Lau Pa Sat is marking the Hari Raya season with a refreshed festive installation, repurposing its earlier Chinese New Year display into a culturally themed experience aimed at education and engagement. Running from 3 March to 1 April, the installation transforms the venue’s zodiac reading carousel into a Hari Raya showcase, featuring 12 educational touchpoints that explore the significance of Ramadan and the traditions of the Muslim community. At the centre of the carousel are familiar festive symbols such as the ketupat (‘rice cake’) and wau (‘traditional kite’), alongside elements including a mosque, crescent moon and Ramadan lantern. The installation is decked in shades of green and batik-inspired motifs, reflecting both the festive palette and the heritage of the historic market. Don’t miss: 13 Raya packets that brought more than just duit this 2026 According to Pauline Png, director and head of customer innovation and marketing, food services at FairPrice Group, the initiative builds on the venue’s ongoing efforts to celebrate Singapore’s multicultural calendar. “This year, Lau Pa Sat has made the campaign more holistic with the dedicated Hari Raya-themed interactive installation and more promotions,” she said. “With Hari Raya being an important festive period for many Singaporeans, the team saw an opportunity to highlight its traditions and significance, while welcoming visitors of all backgrounds to learn more about the celebration.” The decision to repurpose an existing installation was also intentional. Png said the approach allowed the team to extend the lifespan of the earlier setup while adapting it for another major cultural occasion, reflecting a more sustainable way of creating seasonal experiences. Beyond aesthetics, the installation places emphasis on education. Its 12 touchpoints are designed to guide visitors through the spiritual meaning of Ramadan, festive preparations, and key traditions observed during Hari Raya. Png added that the team conducted research and sought feedback from those who celebrate the festival to ensure the display is both respectful and representative. As a National Monument and popular food destination, Lau Pa Sat also positions its seasonal activations as a way to connect visitors with Singapore’s cultural diversity. “Seasonal installations such as this create opportunities for visitors to learn about different cultural traditions, while also offering a photo-worthy experience for both locals and tourists,” Png said. To complement the installation, visitors who spend a minimum of SG$10 can redeem complimentary photo booth sessions featuring Hari Raya-themed frames inspired by the display. F&B promotions are also in place during the period, including festive drinks, Hari Raya cookies from local brands, and deals across selected stalls. The market is home to more than 20 halal-certified and Muslim-owned stalls, alongside its well-known satay (‘skewered grilled meat’) street offering. The activation comes as brands and organisations across Singapore roll out campaigns centred on togetherness and cultural reflection during the festive period. Ministry of Digital Development and Information’s gov.sg recently launched a Hari Raya film titled “Kisah musim Raya” (“A Raya tale”), created with DSTNCT, which follows a young girl distracted by her phone during festive preparations. Directed by Juffrie Juma’at and starring Nur Sabrina Nasir, the film underscores the importance of being present with loved ones, culminating in a reminder to treasure shared moments and traditions. Meanwhile, Mediacorp refreshed its Hari Raya anthem with “Ini baru Raya! 2.0” (‘Now, this is Raya! 2.0′), a lively campaign blending rap, choral elements and vibrant visuals. Featuring talents such as omarKENOBI and Izat Ibrahim, alongside a cast of local artistes and personalities, the music video centres on a couple whose disrupted homecoming plans give way to a celebration with family, reinforcing themes of resilience, joy and togetherness. Be part of #Content360 Singapore, 22–23 April 2026, where creativity and culture collide. Explore how AI-driven storytelling is shaping the future of content, gain practical insights, discover new tactics, and learn how the best in Asia are creating campaigns that truly resonate.  Related articles: 11 Raya campaigns that hit the right notes in 2026  How Yeo’s is bringing café-style pandan home this Raya  Can a Raya anthem sell flights? AirAsia taps Siti Nurhaliza for festive MV source

