Baseball has always been a statistics-driven game. In 2002, however, the Oakland Athletics, led by then-Assistant Manager Paul DePodesta and General Manager Billy Beane, pioneered a completely new approach to analyzing player data that helped a team with one of the lowest payrolls in the league win 103 games. Most recently the vice president of player development for the New York Mets, in January 2016, DePodesta didn’t just switch teams—he switched sports, becoming chief strategy officer of the Cleveland Browns, an American football team.
 
Will “Moneyball” work in football? DePodesta certainly thinks so. Hear what he had to say about the limits of data-driven decision-making, when it makes sense to rely on instinct, and why it’s not only important to consider the data you have, but also the data you might be missing.  He spoke about all that and more at the Credit Suisse 2016 Thought Leader Forum.

No one is right all the time, but one can learn to be wrong less often. Watch Michael Mauboussin, Credit Suisse’s Head of Global Financial Strategies, explain how overcoming naïve realism and questioning the status quo can help leaders of all kinds make better choices. He discussed the above and more at the 2016 Thought Leader Forum.

In January, Google’s AlphaGo crossed a major artificial intelligence threshold by besting human grandmaster Lee Sedol at the famously complex game of Go. The win prompted a flood of news stories about whether humans will become obsolete in a world of increasingly intelligent machines that don’t just follow instructions embedded in code, but actually learn. At Credit Suisse’s 2016 Thought Leader Forum, University of Washington computer science professor Pedro Domingos addressed the state of the art in machine learning, its current limitations and future potential, and what it all means for the economy.

No one is right all the time, but one can learn to be wrong less often. Watch Michael Mauboussin, Credit Suisse’s Head of Global Financial Strategies, explain how overcoming naïve realism and questioning the status quo can help leaders of all kinds make better choices. He discussed the above and more at the 2016 Thought Leader Forum.

The Chinese generation born between 1990 and 1999 has grown up during a time of rising prosperity. How will this expressive, individualistic, and well-educated Young China shape the country’s business and culture? How will their interests and preferences shape buying behavior in an increasingly consumption-oriented economy? Watch the video to hear what experts at Credit Suisse’s sixth annual China Investment Conference expect from China’s next generation.

China is undergoing a seismic shift from an export-oriented economy to one based on domestic consumption. But what do we know about the generation of domestic consumers who will drive that change forward? Young China – those born between 1990 and 1999 – saw economic growth accelerate rapidly during their formative years, and Chinese wealth per capita has quadrupled since 2000. They were also quite likely to have been their family’s only child, thus often receiving the lion’s share of their parents’ resources and attention. Though the one-child policy became official in 1980, the number of babies born each year began to decline in earnest in the 1990s. As a result, 90s babies are better educated than their predecessors – more than 85 percent of them have graduated high school, and nearly 40 percent have some form of higher education. Accustomed to relative prosperity, Chinese youth are more willing to spend money on leisure activities such as eating out, going to the movies, and traveling than previous generations. Finally, and like youth all over the planet, young China has grown up in the digital era, and some 60 percent of them spend more than three hours a day using the Internet on their smartphones.

Just as in Western countries, China’s youth prefers to do most things online – especially shopping. Some 277 million of China’s 649 million Internet users are between the ages of 15 and 25, and people between the ages of 20 and 30 make up about half of the country’s online shoppers. Where are they shopping, and what are they buying? Domestic e-tailers such as Tmall and Taobao are extremely popular, but Credit Suisse also notes that young Chinese shoppers are increasingly ordering clothing, baby products, cosmetics and other goods from overseas. Counterfeit and damaged products are still a concern on some Chinese e-commerce sites, and many shoppers prefer the reliability of foreign brands. Status-conscious young people also like the fact that they can find items online that aren’t available in Chinese stores. China’s online retailers are likely to form partnerships with international brands to sell their products directly, Credit Suisse says E-commerce site JD.com already has a leg up on the competition, as it guarantees the authenticity of its products with a warranty and offers same-day and next-day delivery in more cities than its peers. Meanwhile, service-oriented e-commerce is growing fast, too. China’s youth, not terribly enthusiastic cooks, are fueling huge growth in online food delivery services. Credit Suisse expects the 2.

Having grown up in relatively prosperous times, entertainment is a bigger priority for China’s youth than for generations past. People under 30 comprise 52 percent of Chinese film audiences and have fueled box-office sales growth of 40 percent a year for the last five years. With plans to open 700 new theaters, Chinese chain Wanda Cinema could see its market share double to 30 percent by 2020, according to Credit Suisse. Meanwhile, the Chinese government has predicted the sports industry – everything from the broadcasting, advertising and sponsorship rights associated with professional sports, as well as events such as marathons – will grow 25 percent a year to reach 3 trillion yuan ($462 billion) by 2025, partly through sales of broadcast rights for professional football and basketball games. But young people aren’t just watching – they’re also participating: the number of marathon runners in the country doubled to 1 million between 2012 and 2014. An increasing focus on physical fitness should benefit China’s largest sportswear company, Anta, while the growing popularity of road races should be good for Wisdom Sports Group, which organizes such events. Travel adventures are also increasingly appealing to China’s youth.

