Buy this before earnings. Sell this before the Fed meeting. React to this headline. The investing content machine runs on urgency. And urgency is almost always the enemy of good returns.

I don’t operate that way. I buy companies I believe in for months and years. Not days or weeks. My personal portfolio is 8 to 12 names, concentrated, deliberate, and slow-moving by design. That’s not a limitation. That’s a choice. I’d rather be deeply convicted in a handful of great businesses than spread thin across a dozen ideas I half-believe in.

But I get asked the same question more than any other.

What else do you like?

Fair question. My portfolio is an open book. Readers see the names I own, what I paid, and how they’re weighted. But the portfolio only has so many slots. I have a hard rule about concentration and I’m not breaking it. What that means is there are companies I’ve done serious work on, businesses I believe in deeply, that never make it into the starting lineup simply because I’m already full.

Those ideas needed a home. So I built one.

The Spilled Coffee Double Shot is a curated list of 20 to 25 of my highest-conviction long-term ideas. Not maybes. Not a loose watchlist of things I’m vaguely interested in. Every name on this list has earned its spot.

Here’s how it works.

The ones I personally own are marked with a ☕. That marker matters. It means real money is on the line, not just an opinion. The rest of the list is the bench. Companies that meet my standards, that I’ve done the work on, and that I’d move into the starting lineup under the right conditions.

What you won’t find here is a 12-month price target. I think they’re one of the most useless things in investing. Just a guess about where the crowd will stand a year from now. Instead each name comes with a simple conviction card, the core thesis, the key risk I’m watching, and what would change my mind. That last part is something most lists never tell you. I think it’s the most important part.

The list doesn’t change on a schedule. It changes when my thinking changes. When something earns a spot or loses one, I’ll tell you exactly why. No mystery moves.

This is my answer to everyone who’s ever asked what else I like. All 20 names. The conviction behind each one. Right here in one place.

That’s the Double Shot.

The full Double Shot list, all 20 conviction cards and the complete roster, is available to paid subscribers. Paid subscribers also get full access to my personal portfolio, including my cost basis and weighting on every name I own. If you’ve been thinking about upgrading, this is the right time.

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The numbers behind the rally are hard to ignore. The Nasdaq has surged 16% in just 16 trading days, and the broader tech sector is up 20% over the past three weeks. Both semiconductors and technology closed out their 18th straight day in the green, the longest winning streaks on record for each.

The Dow was the lone laggard, slipping 0.4%, while the Russell 2000 added 0.4% and leads all major indexes year-to-date at +11.5%. Oil surged 13.2% to $94.92, Gold pulled back 2.8% to $4,724, and Bitcoin gained 5.3% to close at 77,767.

Market Recap

Weekly Heat Map Of Stocks

YTD Heat Map of Stocks

Why Is the Market Ripping?

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That’s the truth. No sugarcoating it. If you had read my first post, you probably wouldn’t have come back for a second one. I knew it then and I know it now. But I kept going anyway.

That’s kind of the whole point.

Spilled Coffee turns five years old this month. April 2021 feels like a long time ago and somehow also last week. When I hit publish on that first post, I was writing for nobody. Literally nobody. A handful of friends. A few family members. People who felt obligated to open it.

Five years later, over 12,000 people in more than 125 countries open this newsletter. That number still stops me every time I think about it.

I Didn’t Go to College

I’ve never hidden that fact. I’m proud of it, actually.

I taught myself how to start a business. How to run it. How to sell. How to lead people. I slept on the floor of my office in those first days because I had to. There was no blueprint. No map. No mentor handing me a playbook. I had to figure it out as I went.

That’s still how I operate. It’s the only way I know.

When you walk into my office today, the first thing you see is a quote on the wall. It’s been there since day one. It’s not coming down.

“Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.” Ralph Waldo Emerson.

I didn’t know it at the time, but writing Spilled Coffee would become one of the clearest expressions of that idea I’ve ever had.

Writing to Learn

Here’s something I didn’t expect when I started: writing made me smarter.

Not immediately. Not even noticeably at first. But over time, the act of sitting down and trying to explain something forced me to actually understand it. You can’t fake clarity on the page. Either you understand what you’re talking about or you don’t. The blank page has a way of revealing which one is true.

I wanted to learn more about investing. So I wrote about investing. I wanted to understand business better. So I wrote about business. Every post was me working something out. Still is.

