Reflections on 2025, Predictions for 2026

Join Lisa James and Lori Zager as they reflect on the volatility and market dynamics of 2025, share their outlook for 2026, and discuss the nomination of Kevin Warsh as the new Federal Reserve chairman. Looking ahead to 2026, they anticipate continued market volatility driven by geopolitical tensions and political risk. 2026 will be "another year where thoughtful positioning rather than passive exposure makes the difference". The hosts discuss their strategic positioning, including maintaining international equity exposure while being selective about regions, a strategic shift from AI providers to AI users, shifting from precious metals to industrial metals, and their cautious approach to bonds amid rising Treasury issuance. 

Find out more and reach out to us on our blog.

Transcript

Lisa James (00:01):
Welcome to Nest Egg Podcast. This is Lisa James. I'm here with my partner Lori Zager. We are part of a team at Ingles and Snyder, LLC, which is an independent registered investment advisor.

Lori Zager (00:19):
What we're going to talk about today is referenced in a quarterly letter that we just published. It's entitled, reflections on 2025, and the Outlook for 2026. All I can tell you is we look a lot older after 2025, and I'm not sure 26 is going to be any easier given how we've started out with a bang. We're going to start and talk about what we thought last year and kind of what happened and then what we see happening in 2026. And I'm very serious when I say that we think that the volatility is going to continue and make us even older, but I guess that's mathematically correct and wiser. Oh, wiser. Okay, good. I'm glad we get something out of this.

Lisa James (01:02):
Exactly. The market opened being optimistic, but also with anxiety and geopolitical issues, inflation that wasn't rising, but not really coming down the way the Fed wanted. And our historically high government debt, which was also not falling because our government deficits weren't falling because we continue to spend money and cut taxes.

Lori Zager (01:25):
I just want to say that going into last year, people thought that AI was going to solve everyone's problem and everyone wanted to own everything associated with ai. And we got, I can't tell you how many emails on when was OpenAI going to go public, and there was a definite belief that inflation was stubborn, but the numbers really didn't show it. And so there's been kind a disconnect between what the numbers have said and investment advisors, for a lot of them, I would say, have thought and what the public was feeling

Lisa James (02:00):
About inflation. Well, I think we just go back to the same old problem, which is that people react to the actual price, not to how fast or slow that price is rising. So we have much lower inflation today than we did in 2022. I mean at one point inflation was at nine, now it's at two and a half, but it doesn't matter. The price is still higher, the price is up,

Lori Zager (02:21):
It's going up, it's just going up less fast.

Lisa James (02:24):
Yeah, the price is not going down. It's going up more slowly. But you still go to the grocery store and say, oh my God, this is so expensive. Just like you go to a restaurant and you say, wow, restaurant prices are higher than ever. So this concept of it's called disinflation doesn't really register with people when they do things like go to the grocery store or go out to eat.

Lori Zager (02:47):
And I think a lot of people, myself included, thought that tariffs were going to be inflationary, and we haven't seen that yet. And there's all kinds of reasons why. I could tell you why I don't think we've seen it yet, and I think it's still going to be a problem. But thus far, one for Donald Trump and zero for Lori, we did talk about last year about rewarding assets tied to real value and earnings power and structural change rather than speculation or valuation excess. And I think that those themes continue into 2026 as well.

Lisa James (03:23):
One of our strong convictions, actually, not just in 2025 but for a while now, was to hold gold as a core asset in our portfolios. And there are a number of reasons for that. One is that gold isn't really correlated to either stocks or bonds, which is very helpful in times like 2022 when both stocks and bonds went down and gold went up that year. So while people like to think that bonds hedge equities, it's true some of the time, but not all of the time. So holding another asset in your portfolio that is not correlated to either stocks or bonds tends to smooth out your portfolio performance over time. But that's not the only reason to own gold. Another reason, and particularly in the environment that we've been in for the last few years is that gold is a very good hedge During periods of political stress.