The Chinese middle class is getting younger, and the under-30 crowd has very different ideas about managing money than their parents. They are more interested in higher-risk products such as equities, trusts, and peer-to-peer loans and have a greater affinity for banking and investing online. Though the $1.3 trillion yuan ($200 billion) managed in online accounts for just 3 percent of total assets under management in China, it’s been growing fast, and Credit Suisse believes it will continue to do so. Three types of online wealth management providers are vying for dominance: the financial services arms of Internet giants Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent control 56 percent of the market, traditional financial institutions take another 15 percent, and third-party purveyors of wealth management products comprise the remaining 29 percent. The Internet giants have had success selling money market funds to Chinese investors, and Credit Suisse says an immense trove of customer data gives them an advantage going forward. Banks are launching their own online money market funds alongside their online banking services. Third-party providers allow users to buy products such as equity index funds and short-term wealth management products, and often offer financial education materials and advisory services.

China is facing a serious labor shortage in the not-too-distant future, particularly when it comes to filling dirty, dangerous jobs. Chinese citizens born during the 1990s are better educated than any previous generation, and as a result, factory equipment operator jobs are going unfilled while clerical positions are in high demand. China’s population is also aging – the ratio of people 65 or older to those between 15 and 64 has grown from 10 percent a decade ago to 13 percent in 2014. Slowing birth rates since the 1990s mean that the proportion of retirees is going to keep growing. What to do? Send in the robots, of course. When the old-age dependency ratio reached China’s current level in Japan (the 1980s) and South Korea (2010), automation took off, and Credit Suisse expects it will do so in China as well. Demographics aside, there are numerous other reasons for the increased amount of automation in Chinese manufacturing. Wages are rising quickly, giving factory owners a reason to prefer non-human workers. The combination of rapid urbanization and rising incomes in Chinese society has also shortened the life cycle for manufactured goods and diversified the array of goods consumers want. Both trends put pressure on factory owners to be highly flexible, produce in smaller batches, and yet ensure consistent quality. Robots are good for all of the above.

Enough talk already. The moment is finally here: The Federal Reserve raised interest rates today by 0.25 percent for the first time since June 2006. Credit Suisse doesn’t believe the small, well-anticipated hike will hurt the U.S. economy in and of itself. (What happens in rate-sensitive markets, especially high-yield bonds, is another story, and one that The Financialist will cover in the coming days.) More important to financial markets are the signals Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen sent about what happens next. Both the Federal Open Market Committee statement and Yellen’s press conference struck a balanced tone – neither particularly dovish nor hawkish. The committee said future hikes would be gradual and that interest rates would remain low for some time, but the vote to raise rates was unanimous and the language of the statement was “unapologetic,” Credit Suisse Fed analyst Dana Saporta wrote in a note released after the decision. Credit Suisse believes the Federal Reserve will raise interest rates by 0.25 percent three more times in 2016, which is broadly consistent with the FOMC members’ own projections for the path of the fed funds rate in 2016.
 
Stay tuned to The Financialist this week for more coverage of the Federal Reserve’s historic move.

At the beginning of 2014, there were 43 known “unicorns” worldwide — private companies valued at $1 billion or more. As of November 2015, that number had nearly tripled to 132. The rapid growth in the number of well-funded, late-stage private companies raises several important questions: If companies can raise so much money without tapping capital markets, why do they even need to go public? More importantly, are valuations getting so lofty that they warrant concern? Jim Breyer, founder and CEO of Breyer Capital, a global venture capital and private equity firm, discussed these questions and more at Credit Suisse’s 6th Annual Emerging Markets Leadership Forum. Hear what Jim has to say about the sudden proliferation of unicorns.

It’s no secret that one of the best ways to be successful when investing in capital markets is to buy when everyone else is selling. But that doesn’t make it any easier, especially when market turbulence is coming from several sources at once. Already on edge as a result of China’s surprise devaluation in August and a potential rate hike by the Federal Reserve, investors have had to figure out how to navigate financial markets amid high levels of both volatility and uncertainty. Watch an interview with Jonathan Wilmot, Credit Suisse’s Head of Macro Investments, for his take on whether there’s enough fear in the marketplace that it’s actually time to start buying relatively risky assets such as equities again.

Watch Barbara Reinhard, Americas Chief Investment Officer of Credit Suisse’s Private Banking and Wealth Management division, discuss ideas on how to manage your portfolio in times of volatility.