That’s not a method I read about in a book. It’s something I stumbled into. You learn by doing. And writing has been one of the most powerful forms of doing I’ve found.

You have to let yourself write badly before you can write well. I’ve lived that. Every week for five years. Some weeks the words come easy. Other weeks I’m grinding. But I show up. Every damn week.

That discipline didn’t come naturally. It was built. The same way I built my business. The same way I learned to invest. One week at a time.

A Hobby That Became Something More

I started this newsletter because I wanted to. Not because someone told me to. Not because there was a business plan behind it. I had things I wanted to say and I needed a place to say them.

What I didn’t know is that the process would hook me.

There’s something that happens when you hit publish. A small rush. A sense of completion. And then immediately, your mind starts working on the next one. I chased that feeling every week for five years. I still do.

What started as a hobby I did for myself quietly turned into something I couldn’t have imagined sitting in that office in April 2021, writing to an audience that barely existed.

Build. Create. Keep Going.

Start before you’re ready.

I wasn’t a good writer when I started. I’m better now. I’ll be better in five more years. The only way that happens is by doing it. Over and over. Badly at first. Better over time.

You don’t need a degree. You don’t need permission. You don’t need to know exactly where it’s going.

You just need to start. And then keep going.

Five years in, I wouldn’t trade any of it.

To everyone who has opened this newsletter, shared it, replied to it, or simply read it over their morning coffee. Thank you. You’re the reason this thing became what it is.

Here’s to the next five.

Thank you for reading! If you enjoyed Spilled Coffee, please subscribe.

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The Nasdaq has strung together 13 consecutive winning sessions. That is the longest winning streak since January 1992. The tech ETF XLK matched it, also up 13 straight days. The software ETF IGV put together its best week since October 2001.

From the March 30th lows, the S&P 500 is up 13% in just 14 trading days. That is not a slow grind. That is a rocket ship.

Here is where things stand across the board:

Market Recap

A few things jump out. Oil is still up 45% year-to-date despite falling 13% this week as Iran ceasefire optimism crept in. Gold is up 11% on the year and quietly doing its job. Bitcoin is the only red number on the board at -11.7% YTD. And the Russell 2000 is actually the YTD leader of the major indexes at +11.1%, which does not get nearly enough attention.

Weekly Heat Map Of Stocks

YTD Heat Map of Stocks

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“I didn’t realize this. Is Nike dead?”

The response was unlike almost anything I’ve posted. Strong opinions everywhere. People had a lot to say about Nike. Some defended it. A lot didn’t.

That told me something. When a stock generates that kind of reaction, it’s worth paying attention to.

So let’s dig in.

The Chart That Started It All

That’s not a typo. Nike is down 65.77% over the past five years.

Even over ten years, you’re down 25.71%.

You held one of the most recognizable brands on the planet for a decade and lost money.

Meanwhile the S&P 500 is up over 61% in just the last five years.

That chart is painful to look at. Two lines going in completely opposite directions. Nike has been one of the worst trades you could have made over the past several years.

This week it hit its lowest closing price in 12 years.

It is now in its largest drawdown in over 30 years.

And on April 1st, after reporting earnings, Nike had its single worst day in 40 years. Down 15% in one session. No April Fools joke.

Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, and Bank of America all downgraded it the same morning. Three of the biggest banks on Wall Street hitting the exit at the same time.

So. Is Nike dead?

Not exactly. But it is very much broken.

What Went Wrong

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Oil tells the real story of the week. WTI surged 10.5% to close at $110.85 a barrel, and briefly touched $115 before the Hormuz headlines cooled it off. Oil is now up 93% for the year. That number is not a typo.

Gold had a strong week too, up 4.0% to $4,703, and is now up 7.7% on the year. The 10-year Treasury yield ticked down slightly to 4.31%, a sign that bond markets are at least not panicking further for now.

The Russell 2000 remains the only major index in positive territory for 2026, up 1.2% YTD. Small caps are less exposed to the global earnings pressure that high oil creates for multinationals. Worth watching.

Bitcoin is still stuck. Up 1.1% on the week, but down 23.6% for the year. Risk-off has not been kind to crypto.

One week does not make a trend. But after five straight weeks of selling, the bulls finally had something to cheer about.