Institutional allocators rely on managed futures strategies for diversification and drawdown control, yet often misunderstand how risk is actually taken inside these allocations. They frequently lack clarity on which trend horizons drive performance, how similar managers truly are to one another and to benchmarks, and how differences in horizon mix shape behavior during periods of market stress. By decomposing CTA managed futures returns into a small set of distinct trend horizons (fast, medium, and slow), this post shows that much of the variation across managers and benchmarks reflects differences in horizon mix rather than fundamentally different strategies. Framing managed futures allocations in this way allows investors to better diagnose overlap, benchmark more precisely, and assess whether their exposure is aligned with its intended role in the portfolio. The analysis that follows is necessarily technical, introducing a horizon-based framework that decomposes CTA returns into a limited set of systematic building blocks. While the mechanics are described in detail, the objective is practical: to provide a clearer, more transparent way to interpret managed futures behavior and to link observed outcomes to explicit, governable risk choices. source

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Once the backbone of content discovery, hashtags have been quietly pushed to the margins as platforms evolve into systems that understand content without needing to be told what it is.  What’s replacing them isn’t another tactic, it’s a move away from how content is interpreted, distributed and discovered. “Hashtags aren’t dead, but they’re on life support,” Marcus Willis, CEO of Kill Boring Dead, says. “Most marketers are still treating them like it’s 2018. The platforms have moved on. The algorithms have moved on. The audience has moved on.” SEE MORE: TikTok Shop is booming globally, just not in Australia Across TikTok and Instagram in particular, discovery is no longer driven by what a post is labelled as. It’s driven by what it is, how people engage with it and whether it holds attention. That’s a very different game. The end of manual labelling For years, hashtags were a crude but effective way of telling platforms what content was about. They were a form of manual categorisation – publisher-supplied metadata designed to help algorithms match content with audiences. That layer is no longer required. “Historically, they were the primary way a publisher told an algorithm how to categorise a piece of content,” Luke Gosha, head of search and AI strategy at Edge Marketing, says. “Today, the algorithms have advanced in their ability to understand content, its relevance to audiences and engagement.” The shift is from explicit signals to inferred understanding. Platforms now analyse everything: what’s said in a video, what appears on screen, how long people watch, whether they rewatch, whether they share, save or comment. Content is no longer indexed – it’s interpreted. “AI can now read your content the way a human does,” Willis said. “It understands what the video is about, what tone it’s taking, who’s likely to care.” That has effectively removed the need for hashtags to act as a discovery mechanism. “You don’t need to tag it, you need to make it good,” he added. Context, not content, is now king If the last decade of digital marketing was built on the idea that content is king, the current one is tilting toward something more nuanced. Context. “A piece of content that taps into something people actually care about right now will outperform a perfectly hashtagged post every single time,” Willis said. Bryce Coombe, managing director at Hypetap, goes further. “Context and even subcontext are king. For a brand to succeed today, it’s less about having the right campaign tag and more about delivering content the algorithm identifies as high engagement.” That shift is subtle but important. Content still matters, but it’s no longer enough on its own. Timing, cultural relevance, tone and audience fit now carry more weight than structured tagging ever could. “The real shift is from structured tagging to behavioural and contextual signals,” says Miki Sim, platforms and culture director at VaynerMedia APAC. “The algorithm no longer requires creators to manually label the content. It already knows what the content is about.” Performance isn’t tied to hashtags anymore One of the more telling aspects of the shift is how little impact hashtags now have on performance. “If hashtags disappeared tomorrow, would performance actually change? For most brands, barely,” Willis said. That’s a confronting reality for teams that still spend time debating which hashtags to include on every post. “The content that performs does so because of what it is, the hook, the context, the emotional signal, the watch time, not because someone appended a hashtag at the end,” he said. Coombe agrees the impact is minimal. In creator-led environments, he said, performance is now driven almost entirely by how the platform interprets the content itself. “Content is now assessed automatically via image recognition, speech to text, caption search and a range of other signals,” he said. Hashtags, in that context, have become a “low-level” signal – present, but not particularly influential. Habit over strategy Despite that, hashtags haven’t disappeared from marketing playbooks. They’ve lingered. Partly because they still serve a purpose in specific scenarios be that campaign