IN-DEPTH ANALYSIS AND INSIGHTS DELIVERED MONTHLY

“Wake me up when September ends.” – Green Day

September is living up to its reputation for being fractious, volatile, and generally a down month. While it has felt terrible, and pockets of the market have pulled back sharply, through Monday 9/14, the S&P is off a little under -1%. This is not the Ides of March or Black Monday just yet. However, the wall of worry the market is being asked to climb continues to get higher and steeper. Interest rates and treasury yields are now the biggest risks to the market, and both look like they could break out higher. Historically, policy error is a notorious bull-market killer and this environment is risky.

Learn More from September Brief – A September To Forget

“The beginning of wisdom is to call things by their proper name.” – Confucius 

Diversification is often touted as the backbone to any disciplined portfolio. We tend to view the basic principle as important but often inaccurately applied to portfolio management, as the point of diversification is to help you offset risk of loss. Diversification often does not enhance returns on the upside – its basic definition prevents that by owning uncorrelated assets. But, similar to a seat belt or airbag, one does not truly appreciate it until you need it.

Learn More from August Brief – Caveat Emptor

“Things that have never happened before, happen all the time.” – Stanford Professor Scott Sagan

In 2026 a new question has surfaced- are the Magnificent 7 just not magnificent anymore? The Magnificent 7 refers to 7 stocks that have seen exponential growth and are some of the largest in the USA now: AAPL, AMZN, GOOGL, MSFT, META, NVDA, TSLA. These behemoths have dominated US markets and indexes since the 2022 bear market- driven partially by the growth of AI and their server businesses. MSFT, AMZN and GOOGL are referred to as hyperscalers- which are massive cloud service providers serving on-demand computing, storage and networking globally (think AWS). Basically, providing the support & infrastructure our growing data hoard requires. ORCL is also a key hyperscaler as they are a top provider of data storage. But in 2026, market leadership has shifted with MSFT & AMZN underperforming semis.

Learn More from July Brief – Follow The Money

“Successful investing is about managing risk, not avoiding it” – Benjamin Graham

The S&P 500 recently saw a 9-week winning streak snapped in rather dramatic fashion with a solid sell-off dragging indexes down sharply, including a -4.5% drop on Friday 6/5 for the Nasdaq. This has brought the bear market voices to the forefront, as questions about if this is the top of the AI bubble are once again circulating loudly. We are not agnostic to the very high valuations and rapid movement of semiconductor stocks, specifically memory stocks, and the narrow rally since the war started. In Q1, it was about value stocks and a broad rally with the equal weight index outperforming the S&P as tech waivered; however, since March 31st, the Nasdaq outperformed the Russell 1000 Value by 14%, a huge differential in return depending on sector allocation.

Learn More from June Brief – Defying Gravity

May 10th marked the beginning of 84 days of sun in Utqiaġvik (formerly Barrow), Alaska – the Northernmost city in the United States. That was the final sunset for the summer, with continuous daylight until August 2nd, 2026. True, absolute night and darkness does not emerge in the region until late September. This “midnight sun” phenomenon is due to its northern location, but with endless summer, also comes weeks of absolute darkness in the winter. We feel that the markets are also entering a period of abundant sunshine and prosperity with a summer of endless rallies in the cards on the heels of a blowout quarter of earnings. Oil prices be damned, full speed ahead!

Learn More from May Brief – The Endless Summer

Despite the macro headwinds and ongoing conflict, the S&P 500 recently notched a new all-time high, hitting 7,100. The rebound off the Iran war lows of 6,343.72 on March 30th has been ferocious and swift, a classic V-shaped bounce. But now what? We think the bull market continues to run, but with higher volatility, and more sharp drawdowns may be likely. We point out that we are no longer in an early-stages young bull market, but we are now at least middle-aged and markets react differently. The first 6 months of a bull market, coming off the bear market lows, are typically the strongest. Going back to 1928, 20 out of 27 bull markets have seen the strongest performance in the first half of the run, about 74% of the time. Historically, this bull market has 1-2 years and 40-50% more potential upside to go.

Learn More from April Brief – The Middle-Aged Bull

March is always a fickle month – from the weather to the markets – we know to expect volatility and a bit of misery. History tells us there will be a violent storm or two along the way, making sure we feel the pain of winter or a pullback one more time before a Spring revival. March is also home to the NCAA Men’s & Women’s Basketball Tournament called March Madness, which for a math nerd is a statistical wonderland. The odds of a perfect bracket are 1 in 9.2 quintillion (9.2×1018), meaning you are 4 million times more likely to get struck by lightning than picking a perfect bracket. With that backdrop, we add in some extra spice with the troubles brewing in the Private Credit market and a full-blown regional war in the Middle East. Wars often come with a sharp drop in the markets, but we warn, historically, wars do not start bear markets – even if the risk feels high. Do not allow all the “what-ifs” to build into a crescendo that override the basic market dictation: buy low, sell high. Never panic sell.

Learn More from March Brief – March Madness

While US equity markets have been treading water more than rallying this year, one area of the market that continues to be strong is precious metals. Even with the Silver & Gold meltdown a few weeks ago, which saw Silver prices plummet -30% in a day and Gold -17% dragging down most precious metals, both commodities are still strongly positive on the year and outperforming stocks, bonds, real estate, agricultural commodities and energy commodities. We feel precious metals could continue to be an asset to own in 2026 and march to much higher highs due to 3 main factors.

Learn More from February Brief – All That Glitters

Tariff War 2.0, or Territory War 1.0 if you prefer, is in full swing and has potential to cause significant near-term market disruptions. While we typically preach that politics matters less to the markets than to us personally, that was before politics was wielding such a heavy hand regarding regulations, taxation, tariffs, and the global world order. 2026 has started with rapid-fire policy-by-tweet, of which we are left attempting to decipher what is inflated hyperbole and what may be a real priority to be implemented. One of our themes for 2026 is “don’t fight the admin,” like the adage “don’t fight the Fed,” it means if policy is going to change market dynamics – don’t fight the direction that policy is flowing.

Learn More from January 2026 Brief – Maximum Pressure

At approximately 2am Friday Evening 1/2/26, US forces launched a large scale “air, land and sea” military attack on Venezuela involving at least 150 aircraft and capturing current President Nicolas Maduro and his wife, who are currently on route to New York to be held and charged on drug crimes. The Justice Department is charging them, and 5 others with roles in the drug-trafficking network called Cartel de los Soles and helping move large shipments of cocaine to the USA. This is one of the first US led regime changes in the last 30 years and does follow the script of “Operation Just Cause” in Jan 1990 to remove Manuel Noriega from Panama. And in a twist of fate, the arrest occurred 36 years to the day of the arrest of Manuel Noriega.

Learn More from Special Update – What Happened In Venezuela?