(04:19):
Gold has been around as a hedge for hundreds of years and it's held by many central banks. And so when things go wrong in the world, people generally buy treasuries and gold. And if there are reasons they're not as interested in buying treasuries, they still buy gold. So it's a very good geopolitical hedge and we certainly saw that play out last year. And in addition to that, we have a separate theme driving gold accumulation by central banks and others. And that is having people and countries move away from using the dollar. So at the moment we have the bricks, which is Brazil, Russia, India, China plus Saudi Arabia and other Middle Eastern countries. They're trying to create a separate currency from the dollar that they can trade in because people don't really want to own Japanese currency or Russian currency or Saudi Arabian currency, but they might be willing to own a basket of currencies that not only has a mix of other countries, but has a lot of gold.

(05:24):
So these countries have been buying gold in order to help create a new currency. And in addition to that, worldwide central banks have been buying more gold to become less dollar dependent. Therefore, the price of gold increased substantially because there were a lot of reasons that people were buying gold and buying gold in pretty significant size. So how did that all play out over the course of the year? Physical gold ETFs were up 60% for the year that compared to bonds being up about 7% for the aggregate bond index and gold mining equities, which we also hold in our portfolios, were up about 165% because they're the ones who produce the gold and they have leverage. And on top of that, they had falling energy prices, which makes it cheaper for them to produce the gold.

Lori Zager (06:17):
We first wrote about gold in 2019, and I even was on Yahoo Finance and mentioned gold at a time when most managers wouldn't buy gold. And so this is not a new theme for us. We argued it wasn't a Barbaras relic and that it should be in your portfolio. And the reason for owning the miners is really kind of twofold. On the one hand, they benefit, as Lisa says, when energy prices are low and gold prices are high, that's nirvana for them because one of their big costs is energy. But the other reason to hold gold miners is we have had in our history an inability to own physical gold. It happened during the Roosevelt administration and we've written about that at blogs. And when that happens, people will tend to want to own the miners, the people that are going to find the new gold.

(07:12):
If you can't own the gold that's out there, I dunno if that's going to happen or not, but there is a concern about that. So that's another reason, if you will, to own the miners. I know a lot of people don't believe in gold. We haven't been believers in Bitcoin just because it's never historically been a store of value and gold has throughout history, but I will admit to my friends who love crypto that it's easier to move crypto than it is to move coins from place to place. I will make the counter argument that when I buy something with crypto, it may be easy to move, but I don't really know what I paid for it. So volatile, I may have paid a lot more than I thought. So gold is a long standing thesis. Not everybody likes it. We happen to like it and it's in our portfolios. And last year it served us well. It's gotten a little bit of a mania, nothing like the silver situation, but we think it's going to continue to be a store of value in the future. And then I guess I want to talk a little bit about artificial intelligence and how everybody was using chat, GPT, and they wanted to own the company that

Lisa James (08:26):
Provided a large language model behind it.

Lori Zager (08:30):
And we argued in two different pieces and two different podcasts that the transition was going to begin. And you want to own the companies that use AI to help them rather than the companies that provide the ai. And we talked about the concern that the companies that provide the AI were spending a lot of money in order to make the AI

Lisa James (08:55):
And to stay competitive with each other.

Lori Zager (08:57):
Absolutely. It's interesting, I saw Jeremy Siegel, who's a pretty famous professor or former professor I guess, of Wharton, and he made the exact same point in his letter last week. I was like, oh, wow, I don't think he's reading our blogs however, so we continue to the companies that will benefit from AI and anything else, this is going to get out of whack. I mean, as we record this, the software stocks have gotten incredibly hurt and we have been underweight technology now for a couple of years actually. And we have been underweight software. Having said that, the baby's gotten so thrown out with the bathwater, I think probably different kinds of software companies will do. Okay.

Lisa James (09:44):
Yeah, the real problem now is that people think that AI is going to cannibalize very directly what a fair amount of software stocks are actually doing. So you need to find the software stocks that can't be cannibalized by an AI system. And so we actually spent some of the morning looking into things like that to say which companies are most at risk and which companies really have sort of moats around them where AI can't easily replicate the service that they're providing. So we'll tell you more about that in another time

Lori Zager (10:20):
You see in your portfolios,

Lisa James (10:22):
But we are paying a lot of attention to that. I mean, just today, I mean software stocks were down basically six to 10%, which is, well, this is the kind of volatility, and that's after falling another 10 or 20% over the last couple months. So it's been a pretty tough road for software here.