aggregation, branded communities or live events, but largely because teams haven’t fully adjusted to how discovery now works. “Most businesses still use them out of habit,” Coombe said. “But it’s no longer the engine that’s going to get you onto the ‘For You’ page.” That distinction matters. Hashtags haven’t vanished, but their role has shifted from discovery tool to organisational layer. “They’re more like community anchors than growth drivers,” is how one agency framed it. It’s a subtle demotion, but a meaningful one. B2B matters, sort of… If hashtags have been sidelined on consumer platforms, LinkedIn remains a partial exception. “LinkedIn is probably the last bastion for the hashtag,” Coombe said, pointing to the platform’s reliance on professional terminology and industry-specific categorisation. Even there, though, the direction is changing. “Achieving organic reach on LinkedIn has become much harder,” Gosha says. “The signals that matter most are dwell time and the quality of the conversation in the comments.” In other words, even in B2B environments, performance is increasingly tied to substance rather than structure. “You can’t hack that with a string of B2B hashtags,” he said. From SEO to AI-led discovery The shift away from hashtags is part of a broader change in how discovery itself works. Search is no longer confined to search engines. Discovery is happening across feeds, platforms and increasingly through AI interfaces that don’t rely on keywords in the traditional sense. “We’re living in a world where AI can infer the meaning, tone and intent of a piece of content just by watching it,” Willis adds. That has implications beyond social. “The next frontier takes this even further – brand discovery is increasingly happening directly on conversational AI,” Sim (pictured below)

What are the best first use cases?Start where state, action, and reward are clear and the feedback cycle is short: adaptive trade execution, dynamic portfolio rebalancing, and cost-aware option hedging. These map cleanly to RL/POMDPs, have measurable baselines (e.g., time-weighted average price/volume-weighted average price [TWAP/VWAP], discrete delta), and abundant historical data for offline training. Can I train only on historical data, or do I need live exploration?You can (and usually should) start with offline RL using your fills, prices, and positions. Then validate in a high-fidelity simulator with costs/impact/latency, run shadow mode alongside your existing process, and promote gradually with guardrails (caps, kill-switch, rollback). How do I build risk and costs into the objective?Make risk and costs part of the goal. Define the reward as the money you make after subtracting trading fees/price impact and a penalty for risk. In words:Reward = Profit − Costs − λ × Risk (risk can be tail risk, such as CVaR, drawdown, or mean–variance). Use distributional RL to capture rare big losses (“the tails”). And set hard limits — on exposure, turnover, and market participation — both while training and when the system runs live. IRL versus imitation learning — when do I use which?Use IRL to infer the underlying objective from behavior (managers, clients, “the market”) when you want portability and the ability to surpass demonstrations. Use imitation to quickly mimic actions when you don’t need a reward function. Ranked data? Consider T-REX. Probabilistic, flexible rewards? MaxEnt/Bayesian (GPIRL). What metrics should I monitor to know the policy is working?At minimum, track implementation shortfall (IS) for execution quality, risk-adjusted return after costs (e.g., Sharpe or mean–variance utility) for performance, and CVaR/drawdown for tails. Add drift detectors (feature, policy, regime) and compare to baselines (TWAP/VWAP, risk parity, discrete delta). How do I make the RL/IRL policy compliant and explainable?Log state → action → outcome with immutable audit trails; publish a “policy card” (objective, constraints, data lineage, promotion criteria); add explainability (feature attribution, counterfactuals), runtime guardrails (exposure/participation/loss caps), challenger policies, and human-in-the-loop approvals. These actions turn the model into an accountable decision system, not a black box. source

Since its inception in 1945, the Financial Analysts Journal (FAJ) has advanced some of the investment profession’s most influential ideas by providing an outlet for innovative thinkers. We trace the FAJ’s history by identifying the most prolific contributors and innovations featured over its first 80 years and in each of nine financial eras. Using the comprehensive database and rigorous methodology that we developed, this article provides rankings of the top authors and the most frequent words in titles and examines the context in which these words were used to identify seminal ideas and the authors behind them. source

