The Financial Post reports in its Thursday edition that the once-hot Wall Street trades of 2023 are all falling apart, in a fresh blow to market pros blindsided again and again ever since the pandemic broke out. A Bloomberg dispatch to the Post says that nearly halfway into the year, a slew of consensus bets is losing as the U.S. economy defies the recession bears, the artificial-intelligence craze heats up and more. Misfiring strategies include selling Big Tech stocks, snubbing the U.S. dollar and buying into the promise of emerging-market equities as China emerged from COVID-19 lockdowns. The MSCI index tracking global shares is up 10 per cent, compared with a gain of 1.4 per cent from bonds worldwide. Fuelling the surprise equity outperformance is the optimism around AI following November's release of ChatGPT. "AI has taken off like a rocket and drawn all kinds of investors in," Tony Pasquariello at Goldman Sachs Group said in a note. "There are still detectably strong and fairly widespread expectations of a U.S. recession" for the next 12 months, he added. "That view -- if more psychological than currently positioned for -- has been challenged by the recent macro data set and equity market price action."