Lori Zager (10:42):
And the thing you want to do is to be prepared because if you get new money and it hits something that you like, you want to be prepared to buy it. And by the same token, you want to hopefully be out of what is getting hurt or figure out, okay, this company is being thrown out and it doesn't deserve to be thrown out. So it's just like I said, the volatility is eye popping.

Lisa James (11:06):
Another theme of ours, which we actually did write a blog about was rethinking bonds as a hedge. And the reason for that is traditionally bonds that had fairly static supply from a country that was well regarded and viewed as a safe haven tended to be a very good hedge against disturbances in the world and when equities went down. So for a very long time, us treasuries were a pretty good hedge except in inflationary environments. But now we have a world situation where we actually had a Danish pension fund sell a hundred million of US tenures because as just a protest against what Trump is trying to do with Greenland. So we have an environment now where certain international investors aren't buying treasuries, not just because it might not make sense in their portfolio because they actively have an issue with the United States government. Well,

Lori Zager (12:06):
Also just the amount of bonds we need to finance our debt is just, it's huge.

Lisa James (12:12):
Well, it's higher than it used to be, and the question is, will it continue to grow or not? And I guess

Lori Zager (12:19):
You tell me a politician that ever gets elected by cutting anything.

Lisa James (12:22):
Well, but that was actually part of Trump's strategy was that he was going to take all the money from tariffs and use it to reduce the deficit, but I guess he found that he had to actually take a fair amount of that money and give it to the farmers who were losing money and of tariffs space going out of business because of retaliatory tariffs. So I think the tariffs actually though, did help a little bit to bring down the deficit, but not enough to really make a big difference. And also the tariffs ended up being a lot lower than what he initially posited to the world. So we have continued growth in deficits, which means continued growth and issuance of treasuries. Now, the treasury Department itself does try to manage that somewhat. And one of the things that they're doing is they're issuing more short-term bills and not as many long-term 10 and 30 year bonds in order to not put pressure on interest rates at what we call the longer end of the curve, the 10 year to 30 year part of the interest rate curve, just explain you want your hedge not to be something A, that people are starting to resist buying and B, not something that is increasing in supply because that sort of counteracts the fact that you want to buy it when there's a problem

Lori Zager (13:43):
And throw a little dose of inflation on there, and then you really don't want to have it

Lisa James (13:46):
Right. So therefore you can have some bonds for income. We prefer to have shorter term bonds with maturities that are five years and under for the most part and not really take as much risk to longer term bonds. So we also say what happens with inflation? We know bonds are terrible in inflationary environments, and if we do get inflation, we've written before and cited actually a great Goldman study that shows that gold and energy stocks are really the most effective hedge for inflation.

Lori Zager (14:20):
If you notice, we started adding some energy positions at the end of last year adding to our energy positions. And we have historically had a big energy position, which surprisingly did not hurt us last year. And in the case of individual stocks actually helped us because

Lisa James (14:37):
Of the type of energy we type

Lori Zager (14:38):
Of energy, we had a huge position in uranium stocks. But what Goldman found is that energy stocks tend to move ahead of macro data and that they are one of the few things that can help you in an inflationary environment even more than gold. And if you want to see that study or want to see our blog on that, let us know. It was one written last year. I think

Lisa James (15:04):
Another theme of ours last year was believing that China would become investible again, that was controversial. Not everybody really thought that was an opportunity. And we

Lori Zager (15:14):
Were in such a, we seem to be in World War III with China as well,

Lisa James (15:19):
But she went from allowing a lot of development, especially in the tech sector in China to curtailing that development because he felt that people that ran those companies were getting too rich and having too much power. And he wanted to return to the roots of the communist party and focus on benefiting the people as opposed to the top earners in the food chain. And that really backfired for a while. Their stock market went down, their companies did more poorly, and eventually he had to regroup and stimulate the Chinese economy.

