Future Alpha 2026 – Invesco’s Kenneth Blay On What Is Wrong About “Uncertainty”

In the closing keynote of Future Alpha 2026, Allison Adams, Publisher of the Financial Analysts Journal, interviewed Kenneth Blay, Head of Strategic Research at Invesco’s Strategy & Insights group. The conversation covered uncertainty, the case for active management, and why many experts may have drawn the wrong conclusions from their own research. Blay has co-authored work with Larry Siegel through the CFA Institute Research Foundation, including a recent piece called “Beyond Active and Passive Investing: The Customization of Finance.” He used the session to walk through research that he thinks points in a very different direction than the market’s assumptions.

Uncertainty is rising, and diversification is shrinking

Blay opened with three numbers that, taken together, tell a pretty bleak story.

The Global World Uncertainty Index, which counts how often “uncertainty” and related words appear in the Economist Intelligence Unit’s country reports, has roughly tripled since 1990. It went from about 10,000 to about 30,000 by the end of 2025. That 30,000 corresponds to roughly 300 uncertainty-related words per report. Imperfect measure, but the implication would be that the future is increasingly more uncertain.

Meanwhile, the S&P 500 has gotten extremely concentrated. Blay used the Herfindahl-based metric that translates a cap-weighted portfolio into its equal-weight equivalent for risk purposes. The long-term average is about 112, while it recently hit 43, a decline of roughly two thirds: Note: To learn more about the methadolgy for calculating this metric and how it is used see an example of ours  using the Herfindal metric here.