Valentijn van Nieuwenhuijzen: Markets move, people matter - three decades of insight in asset management
By Valentijn van Nieuwenhuijzen, investment strategist and former CIO NNIP/GSAM
After three decades in the asset management industry, I’ve learned that markets may evolve, technology may transform, and geopolitics may shift. But also how enduring certain truths remain.
As I start this new series of columns for Financial Investigator, I want to start by sharing what three key insights on three key topics I’ve gained from three decades of navigating the financial world: three about the global economy, three about markets, and three about people.
The global economy: remarkable, robust, and a rollercoaster
1. Free markets are not perfect, but they work wonders
Free markets have an incredible capacity to allocate resources and generate prosperity. After WWII, much of the Western world embraced capitalism and international trade. The result was an unprecedented boom in economic growth, rising living standards, and societal progress. Compared to the dominant alternative of the time - communism - the contrast is stark: higher incomes, better health, more innovation, and greater inclusion.
That’s not to say free markets are flawless. Inequality and environmental degradation remain urgent challenges. But history shows that capitalist systems, while imperfect, have delivered more progress than any other economic structure. The mission now is not to abandon them, but to improve them, and finance can play a vital role in that effort.
2. Growth is persistent, but never guaranteed
Despite countless shocks over the past 80 years, oil crises, stagflation, emerging market meltdowns, the global financial crisis, COVID-19, the global economy has managed to grow steadily. But this resilience should not lull us into complacency.
Growth depends on three things: people, capital, and innovation. Japan’s story offers a cautionary tale. After its asset bubble burst in the 1990s, Japan faced not just a demand shock but a demographic decline. Its working-age population has been shrinking for nearly three decades — down 16% from a peak of 87 million in 1995 to 73 million in 2024¹. This has hampered its growth potential, even long after the financial damage was absorbed.
What was once a Japanese exception has become a global trend. Aging populations and declining immigration are now challenges facing Europe, China, and even the US. That means growth will likely slow, and we’ll need new strategies to adapt.
3. We haven’t “solved” the business cycle
In the early 2000s, Nobel laureate Robert Lucas declared that the problem of depression prevention had been solved. Then came the global financial crisis. The supposed end of volatility turned out to be a mirage.
So, our systems have become better at absorbing shocks. But crises, whether sparked by housing markets, banks, pandemics, or geopolitics, remain inevitable. Adaptability will always be a required human skill. Economic history is a story of progress, interrupted by periodic resets. The future will be no different.
Financial Markets: complexity, emotion, and humility
1. Markets are complex adaptive systems
Like the economy, markets are living systems. They self-organize, evolve, and sometimes shift dramatically. Small changes in participant behavior, human or machine, can have disproportionate effects. These systems are shaped by path dependencies, irrational dynamics, and emergent properties that defy neat modeling.
Modern portfolio theory, with its elegant assumptions of rationality and normally distributed returns, simply doesn’t capture the reality. Markets are more volatile, less predictable, and prone to extreme drawdowns than standard models suggest.
2. Markets are emotional
From Black Monday in 1987 to the collapse of LTCM (1998), Lehman Brothers (2008), and the COVID panic (2020), history is littered with examples of emotionally driven price movements. Behavioral finance, as advanced by scholars like Robert Shiller and Andrew Lo, has shown us how cognitive biases and collective psychology distort market outcomes.
What’s more, markets and the real economy don’t exist in isolation. They feed off each other. As we saw during emerging market crises in the 1980s–90s and again during the credit and euro crises, financial panic can quickly spiral into economic damage. These feedback loops — part rational, part emotional — make the system even harder to predict.
3. Markets demand humility
Despite all this complexity, financial markets remain fiercely competitive and surprisingly efficient over time. Outsmarting Mr Market isn’t impossible, but it is incredibly hard. It requires Olympic-level discipline in data, analysis, collaboration, and decision-making. And even then, success is fragile.
For investors, the lesson is clear: stay curious, stay adaptable, and stay humble. No one has all the answers. But the best teams keep learning and keep challenging their own assumptions.
People: partnership, team play, and humanity
1. Invest in people like you invest in markets
The true engine of any successful investment organization isn’t just strategy: it’s people. Belief in each other creates momentum. Sharing inspiration and staying open to others’ ingenuity builds trust and sparks breakthroughs. When people combine their passions and strengths, wonders can happen.
2. Teamwork isn’t optional: it’s everything
Outperformance is a team sport. That means aligning not just with colleagues, but with enabling technologies like data science and AI. These tools can augment decision-making in both fundamental and behavioral analysis, helping spot risks, find new insight, and avoid blind spots.
A resilient team needs diversity of thought, mutual respect, and psychological safety. That’s easy to write down, and hard to build. Especially under stress. But the most enduring cultures are forged in crisis. If your team can hold together when the sky falls, you’ve built something exceptional.
3. Stay human
In the end, markets are emotional because people are emotional. We need time to reset. To laugh, move, rest, and be with loved ones. Great investors, like great artists, need space to refresh and reconnect with life.
To navigate a complex, fast-changing world, and to outperform over time, we need curiosity, courage, and a sense of play.
That’s why Steve Jobs’ iconic advice still holds true: “Stay hungry. Stay foolish.”²
These lessons brought me a lot. I hope you all can build on them!
¹ Source: OECD Employment Outlook 2025: Japan
² [Steve Jobs, “Connecting the Dots” — Stanford Commencement Address, 2005](https://news.stanford.edu/2005/06/14/jobs-061505/)