Lori Zager (16:00):
And it's still a mixed bag in terms of the data that's coming in on China. Some of the companies that we own are starting to see some pretty good news out of China. It's not uniform,

Lisa James (16:13):
But it's also not punitive anymore. It had become punitive towards the tech firms and now it's much less confrontational and they actually do want to support growth. So I mean, you want to be on the side of the government. I mean, you can't really pick a different side than what the government's trying to do in China because they have absolute power as opposed to the United States. And so look at what they're doing and make your investment decisions based on that. The

Lori Zager (16:39):
Stocks were also cheap, but they had been cheap even when they were out of favor. And I guess the property sector, which has been a real problem in China, it looks like it's showing some signs of stabilization. So things are getting better. And often stocks do really well when things incrementally change. And that's what happened in China. And we did catch that. We also talked about the fact that margins had driven so much of company performance that we didn't think that was going to continue. And just to explain that was in 24.

Speaker 3 (17:11):
In

Lori Zager (17:11):
2024, late 24, we talked about this, I think it was October of 24, we wrote a blog, trees don't Grow to the sky. They actually grew closer to the sky than we thought. They went from, I think at the time we wrote the blog, it was 24 30%. They went all the way to 40%. The top eight or 10 stocks got that high. So they grew closer to the sky than we thought.

Lisa James (17:33):
You mean 40% of the s and

Lori Zager (17:35):
PS and P 500 was in eight or 10 stocks. And that was unusual. And one of the reasons why it worked for a while is because they were really earning a lot of money and they continued to earn a lot of money. But on top of it, you did get huge amount of not only the amount that they earned, but the multiple that is how much people were willing to pay for those earnings called the multiple.

Lisa James (18:02):
Sum it all up. When you looked at 2024, what you saw was that the rise in the stock market was dominated by an increase in multiples and not by an increase in earnings. So

Lori Zager (18:15):
Even though earnings were going up, that isn't why the stocks went up as much as they did. Exactly. And we said in 2025 that it was going to take earnings growth rather than multiple expansion to really move stocks. And actually only two of the magnificent seven outperformed the s and p 500 in 2025 Google, which has been a name that we've liked for a long time. And Nvidia was the other one.

Speaker 3 (18:44):
But

Lori Zager (18:44):
Nvidia not behaving very well right now. Anyway, we continue to think that that's going to continue to be the case. In fact, I heard someone today talk about the fact that hardware technology companies had beat earnings estimates, like 87% of them had beat earnings estimates. Whereas software companies, which we mentioned have gotten slammed today, only 60% or 65% of them have beaten. So this theme of earnings mattering more than valuations. I guess if your valuation multiple is too high, it can hurt you. But we do think earnings growth is going to continue to be a theme. So for 2026,

Lisa James (19:24):
Well, there are parallels. I mean, we were saying at the very beginning, maybe on January 2nd, hoping for a somewhat more stable year, but that did not happen. So we have the same sense of a general, I think une, if you talk to people, you talk to your friends, most people are uncomfortable with what's going on and the amount of disruption that our administration is causing around the world. The tariff threats move markets when they happen and move markets when they recede. Geopolitical statements do.

Lori Zager (19:57):
India was the latest one the last

Lisa James (19:59):
Few days. Markets are constantly now weighing political risk against economic resilience. And I think the thing we could say about 2025, and a lot of people believe about 2026, is that United States does have a lot of economic resilience, and people at our companies put their heads down and keep working and keep inventing new things and selling more of their product and employing people. They might not be adding employment, but they're for the most part, not firing a lot of people. So we have been resilient so far,

Lori Zager (20:35):
And we do. We like the us, we continue to like the us. We don't hate the us. We just think that international equities might really help. And that helped our portfolios last year, and I think it'll continue to help our portfolios this year. We're a little selective on where we want to be. I know that Europe was a big performer last year, and I understand that there is a major change that went on in Germany that these were people that hated debt and are now going to take on debt to fund their military exposure. But when I look at the European economy, they like all the other developed world, has a demographic problem, but they also have a regulation problem. All Europe is very heavily regulated. And if you look at the entrepreneurial spirit, I just don't see it in terms of companies and things that happen in Europe. It's different in other parts of the world. I think Asia Pacific is really different. Now, you could argue that maybe the Chinese just steal what we do rather than invent, but they do it cheaper.