Market Recap

Weekly Heat Map Of Stocks

YTD Heat Map of Stocks

The Dow Report Card

Q1 Recap

The first quarter is in the books. It wasn’t pretty.

The S&P 500 finished Q1 down 4.6%. That’s the worst quarterly performance since Q3 2022, when Russia’s invasion of Ukraine rattled global markets. Three years of double-digit gains, gone in 90 days.

If you had told investors in January that bitcoin would be the single worst-performing asset class by the end of March, most would have laughed. But here we are. Bitcoin dropped more than 23% while commodities ripped 30%. Large-cap U.S. stocks weren’t far behind bitcoin on the losers list. That’s not a lineup many saw coming.

Here’s what the damage looked like at the sector level. Energy was the clear standout. Everything else was mostly red.

The megacaps didn’t just underperform the market. They led it lower. Microsoft is down more than 23% year-to-date. Tesla is off nearly 17%. Every name on this list is in the red. Most of them are sitting in oversold territory.

One notable split: small and mid-caps are still positive on the year. It’s the mega-cap weight dragging large-cap indexes down. The equal-weighted S&P 500 tells a very different story than the cap-weighted one.

The top performers this quarter tell a story about two things: memory chips and oil.

Sandisk finished Q1 up 168%. It topped the entire S&P 500 in 2025 at +559%, and it’s apparently trying to do it again. No stock has ever topped the index back-to-back. It’s fueled by hyperscaler demand for flash storage in AI data centers. The broader memory and optical group followed its lead. Lumentum was up 92%. Ciena up 66%. Western Digital up 57%.

The other big winner was energy. The Iran conflict pushed crude well above $100 a barrel and 15 of the top 30 performers in Q1 were energy or chemical names. APA up 73%. OXY up 58%. Valero up 52%. It was the best quarter on record for energy stocks relative to the S&P 500.

The losses were concentrated in software. Investors spent most of the quarter asking a simple question. If agentic AI can do the work, why pay for the enterprise software?

That fear alone crushed some of the biggest names from 2025. Software companies made up more than half of the bottom 20 performers in Q1. Trade Desk dropped 40%. Workday fell 38%. Adobe was off 31%. Salesforce down 30%. AppLovin, which surged 108% in 2025, was the single worst performer in the index this quarter, falling 41%.

The Q1 story is clear. What happens next is the harder question. Paid subscribers get the full Q2 outlook, a look at what the technicals are saying, and a breakdown of today's jobs report below.

Looking Ahead To April

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It’s not hard to see why.

Microsoft is the worst-performing Mag 7 stock in 2026. Down more than 26% on the year. Down 33% from its all-time high. The most beaten up name in the group that was supposed to lead everything higher.

The quarter that just closed is the worst Microsoft has had since the 2008 financial crisis.

And by historical standards, this is the worst start to a year the stock has ever seen going all the way back to 2000.

That's a lot of bad in a short period of time.

So. Is it broken? Or is it hated?

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The S&P 500 finished in the red for the fifth straight week, its longest losing streak since the 2022 bear market. The Dow matched that, with both indexes now carrying their longest weekly losing streaks since May 2022.

The Nasdaq was the headline. It crossed into correction territory on Thursday, falling more than 10% from its October 29 high, and it didn’t recover by Friday’s close. It has now gone 102 sessions without a new high, the longest drought since 2023.

The Dow held up relatively better, down less than 1% on the week, while the Russell 2000 was the lone bright spot with a 0.5% gain, though small caps are still down 2% on the year.

Oil crossed $100 and closed the week there, now up 74.6% year to date. That number continues to be the story hiding in plain sight. Bitcoin dropped another 6.7% and is now down more than 24% on the year. Gold gave back a little on the week but is still one of the few places investors have made money in 2026, up 3.5% YTD.

Market Recap

Weekly Heat Map Of Stocks

YTD Heat Map of Stocks

More Pain Ahead?

I keep waiting for the panic. The real one. The kind where investors throw everything out the window and the market finally finds a floor. It has not happened yet. And until it does, I do not think we have seen the bottom.

The reason is simple. One waterway is holding this entire market hostage. Until the Strait of Hormuz opens, nothing else really matters. Every headline out of the Middle East moves stocks. Every rumor gets priced in instantly. The market is stuck in no man’s land, and there is no other catalyst in sight.

