The ASX200 is down over 1 per cent so far in 2026. Meanwhile, US markets are soaring. The S&P500 is up over 8.5 per cent, the NASDAQ is chasing almost 14 per cent higher the Dow Jones is up almost 3 per cent year to date. The gap continues to grow wider and wider for Australian investors compared to our US market mates, but why? We put that to Armina Rosenberg, co-founder and portfolio manager at Minotaur Capital this week on Switzer TV.
Rosenberg’s answer was that the gap is not a tactical mismatch that closes with the next earnings season. It is the product of three structural forces working against the ASX simultaneously: index composition, a tougher domestic macro setting, and weaker China-linked commodity demand. Two of the three are unlikely to reverse quickly.
The composition problem
The first and largest reason, in Rosenberg’s framing, is what Australian investors are actually buying when they hold the index. The ASX is not built for the trade that has driven the global market this year.
“I think part of it is index composition,” she said.
“If you look at it, the ASX is 35 per cent financials, 25 per cent materials and information technologies? Like 2 per cent. For the US, it’s almost the exact opposite. Where that’s 35 per cent information technology, and obviously the big players of Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, the mag seven sort of dominate that. And I think part of that is the AI infrastructure theme. You really see that playing out in the US. We’re less exposed to it here in Australia. So I think that’s probably the biggest reason by far.”
She adds that the AI infrastructure trade – the so-called ‘picks and shovels’ deals driving the global markets higher – barely touches the ASX. Australian investors who want exposure to it have to look offshore.
The domestic macro problem
The second drag is the Australian economy itself.
With inflation and interest rates still climbing, the consumer-facing parts of the ASX are working against a different cyclical backdrop than their US peers.
“Our domestic macro is a lot more challenged than they are over there,” Rosenberg said. “You’re seeing persistent inflation fears and interest rate fears here. And the consumer is feeling that and you’re seeing that play out across the sectors as well, and particularly with some of the bank’s results.”
The third drag is the resources story. China’s commodity demand has been weaker than the early-2026 consensus expected, and that has held back the materials and mining names that dominate the second-largest sector in the index.
“With materials, there’s been less commodity-linked demand. And China has seen less demand there as well.”
Some pockets of the resources complex are working. Rosenberg flagged the gold miners – Newcrest, Northern Star, Evolution — as outperforming on the back of geopolitical risk, and noted that the AI infrastructure trade is itself feeding through into demand for lithium, copper and other metals needed for data centres. But the iron ore story, the engine room of the ASX 200’s materials weighting, has been “fairly subdued from a commodity demand” perspective for some time.
Where to look for growth
Rosenberg said that her fund is looking in places like memory chips for growth going forward. Her thesis is that the AI infrastructure trade has broadened beyond just NVIDIA, and that the next bottleneck in the global build-out is the high-bandwidth memory needed to feed the data centres.
“We’re invested in SK Hynix and Micron Technology. It’s actually effectively an oligopoly between those two plus Samsung Electronics. Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix are going to be the number one and number two most profitable companies in the world next year. And they’re sold out of capacity through twenty twenty six and twenty twenty seven. If you believe analyst high estimates for next year, then they could outturn the mag seven next year. So yes, memory feels like where the bottleneck is. It feels like where Nvidia was a couple of years ago.”
The healthcare side Minotaur’s book runs parallel. Minotaur is long Eli Lilly on the GLP-1 weight-loss thesis, with a second position in Chugai Pharmaceutical, an eighty-billion-dollar Japanese pharma company that Rosenberg flagged as effectively unknown to most investors despite its scale.
“We own Eli Lilly, which is in that GLP one space. We also like Chugai Pharmaceutical, which is an unknown Japanese stock. It’s funny that it’s unknown because it’s eighty billion dollars market cap, but no one knows it. It’s because it’s listed on the Japanese stock exchange, but it actually develops the oral version of the GLP one for Eli Lilly. So the total addressable markets of those guys are going to increase because more people are probably likely to take a pill than they would to inject themselves.”
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