Lisa James (21:43):
But they're good manufacturers,

Lori Zager (21:45):
They do it cheaper and they make it

Lisa James (21:47):
Open for everyone. And that's actually one of the issues is that the Chinese are excellent manufacturers, and actually European exporters are losing market share to their Chinese competitors. So where do you want to invest? And the people that are losing market share, the people that are gaining market share China provide some opportunities versus Europe.

Lori Zager (22:10):
And we've liked Korea as well. And the reason really for that is just I hope China's going to behave themselves, but good luck with that.

Lisa James (22:20):
But Japan has also had an improving economy and they have really changed how their corporations work and they have much better corporate governance than they did before. And it's been a great transition in their stock market over the past couple of years.

Lori Zager (22:40):
And what I was going to say about Korea is that you do, if you want semiconductor manufacturing outside of Taiwan, Korea is one of the only places that provides it. So that is what at least initially got us excited about that. But I do think in terms of Asia Pacific, I do think there's an entrepreneurial spirit. I dunno if they have regulation, you kind of do it their way or take the highway maybe.

Lisa James (23:06):
I think there's far less regulatory oversight. Yeah, I wouldn't, they decide you're okay, you can do whatever

Lori Zager (23:11):
United States

Lisa James (23:11):
Exactly.

Lori Zager (23:13):
Do whatever it takes to get it done. It's not so good for the world. So we're going to continue to use international, but we're going to be selective about where we go in the world. And sometimes we're not going to be right. But I find it hard to go to Europe at this point. And then another theme that we have this year, and it really has to do with the strength of the US economy, and I think some of the other economies in the world, and that is looking at industrial metals versus precious metals.

Lisa James (23:42):
And we have a government that's putting a lot of emphasis on having access to industrial materials and especially the materials that are needed for all our tech industry and our military. So because we had such an explosion in the value of our gold positions last year, we made the decision in our mutual fund portfolios at least to cut some of our gold stock exposure and instead put that money into companies that produce industrial metals. So that would be copper and other things like that.

Lori Zager (24:19):
And we do have some individual stocks, some exposure to silver. We don't like the meme.

Lisa James (24:27):
And silver is sort of a mixed metal. It's a mixed

Lori Zager (24:29):
Metal, fresh sand

Lisa James (24:30):
Industrial,

Lori Zager (24:32):
But its industrial uses are real.

Lisa James (24:34):
Right. No, I know.

Lori Zager (24:35):
And that it is kind of hard, but I buying the commodity when it's up on a tear, that is not in my blood. We did own some the company that had exposure there, and I'm fine with that, but

Lisa James (24:48):
Yeah. Well, and the other theme that we've talked about before with energy, with industrial materials with gold to some extent is that there's only so much of it and it's very difficult to get out of the ground and there aren't a whole lot of new discoveries being made. So one of the reasons to be invested in materials that people continue to need and potentially need more of is that if you can't really get more very easily, the only way you solve that demand versus supply problem is for prices to go up. So that is just basic economics.

Lori Zager (25:24):
And another thing that I guess I want to mention, which I think is really interesting, the price of oil was down last year, but the price of the stocks of the energy companies, including oil companies, think Exxon as an example of a large oil company. It actually, it didn't outperform the s and p 500, but it wasn't going down. And a lot of these companies pay you pretty good dividends and they have learned capital discipline. So it used to be that it was drill, baby drill regardless of price. And they're learning that they aren't rewarded from their shareholders by doing that, so they're not doing it. In fact, I had to laugh after our takeover of Venezuela or whatever you want to call it, and Trump suggesting that oil companies needed to go and invest there. Exxon Mobil, the CEO, basically told him to pound sand,

Lisa James (26:21):
Right? And then he said he couldn't, after being told that Exxon didn't want to invest, Trump said, I'm not going to let them invest. Which I think the

Lori Zager (26:31):
CEO of Exxon is perfectly okay. And actually given what's happened in Venezuela in the past, I'm happy to,

Lisa James (26:39):
They want to get their money back first before they start putting new money in.