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It was the last time my portfolio was in the red. It was not fun. The stock market felt like it was broken. Nothing worked. Every rally got sold. Every piece of good news was ignored. Every piece of bad news sent stocks lower.

Sound familiar?

Before we get into what is different this time, let’s talk about what is the same. Because the parallels between 2022 and 2026 are striking.

The wall of worry looks the same

In 2022, the market peaked on January 3rd. From there it was a slow, painful grind lower. Tech stocks led the way down. The Mag 7 got absolutely destroyed.

Sound familiar? The S&P 500 hit its most recent all-time high on January 28, 2026. And just like in 2022, the Mag 7 has been leading the way down ever since.

Here is what those stocks did in 2022 and how 2026 is shaping up so far:

The Mag 7 index fell roughly 50% from peak to trough in 2022. The S&P 500 bottomed on October 12th. Tech stocks didn’t find their floor until December 31st. It was almost a two-year bear market for the names that had been carrying the market higher.

And it is not just the YTD numbers that tell the story. Here is where these same stocks sit right now from their 52-week highs:

Microsoft down 31% from its high. Meta down 24%. Tesla down 24%. These are not small pullbacks. This is real pain.

But before you do anything, let's talk about why 2026 feels so much like 2022 and the one thing that is completely different this time.

Read more

The real headline, though, belonged to gold. After a monster run, the shiny stuff cratered 11.1% this week, its worst weekly performance since 1983, and is now on pace for its worst month since 2013. Turns out even the ultimate safe haven isn’t immune to a good old-fashioned selloff.

Bitcoin wasn’t spared either, dropping 5.7% on the week and sitting down nearly 20% on the year. Oil slipped modestly, off 0.7%, though it remains the standout performer of 2026 up more than 70% year to date.

Four straight down weeks for stocks, gold getting crushed, crypto bleeding out. If that’s not a flush, it’s putting on a pretty convincing costume. More on that in a bit.

Market Recap

Weekly Heat Map Of Stocks

YTD Heat Map Of Stocks

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Friends. Acquaintances. Someone I haven’t talked to in two years slides into the DMs.

What stock should I buy right now?

They figure because I write a markets newsletter, I’m sitting on some secret. Some edge. Like I’ve got a Bloomberg terminal and a direct line to someone at the Fed and I’ve been quietly sitting on the answer this whole time, just waiting to be asked.

Every January I publish my three stocks for the year. (you can see this year’s picks here) Every year, without fail, at least a few people read that and think there's a fourth stock, the real one, that I'm keeping to myself. The private pick. The one I'm actually buying.

There isn’t.

Here’s the truth: I don’t know.

And neither does Warren Buffett. Neither does your brother-in-law. Neither does the guy on CNBC with the really confident tie. Neither does the hedge fund manager with the $50 billion AUM and the research team of 200 people and the satellite data tracking parking lot traffic at retail stores.

If any of us actually knew, not guessed, not estimated, not modeled, what the market was going to do, we wouldn’t be here.

We’d be on a private island, completely off the grid, sleeping in, surfing, swimming, and eating whatever our private chef decided to make that day. We would have bought the right thing, cashed out, and disappeared.

Nobody’s on that island.

We’re all guessing. Some of us just guess better.

Every day, market participants from retail investors to trillion-dollar institutions take the information available to them and make their best educated guess about what comes next. That’s it. That’s the whole game.

The difference between a good investor and a bad one isn’t access to some hidden truth. It’s the quality of the process. How disciplined is your research? How well do you manage risk when you’re wrong? How honest are you with yourself when a thesis breaks down? Good investors aren’t right more often because they know more. They’re right more often because they’re more rigorous about how they guess, and quicker to admit when they’ve guessed wrong.

Yes, Wall Street strategists have more data, more charts, and more computing power than most of us will ever see. And they still don’t know. Every December, the biggest banks on the planet publish their year-end S&P 500 price targets. Every year, the range of those targets is enormous. Every year, most of them are wrong. Some years, nearly all of them are wrong in the same direction at the same time, which is its own kind of humbling.

Think about it this way. Who predicted the pandemic? Who predicted that the stock market would hit all-time highs in the middle of it? Who predicted the selloff that followed, or the pace of the recovery, or inflation running hotter than it had in 40 years?

