When examining long-term investment themes, several stand out as sparking the interest of investors worldwide. But once niche sectors like digitalization, Artificial Intelligence, cryptoassets, digital payments, and robotics rise to the top of investors’ long-term focus.
Interlocked investment themes that show how “Digital” seems to be the keyword for the global future, writes eToro analyst for Romania, Bogdan Maioreanu.
According to the latest eToro Retail Investor Beat survey, 31% of investors at the global level are considering long-term investing in digital transformation, a broad theme that includes AI, cloud computing, and VR, among others. If we look at the recent evolution of the stock market, it is one of its growth factors as the AI theme sparks an “arms race” for the best AI model between technology giants worldwide. Microsoft, Alphabet, Meta, Amazon, Tesla, Alibaba, Tencent, and numerous others are investing billions in AI research and tools, leading to the growth of silicon chips and equipment suppliers like Nvidia, TSMC, and ASML.
This theme is closely followed by Crypto assets and digital payments, considered by 27% of the global investors. With rising institutional adoption and ETFs now available for wider categories of investors, Bitcoin and Ethereum saw price increases exceeding 65% in the past 12 months – headlines that certainly attract attention.
For the Romanian retail investors, digital transformation (38%) and crypto assets and digital payments (35%) are also the top two themes of interest in the survey. But a close third (32%) is the Robots and automation investment theme. This is an area that sparked a lot of interest lately, with exciting new products under development and expected to soon reach the market. Last week Elon Musk mentioned that Tesla’s humanoid robot Optimus is planned to reach version 3 in the first quarter of 2026, saying that it would appear more like a person in a robot suit than a traditional robot. Musk also painted a future where Optimus is evolving into a highly capable machine, potentially performing complex tasks such as surgery.
Tesla’s CEO vision is not singular. Boston Dynamics, Agility Robotics, and Figure AI are working on their version of commercial humanoids like Atlas, Digit, and Figure 03 for manufacturing, logistics and also household use. Top Chinese players such as Unitree, XPeng Robotics, UBTech and Agibot are targeting similar goals. The industry aims to combine artificial intelligence with human-like behavior for practical deployment in factories, warehouses, and household environments.
A Morgan Stanley research is estimating that the humanoid market could surpass $5 trillion by 2050, including sales from supply chains and networks for repair, maintenance, and support. About 90% of humanoid robots, or about 930 million units, will likely be used for repetitive, simple, and structured work—primarily industrial and commercial purposes while the report sees the household usage more limited to only 80 million units by 2050. China is likely to have the highest number of humanoid robots in use by that time, at 302.3 million, trailed by the U.S. at 77.7 million.
But the task ahead is not as simple as it requires a lot of financial efforts, research, but also AI advancements enabling the robots to contextually interpret the environment around themselves and to learn new skills. Ever-increasing amounts of energy will be required for the data centers and to enable the recharge of the future robots (including clean generation, batteries development, electric vehicles, etc). As such, clean technology and the energy transition is also an investment theme for 26% of global and 28% of Romanian investors, according to the eToro Retail Investor Beat survey.
Moreover, new regulatory frameworks may need to be developed for robots, as is the case with AI. As human robot development evolves, it appears that the implementation of the three laws of robotics envisioned by Isaak Asimov in his “I, Robot” series is quite a difficult task. This shows how closely the AI and robotics themes, but also the others mentioned above, are linked in a world that rushes to a global digital future.
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