed to power personal computers. How meaningful is this new development in the ongoing kind of AI story?
JAMIE: Well, it’s just another leg in it, and really the way we think about things here at Periscope isn’t so much directional, but the volatility around the narratives in the market. AI is a big narrative, as you know, in the market, and this is just another data point for us all to consider in that narrative, and it is definitely leading the market today, but it leads it both ways. We’ve seen that, right? There’s lots of anxiety out there around the spend around AI, and will it be monetized in a certain way? So far, recently, we’ve had some constructive attitudes around that, but we certainly saw the anxiety around that just a few months ago.
LINDSAY: Right. So, what does Nvidia have to do when it comes to this plan, in particular, to keep investors feeling positive moving forward, do you think?
JAMIE: I don’t think it’s a company-specific thing. I think it’s just sentiment that’s really driving these markets, and every single day investors get a new data point that they can feel comfortable around and look through some of the other narratives that keep popping up in markets and causing anxieties. Right now, on the equity side at least, we’re living through a period of relative calm and positive sentiment, but the cross-asset volatility behind the scenes really stays front and centre for us, and that’s what’s driving a lot of our positioning.
LINDSAY: We’re also watching for some big kind of mega-IPOs this year, both from Anthropic and OpenAI. Those are just two companies, but to speak about those two companies in particular, how do you think those kind of mega-IPOs will reshape the markets?
JAMIE: There’s no question it’ll have a big impact on the market, but it’s unclear whether that will be a positive or negative impact. There’s going to be lots of positioning that managers will have to get in front of ahead of those IPOs, whether that’s rebalancing their portfolios to account for them or even on the more passive side of the market, where they are likely going to be a part of the major indices sooner rather than later. Lots of those index companies are making changes to their index guidelines to allow for those things to happen, so there is going to be a lot of churn in the market as those large IPOs come to be. It remains to be determined how volatility will react around all those things.
LINDSAY: Is there one that you’re more interested in than the others in terms of how things play out when it comes to some of the big ideas?
JAMIE: Really, yeah, our approach here isn’t on the fundamental side to be directional around these things. It’s recognizing that there are a lot of different narratives that have been happening in the market and wanting to build things, portfolio-construction-wise, that really offer convexity, that offer optionality to different types of outcomes. Resiliency is very important to us, and we recognize that and expect continued pockets of volatility to emerge in the market, but also understanding that those volatility pockets can be to the upside and to the downside. So we really try and position ourselves using options and other resilient forms of strategies and things that have convexity characteristics to them to allow for returns to be harvested in either type of environment without having to take a big directional view.
LINDSAY: We’ve seen tech AI stocks carrying the S&P 500 at the moment. Given the kind of volatility that you were talking about beneath the surface, is this leadership from tech AI sustainable, do you think?
JAMIE: Well, it’s very interesting to talk about that because when you look at the Magnificent Seven, they’ve actually underperformed the market this year. So you’ve had this rotation away from the Magnificent Seven, which many people a year ago thought might not be possible, or that the market would really take a beating if that were to happen, but we found other leadership. Right now, it’s certainly in chipmakers and semiconductors. Earlier in the year, it was more widespread. So I think that’s a really interesting storyline to follow. Can the market diversify away from either tech or the Magnificent Seven and continue its march onward?
Again, something that we focus on a lot here is looking at what correlations are in the market, how high dispersion is, and how interesting it is that we have very low correlation and very high dispersion in the underlying market, yet equities have ground higher and higher and quickly reset from those levels of anxiety just a few months ago. You mentioned some of the geopolitical churn that’s happening in the market. We’ve jumped around from Greenland to Venezuela and, of course, now all eyes are focused on the Middle East. But when will those narratives come back and matter again, and will investors focus more on the geopolitical side of the market rather than the tech side of the market again? These are all things that, to us, point to continued pockets of volatility. We’re enjoying an upside pocket right now, but I think it’s important to keep portfolios resilient against those dynamics should they change.
LINDSAY: I wanted to ask you about that rotation away from the Magnificent Seven, that kind of market dispersion that you mentioned, because some analysts feel as though there’s about to be more attention on the Magnificent Seven once again. Were you surprised by what we’ve seen so far, and what do you think we’ll see for the second half of the year?
JAMIE: Well, definitely the surprise over the last month might have been the strength in semiconductors and those chipmakers really making up for the weakness in the Magnificent Seven. We’ve had this theme — we kind of refer to it as narrative whack-a-mole — that we’ve been living through over the last year or so, with all these different narratives coming up, and then you whack one down and another pops up.
I don’t think many people expected demand to be so strong for the AI build. There was lots of anxiety around the cost of the build, what the Magnificent Seven was spending on that, and whether they would be able to earn a reasonable return on that massive spend. Of course, recently we’ve seen some of that come through, where demand seems to be exceeding supply for now. But will that anxiety, that new mole, pop up again? Will we have to whack it down on the anxiety of just how much is being spent? I think that is still an unresolved question.
LINDSAY: And just lastly, with all this volatility and shifting narratives, how do you think investors should be positioning themselves to withstand it all?
JAMIE: Add convexity into your portfolio. I don’t think now is the time for carry strategies or strategies that expose weakness either in massively rising markets or markets that are falling very quickly. So, to the extent you can use certain types of securities in your portfolio — things like convertible bonds, things like options-based strategies, things that naturally provide some convexity both to the upside and the downside — it’s a good way to harvest that volatility, because oftentimes the volatility that you have to ride through might not be worth the return that you’re experiencing. So we’re looking for other ways to harvest that volatility and still generate returns.
LINDSAY: Okay, we’ll leave it there. Jamie Wise, CEO of Periscope Capital. Appreciate your time. Thanks so much.
JAMIE: Thank you.
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This BNN Bloomberg summary and transcript of the June 1, 2026 interview with Jamie Wise are published with the assistance of AI. Original research, interview questions and added context was created by BNN Bloomberg journalists. An editor also reviewed this material before it was published to ensure its accuracy and adherence with BNN Bloomberg editorial policies and standards.
