Our Chief Market Strategist James Thorne gives our team a leading-edge, curating insights from data sources and providing analysis to help our investment advisors select the best possible assets and plans for clients. Jim is a top-industry expert, translating complex economic and market issues and grounding his counsel in historical context to help advisors and investors navigate short-term issues with their potential impact on financial goals. His views consider global economic, political, and financial market events and their short and long-term portfolio implications.
Chief Market Strategist
Prior to joining Wellington-Altus Private Wealth, James Thorne was most recently chief capital market strategist and senior portfolio manager at a leading independent investment management firm.
He also held various senior investment management positions in the U.S., including chief economist of a major U.S. financial institution, chief investment officer of equities, managing director and chief capital market strategist. During his tenure he developed small, mid- and large-capitalization investment strategies, which employed a combination of quantitative and qualitative analysis and achieved top-quartile performance.
Dr. Thorne received a Ph.D. in economics in the fields of finance and industrial organization from York University and worked as a professor of economics and finance at the Schulich School of Business and at Bishop’s University. He also regularly appears on BNN and in other media outlets.
Winston Churchill, as first lord of the Admiralty, tied Britain’s fate to Persian oil. United States President Donald Trump’s war in Iran, centred on Operation Epic Fury, could do the same for the West by removing Iran’s nuclear shadow, resetting oil toward US$60, and finally unlocking a modern peace dividend.
U.S. President Donald Trump’s second term is not just another burst of tariff theatre; it is the opening move in a new great game over energy, artificial intelligence (AI), and money. By neutralizing Iran and Venezuela, squeezing Cuba, binding Canada, and courting Russia, Washington is trying to re-anchor oil in U.S. dollars and push BRICS’ [1] monetary ambitions to the margins. Layered on top are digital rails—dollar-backed stablecoins, tokenized Treasuries, gold, and even a strategic bitcoin reserve—designed to harden, not retire, King Dollar. If it works, Bretton Woods 2.0 will arrive not as a conference, but as the unannounced sequel to a crisis-ridden decade, with the U.S. once again writing the rules.
“There’s only two cultures that are going to win in the next year. It’s going to be us or China.” The subtext of Palantir CEO Alex Karp’s widely cited speech from late 2025 sounds like tech‑bro theatre until you reflect on it. In artificial intelligence, there is no bronze medal. There will be a hegemon and a runner‑up. Everyone else will be a client. Markets are not pricing that reality. Investors still treat the AI build-out as marginal cloud spend or another overhyped software cycle. They debate whether Big Tech is “exhausting its available capital” or whether capex “must mean revert,” as if infrastructure were optional and competition courteous. They are using valuation models from the wrong century for the wrong game. AI is not an app store. It is a weapon system—and the operating system of the next industrial era. The capital going into it is not a bubble. It is rearmament.
