Hello, everyone, and welcome to another monthly update of State Street's Institutional Investor Indicators. My name is Dwyfor Evans, and I'm going to run you through the highlights from our investor behaviour material for the month of January. And of course, a lot happened in January. It's the beginning of the year.

It already seems like quite a long year, given all of the trials and tribulations of geopolitics, and also some of the comings and goings in terms of markets, in terms of institutions within markets, Federal Reserve nomination being one, of course, and all of that impacted on how investors, looked at risk.

And their exposures throughout the month of January. Let's just run through something very generic, but something very telling in terms of the overall aggregate picture for investor behavior, and that is our behavioral risk scorecard.

I'll focus here mostly on the dark blue line, which is the aggregate flows across the 22 indicators that we track, which combine equities, fixed income, commodities, and factors in foreign exchange.

The simple way of reading this chart is the higher the behavioral risk score on the left-hand axis, then the more risk-seeking investors are in aggregate, the more negative the score on the left-hand axis.

And the more defensive and the more cautious they are in terms of their overall risk bias. And if you go to the extreme right of this particular chart, you'll notice that as we came into 2026, we actually had quite a high behavioral risk score. That actually was maintained throughout most of the month, but as we went into the back end of January, investor behavior began to weaken, weaken quite considerably, actually, from a high of around, sort of, plus 12, and it ended the month at zero.

Some of that exuberance in risk at the very beginning of the year very slowly ebbed away by the time we came to the end of January. So, a neutral reading at the end of January. What we still had throughout the course of the month was actually a bias in favor of stocks, as opposed to bonds and cash.

The pickup in stock allocations actually drove those allocations to their highest level since around 2007. Likewise, the continued move out of bonds actually drove the allocation to bonds to its lowest level since around 2008.

Again, looking at it from a geographic perspective, the US remains a clear positioning outlier among the regions. European equity positioning remains around benchmark, while emerging markets have seen inflows from very low levels.

That overweight on US equities contrasts with what we're seeing in the currency space, where diversification away from the dollar continues.

Dollar underweight remains entrenched, though dollar selling slowed in January. Emerging market bonds and FX saw risk‑adding flows, while equities bore the brunt of risk‑reducing flows.

Overall, January started strong but ended with a cautious, more balanced risk stance.

Thank you for listening, and we will update you again at the end of February's data.