Recent Investing Trends(Past 5 years)

Trend: Don't buy bitcoins 12 days ago!

In the past 5 years?

The two things that most people are talking about more than anything else are (A) high frequency trading, a.k.a. algo trading, and (B) risk management measures.

For the people on the cutting edge still trying to pull every conceivable trick to capture a little more alpha, it's (A) that's the big deal. There have actually been spikes in real estate prices based on getting Internet cables closer to the trading floor (in Chicago in other places), where an extra 10 meters is actually worth lots of money.

For institutional investors and large financial firms, the biggest change in their universe over the last 5 years has been all the regulatory compliance shite they have to deal with, and a huge part of that relies on Value-at-Risk and similar risk measures that are mandated by regulatory bodies. See also insurance and reinsurance firms.

Back 5-10 years ago, it was the slicing and dicing of asset backed securities that was a big deal, and 10-20 years ago, it was alternative investments by big endowments into venture capital, hedge funds, private equity, etc., that was a big deal, but both of those things have been relatively cold the last 5 years.

There are always new computational methods being devised for equity derivatives traders and professional portfolio managers, but nothing really revolutionary has happened in the past 5 years there. Just some modest incremental changes, although for the derivatives people, everybody is more interested in extreme value theory and outliers, but really, that just gets back to VaR and TVaR.

The capital inflows into emerging markets caused in part by significant interest rate spreads and met with soaring market returns in those countries are interesting, particularly once you start comparing the differing characteristics and demographics of some of those markets. There's also one major exception.

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Here are some big ones.

#1 (By far the biggest) - The divergence of economics from the markets due to central bank intervention.

#2 - The decrease in available securities and the search for yield through zero interest rates. Sheer supply/demand technicals.

#3 - The growth dynamics of emerging nations starting to change as developed nations aren't creating the same aggregate demand levels that they used to.

You can write a fricking thesis on #1. Hell you could probably take Fenton and I's back and forth on it and your paper is written.