Nobody called it. Some people got pieces of it right. Most didn’t. And the ones who did often got the next thing wrong.

The risks to a market are simply endless. Inflation. Fed policy. Interest rates. Supply chains. Political instability. Geopolitical shocks. Currency crises. Credit stress. A pandemic nobody saw coming. A war that moves oil prices over 30% in a week. You can keep adding to that list forever, because the world keeps inventing new ones. There are just too many variables, and too many of them are completely outside anyone’s control.

Anyone who tells you they know, not thinks, not believes, not expects, knows what the market is going to do is full of it.

Right now, in March 2026, “nobody knows” has never felt more true.

The Fed decides today. This afternoon, Jerome Powell steps to the podium and the dot plot gets released. It will look precise and authoritative. Sixteen Fed officials, each with a projection, neatly plotted on a chart. Wall Street analysts will parse every word of the statement. Financial media will spend two hours dissecting a 45-minute press conference.

And yet, oil has spiked sharply on Middle East tensions. Inflation is running hotter than expected. Growth is slowing. The Fed chair transition is in limbo. Rate cut expectations have been pushed from June all the way back to October. Equity markets are pricing in one scenario. The bond market is pricing in another. They can’t both be right. One of them is going to be surprised.

The dot plot will look authoritative. It isn’t. It’s sixteen people’s best educated guesses, dressed up in a grid.

Nobody knows. Everyone has a model. The models disagree.

And that’s before you account for the thing nobody’s modeling yet. The next shock that hasn’t happened. The one that will feel obvious in hindsight and impossible to have seen coming in the moment. There’s always one. We just don’t know what it is.

That’s not a failure. That’s simply the market.

Four quotes worth keeping on your wall:

“In the financial markets, hindsight is forever 20/20, but foresight is legally blind. And thus, for most investors, market timing is a practical and emotional impossibility.” — Benjamin Graham

“In all my 60 years in the stock market, I never found anyone whose opinion of what the stock market would do next week or next month was worth heeding.” — John Templeton

“I am certainly not going to predict what the stock market is going to do in the next year or two, since I don’t have the faintest idea.” — Warren Buffett

“You never can predict the economy. You can’t predict the stock market.” — Peter Lynch

These aren’t just humble disclaimers. They’re hard-won wisdom from people who spent their entire careers in the markets. People with more information, more experience, and more resources than anyone reading this newsletter. And every single one of them landed in the same place. I don’t know, and neither does anyone else.

If that’s where Benjamin Graham ended up, you should probably be suspicious of anyone a lot less accomplished who sounds a lot more certain.

So what do you do with that?

You stop looking for certainty where there isn’t any. You stop trusting the guest on TV who says this is “a guarantee.” You stop treating the December price target from a big bank like it’s a forecast and not a guess with a suit on.

You get comfortable with the idea that investing is inherently probabilistic. You’re not trying to be right every time, that’s not possible. You’re trying to make high-quality decisions with incomplete information, manage your downside when you’re wrong, and let your winners run when you’re right. Over time, that process compounds. The need to know doesn’t.

And the next time someone asks you what stock to buy, or the next time someone on TV tells you this one is a lock, remember where the greatest investors of all time landed after a lifetime in the game.

Nobody knows. We’re all just making our best guess.

Next time someone tells you otherwise, that they know, that this one is a lock, that this trade is guaranteed, smile, nod, and then go do your own homework. Because what they’re really telling you is that they either haven’t been doing this long enough to be humbled yet, or they want something from you.

The island isn’t real. Never was.

Now stop asking me what to buy.

Thank you for reading! If you enjoyed Spilled Coffee, please subscribe.

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The Nasdaq continues to bear the most YTD damage, now down nearly 5% on the year as growth and tech names absorb the brunt of the rotation. Small caps, despite their relative insulation so far, slipped again this week.

The real story, however, continues to play out in commodities. Oil surged 8.5% on the week and is now up a stunning 71.8% YTD. It’s a move that should be front of mind for anyone watching inflation dynamics. Gold pulled back modestly but remains up nearly 15% on the year. Bitcoin managed a bounce but it sits in deeply negative territory YTD.

Market Recap

Weekly Heat Map Of Stocks

YTD Heat Map Of Stocks

Consider everything the market has absorbed over the past several months, geopolitical flare-ups, an oil shock, inflation fears, a Magnificent 7 selloff, and a chorus of recession warnings. And yet the S&P 500 sits less than 5% from its all-time high. Peak pessimism has done surprisingly little to derail the underlying bull market.