When HS Chung stepped into her role as APAC CEO of Burson, her first priority was clear, and it had little to do with structure or scale. Instead, it centred on culture. “Before anything else, our priority was really to think like one. Not as two, three, four,” she told Marketing Connected’s Agency Agenda. “It was very important for us to really get the philosophy of why we were coming together before we could even do anything.” Following the merger that formed Burson, Chung emphasised that integration was not about preserving legacy ways of working, but about creating something entirely new. “Many people tend to wish and believe what they are used to can remain. But the reality is, we’re doing all of this to create a new culture,” she explained. Don’t miss: Agency agenda: Barby Siegel on future-proofing Zeno’s agency model Catch the full conversation here:  That mindset shift was critical. Rather than seeing the agency as a continuation of its past, Chung positioned Burson as starting afresh. “We actually consider ourselves about one to two years old. We don’t see ourselves as being the legacy 70-year-old,” she said. We are now creating a new culture. And building that new culture is not something that’s going to done top down, but built together. This collaborative approach underpins her broader agenda for the agency across APAC. With momentum building despite macroeconomic challenges, Chung is focused on turning change into opportunity. “Some people might think that’s a challenge, but we see it as an opportunity,” she said. At the core of Burson’s strategy are three priorities. First is an almost obsessive focus on clients and the environments they operate in. “Be obsessed with the business environment our clients are in,” she added, noting that businesses today are undergoing “transformative change,” particularly driven by AI. The second priority is to lead in that very space. “We need to be able to really lead in that AI space for communication, so that when clients turn to us, we’re able to lead them and pioneer this area,” she explained. Finally, Chung stressed the importance of execution. “It’s really about not just setting these goals, but thinking about how we can operationalise it. And this goes back to the idea of building one collaborative culture.” That culture also plays a key role in navigating change internally. Transparency and communication, she said, are essential during periods of transformation. “It all comes down to having a clear vision and a strategy, and transparently communicating that to the people,” she explained, adding that organisations must continuously listen and respond to employee concerns. Looking ahead, Chung believes PR agencies must evolve into strategic business partners, as the future is pointing towards a reality where agencies play a bigger role at the C-suite and board level. According to her: We should, and will need to aim to be a business solver, a problem solver. For Burson, that future is already taking shape, grounded in a new, unified culture and a clear ambition to lead in an increasingly complex, AI-driven world. Also tune in to the full conversation on Spotify: Tune into the rest of this conversation on your favourite podcast platforms, by searching up Marketing Connected. For all the visual people out there, we’ve got your back as well, with our vodcasts on YouTube. Related articles: Women who lead: Mutant’s Lina Marican on embracing leadership despite self-doubt Agency Agenda: Arshan Saha on navigating change and transformation during his WPP Media days Agency agenda: Tony Harradine outlines Omnicom Media APAC’s post-deal plan  source

Industries worldwide are evolving rapidly amid new technologies and policy shifts, while markets are more interconnected than ever. Information travels almost instantaneously across global networks, meaning a shock in one market can ripple quickly through others. The investment industry must continually adapt to changing economic and market environments, yet traditional financial models — built on assumptions of equilibrium and rational actors — often struggle to capture the unpredictable, networked, and nonlinear behaviors observed in financial markets. This report reconsiders how we understand financial markets, framing them as complex systems and offering alternative approaches to traditional financial models. By applying methods from complex systems sciences, it equips financial professionals with new tools for systemic risk analysis, portfolio management, and system-level investing. Techniques such as agent-based modeling and network theory can be used to understand and capture complex market phenomena such as emergent behavior, nonlinearity, feedback loops, and structural resilience. For portfolio managers and risk analysts, adopting a systems perspective means moving beyond normal distributions and equilibrium-based models to capture investment complexity and better inform scenario planning, portfolio optimization, and risk management. For regulators, it means leveraging new models to strengthen systemic risk oversight and macroprudential policies. source