That context matters when reading this week’s sentiment data. Bearish readings among individual investors jumped again, with nearly half of AAII respondents now expecting stocks to fall over the next six months. That’s the fourth consecutive week where bears outnumber bulls. That’s a lot of pessimism for a market that hasn’t actually broken down.

Here's the thing though, the majority of stocks haven't gone down. The index is off, but it hasn't collapsed. Which brings us to the technical picture.

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What’s happened since has only made the concern more urgent.

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The Nasdaq slid 1.2%, extending its YTD loss to -3.7%, while Bitcoin quietly shed another 0.9% , now down more than 22% to start the year.

Not everything is red. Gold continued its impressive run, sitting up 18.6% YTD despite a minor weekly dip. And oil was the week’s big story, surging 36.4% on the week, more on that in a moment. We’ll also touch on the latest jobs data coming up.

Market Recap

Weekly Heat Map Of Stocks

YTD Heat Map Of Stocks

S&P 500 Sector Returns

Since last week ended, energy is the only sector in the green. It’s the clear winner so far in 2026.

The Calm On The Surface

For all the noise this year with tariff threats, geopolitical tension, a jobs scare, and a volatility spike. The S&P 500 has actually been trading in a historically tight range. Through the first 41 trading days of 2026, the index has moved less than 4% from high to low. According to Bloomberg data, that is the narrowest starting range in market history, dating all the way back to the 1930s.

Don’t let that fool you though. Beneath the surface there has been plenty of rotation, sector-level swings, and individual stock volatility. The headline index just hasn’t reflected it, yet.

The question worth asking. Does this calm eventually break one way or the other? History suggests these periods of unusual compression tend to resolve with a move. The direction is the debate.

What March History Says

With the market under pressure, it's worth zooming out and looking at what March typically does because the current weakness may actually be right on script.

Looking at the past 20 years, it is perfectly normal to see S&P 500 softness in late February and into mid-March, before a meaningful low forms.

Ryan Detrick notes that mid-March has historically been the bottom of the average year going back to 2006. Yes, 2009 and 2020 are part of that story but the pattern is consistent enough to be worth noting.

The Goldman Sachs Flow of Funds seasonal composite points to the same thing: the window from roughly March 6 through March 14 has historically been the soft spot, with strength typically returning after the 14th.

And for those watching the calendar closely. 2026 is a midterm election year. According to Jeff Hirsch at the Stock Trader's Almanac, March in midterm years has historically shown early strength that lasts longer, with the second half of March tending to outperform the first.

If the market feels rough right now, history says that's normal for this time of year. The other side of this window has typically been better.

Jobs Are Now A Concern

Before we even get to the oil story and the geopolitical headlines, the economic narrative shifted dramatically on Friday morning.

Read more

11 Offers in 5 Days

A few weeks ago, we put an offer in on a cottage. It seemed like a reasonable bet in a market that has been cooling for years. We came in $40,000 over the asking price. We weren't even close.

The property received 11 offers in under 5 days. It ultimately sold for $75,000 over asking. All cash, no contingencies, with the appraisal and inspection conditions waived entirely.

That’s not a buyer’s market. Or is it? The data tells a more complicated story and understanding the contradiction is exactly what may help you make a smarter decision right now.

Read more

The real headline? Gold. Up 4.7% this week alone and now +21.2% on the year. When gold is outperforming everything in sight, the market is telling you something about where investor confidence stands right now.

Oil quietly continues its run up 17.2% YTD, while the 10-year Treasury yield ticked down to 3.95%, a nod to the short rates are coming down environment we’ve been talking about.

Bitcoin had a decent week, up 1.9%, but remains one of the worst performing assets of 2026, down nearly 25% on the year.

The rotation continues to speak volumes. Safety assets like gold and bonds are winning. Growth and tech are struggling. The market is voting with its feet and right now, it’s voting defensive.

Market Recap

Weekly Heat Map Of Stocks

YTD Heat Map Of Stocks

S&P 500 Sectors In 2026

The S&P 500 may be sitting near all-time highs, but look beneath the surface and the picture gets a lot less comfortable. Energy, Materials, and Consumer Staples are leading the market in 2026, the classic defensive rotation. Meanwhile, Technology, Financials, and Consumer Discretionary are all negative on the year.

The Breadth Dashboard makes it even clearer. In Technology, Financials, and Consumer Discretionary, fewer than 60% of stocks are trading above their 50-day moving average. That's a notable disconnect when the index itself is near record levels.

In today’s Investing Update:

• The Most Important Chart in the Market

• Risk-Off Signals Are Flashing

• The Mag 7 Valuation Flip Nobody Expected

• The VIX Signal That Has a Perfect Track Record

• My Thoughts on Nvidia

• Moves I’ve Made

Let’s get into it.

Read more

Nobody knows.

And yet, the takes keep coming. The columns keep piling up. The newsletters keep landing in your inbox, each one more breathless than the last. Some will be bullish. Many, if not most, will be bearish and fear mongering, because here is the dirty little secret of financial media: fear sells. Fear gets the clicks. A headline that says “AI Could Be Just Fine” doesn’t move the needle. “THE 2028 GLOBAL INTELLIGENCE CRISIS” absolutely does.

Before we go any further, I want you to hold onto one idea as you read everything that comes out about AI, whether it is from me or anyone else in the weeks and months ahead: it is all a best guess. The most confident voice in the room is still guessing. The most bearish doom piece and the most bullish moonshot prediction are both working with incomplete information about something none of us have ever seen before.

That’s what makes this moment so disorienting. And so fascinating.

The AI Trade That Ate Itself

Not long ago, the playbook was simple. If a company mentioned AI in an earnings call, the stock went up. If an executive said “we’re integrating AI into our workflow,” investors cheered. AI was the golden ticket, and everyone wanted one.

That trade has gotten a lot more complicated.

Now, the very companies that rallied on the promise of using AI are being sold off as the AI developers come after their core businesses directly. Anthropic’s Claude releases new tools aimed at HR, financial analysis, equity research, private equity, wealth management, investment banking, and suddenly the stocks of companies in those industries sell off. The market is essentially pricing in a question it doesn’t know how to answer: if AI can do what these companies do, what are these companies worth?

Each release is a small tremor. And the market, fragile and anxious, shakes.

The reaction to Citrini Research’s recent piece on AI, what they’re calling a potential intelligence crisis, sent ripples through the financial world. Was Citrini too bearish? Maybe. But “too bearish” and “wrong” are different things. And the market’s violent reaction to it tells you something important: the anxiety is real, even if the specific predictions are uncertain.

Elon Said What Now?

In 2014, Elon Musk gave an interview and said something that sounded, at the time, like science fiction wrapped in paranoia:

“I think we should be very careful about artificial intelligence. If I had to guess at what our biggest existential threat is, it’s probably that. So we need to be very careful... With artificial intelligence, we are summoning the demon.”

People rolled their eyes. I still remember the day he said it because it stuck with me. At the time I thought, what on earth was he smoking?

It sounded less like something you would expect from the CEO of a car company and more like a late night dorm room debate after too much caffeine. Far fetched. Exaggerated. Almost absurd.

That was twelve years ago.

I’m not saying he was right. I’m not saying he was wrong. I’m saying that when I read that quote today in 2026, watching AI tools roll out across every industry simultaneously, I pause in a way I didn’t before. The gap between the idea and the reality has closed faster than almost anyone predicted. That’s worth sitting with.

The Industries Falling Like Dominos

Let’s walk through what’s already happened, because I think we underestimate how quickly things have moved.

AI came for software development first. Tools that could write and debug code faster than engineers. Then cybersecurity. Then it landed in HR, with AI agents that can handle recruiting, onboarding, and performance reviews. Now accounting and financial planning are squarely in the crosshairs.

Anthropic recently released a suite of new plugins covering HR, design, engineering, operations, financial analysis, investment banking, equity research, private equity, and wealth management.

Essentially a roadmap of white-collar industries they’re moving into. Then came deeper integrations: admin controls, workflow automation, connectors built to work inside Microsoft Excel and PowerPoint.

Read that list again slowly. That’s not a niche. That’s a significant portion of what office workers in America do every day.

And this isn’t just a software story anymore.

The Layer Underneath the Layer

Here’s where it gets harder to think about.

When people try to reassure themselves about AI disruption, they often reach for the same comfort: “Sure, AI might take white-collar jobs, but trades and physical jobs are safe.” The plumber, the electrician, the nurse, AI can’t do those, right?

Maybe. For now.

Because the next layer of the AI onion, and I realize how uncomfortable this is, is humanoid robotics. AI-driven robots that can perform physical tasks. Companies like Figure, Boston Dynamics, and Tesla’s Optimus program aren’t building these machines for science fairs. They’re building them for warehouses, factories, and eventually homes.

Once you start thinking about that layer, it becomes genuinely hard to identify an industry that is fully insulated. Not just hard, nearly impossible.

Is your head spinning yet?

We’ve Been Here Before. Sort Of.

The optimist in me keeps reaching for historical context, because history offers the only honest comfort here.

We’ve done this before. Three times, actually.

In 1784, the steam engine didn’t just change how goods were made. It rewired the entire economic order of the world. Millions of people who worked in ways that had sustained their families for generations found those ways obsolete within a generation. It was terrifying in real time. In retrospect, we call it the First Industrial Revolution and frame it as progress.

In 1870, mass production and assembly lines did it again. In 1969, automation and electronics again. Each revolution displaced workers, disrupted industries, and created enormous anxiety, and each one, in time, created more prosperity and more jobs than it destroyed.

Now we’re at the Fourth. The digital world merging with physical reality through AI and robotics. Cyber-physical systems that don’t just process information but act in the world.

The difference, the part that keeps me up at night, is the speed. The First Industrial Revolution played out over decades. Workers, institutions, and governments had time to adapt, however painfully. This one is moving in months. The plugins released last week will be obsolete in six months. The job that feels secure today is being evaluated right now by someone’s AI roadmap.

The internet changed everything too, we remind ourselves. And it did. But it also took twenty years to fully reshape the economy. This feels faster.

What Main Street Isn’t Ready For

Wall Street is anxious about valuations and disruption cycles. That’s its job.

Main Street is anxious about something more immediate: Will my job exist in three years?

The accountant at a mid-sized firm. The financial analyst at a regional bank. The HR manager coordinating hiring across a company. The equity researcher producing reports. These aren’t abstract roles. These are mortgages, kids in school, and retirement accounts. These are real people looking at a list of new AI capabilities and trying to figure out where they fit.

I don’t have a clean answer for them. No one does. The honest answer is: some of these jobs will evolve dramatically, some will shrink, and some will disappear. New jobs will be created that don’t exist yet. That’s the historical pattern. But “new jobs will be created” is cold comfort if you’re 47 years old and mid-career.

The real conversation should be about retraining, how we help people transition, who pays for it, and which institutions step up to support it. That is the discussion we are not having loudly enough. We’re too busy arguing about whether AI is good or bad, bullish or bearish, demon or savior.

Two Reads Worth Your Time

If you want to dive deeper into the competing visions of where this goes, two pieces have generated enormous discussion:

Matt Shumer’s Something Big Is Happening captures the vertigo of the moment from an optimistic, awe-struck perspective — the sense that we’re watching something genuinely historic unfold in real time.

Citrini Research’s The 2028 Global Intelligence Crisis takes the darker view, arguing that the displacement will come faster and harder than markets and institutions are prepared to handle.

Read both. Hold both. Neither is certainly right. That’s the point.

So Where Does That Leave Us?

I could end this with a confident take. Readers respond to confident takes. But I’d be lying.

Maybe AI doesn’t end the world. Maybe it doesn’t even end most jobs. Maybe it’s the most significant technological advancement in human history. The next internet, or bigger and we’re watching the early, awkward, terrifying phase before the transformation settles into something extraordinary.

Maybe the Citrini piece is closer to right and the disruption comes faster and harder than any institution is equipped to handle.

Maybe it’s somewhere in between, messy and uneven and full of both loss and possibility in ways we can’t fully see from here.

What I know is this: more scary pieces are coming. They will get scarier. That’s not cynicism, that’s pattern recognition. Fear is the dominant narrative in uncertain times, and these are deeply uncertain times. When those pieces land, read them. Take them seriously. Just don’t mistake a compelling argument for a prediction.

The future isn’t written yet. Not by the bulls, not by the bears, not by the AI developers, and not by me.

My head is spinning.

I suspect yours is too.

And I don’t think it’s going to stop anytime soon.

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