Lori Zager (26:42):
Oh God. Anyway, lastly on the bond environment, we kind of exhausted it, but

Lisa James (26:51):
It's kind of like a similar theme to what we've been discussing. The risks remain. Last year was a reasonable one for bonds, but this year we have a little bit more of a concern because towards the end of the year, we think that issuance of long-term bonds is likely to increase. And if that happens, it's going to have a negative impact on the price of long-term bond funds. And

Lori Zager (27:16):
On top of it, you've got, I mean Lisa, you've spoken about a crowding out effect that the treasury has. What's trying to crowd in are all of these technology firms that are issuing bonds in order to fund these huge AI buildouts.

Lisa James (27:32):
I said that's a really big change for these tech companies and is one of the things that's made people a little bit more leery of their stock price and their multiples is that those companies were all cash cows. They did not borrow money, they had excess cash, and now they're taking all of their cash and investing it in data centers plus borrowing money to do more. And that's a very big change. Some of them

Lori Zager (27:59):
Are doing it off balance sheet, which also really bothers me. I spoke about that in the last podcast, so I won't belabor

Lisa James (28:05):
It. It's a very big change in their financial position, but it's also a big change in the bond market because now you have these companies flooding the bond market with enormous amounts of bonds. Oracle just issued 25 billion. So that creates some concentrated risk in the bond market that didn't use to exist. So if you buy an index bond fund, you are buying tech debt that was issued to build data centers that we hope will be used and we hope won't turn out like cable and fiber optics did 20, 25 years ago when they put more in the ground than was actually needed. They actually used it. Yeah, they did. It took 25 years. Let hope. We're not doing the same thing with data centers. There are people that are quite concerned about that and that in fact, it's going to take a tremendous amount of earnings for these companies to justify the investment that they've made.

Lori Zager (28:58):
So I guess the last thing that we want to talk about, this wasn't in our blog, but recently we have a nomination for a new Federal Reserve chairman, Kevin Walsh. And look, I don't think Jerome Powell was perfect, but I do think he did a good job

Lisa James (29:15):
And he was very trustworthy. I mean, nobody thought that he had a political agenda.

Lori Zager (29:21):
All of the pundits that we read really are very pleased with Kevin Morris.

Lisa James (29:26):
Yeah, he has a lot of experience both on Wall Street and at the Fed. He was a Fed governor. It is not like he's coming, he resigned. He's not coming into this position, not having had experience.

Lori Zager (29:37):
And he's not a Trump lackey either, for lack of a better word, pun intended. I mean, he has a position, my guess is that Cent and he will work very closely together.

Lisa James (29:50):
They were both actually trained by Druckenmiller. That's who was a very famous investor. So it's kind of funny that two people that got their initial experience or their substantial market experience, I'm not sure they were trying, they worked

Lori Zager (30:03):
Powerful positions. They worked with Stan Drunk Miller, and when he had a hedge fund, he never had a down year. So he's a pretty famous hedge fund manager.

Lisa James (30:13):
He returns at 30%. Yeah,

Lori Zager (30:16):
He now has his own family office. He doesn't want to have to deal with people anymore.

Lisa James (30:20):
But we were chatting about wars and some of the things that he's brought up that could affect stocks, particularly bank stocks. So wars is in favor of, you can argue whether it's reregulation or deregulation, but he thinks that after 2008 when there was a change in the capital requirements for banks to make them more credit worthy, that the money center banks need to be carefully watched for systemic risk, but that the regional banks really had a little bit too much put upon them. And he thinks that regional banks should have a little more elbow room than the current regulations.

Lori Zager (31:03):
I have to tell a story while we were talking about this. It just got the hair up on the back of my neck. And that is that there was a cutoff for the amount that the banks that were too big to fail, that had to hold more cash, had to be safer to protect us. There was a cutoff and there was a bank called Signature Bank that was going to have to be considered of too big to fail bank because it was big enough in terms of market capitalization that it was going to have to hold more reserves. And so Signature Bank hired Barney Frank, who was one of the people that produced the legislation on Too Big To Fail. That's

Lisa James (31:44):
The dot, Frank Bill,

Lori Zager (31:45):
The dot, Frank Bill, they hired him to work or be a consultant for Signature Bank. They raised the amount that one a bank was considered to be too big to fail. So Signature Bank no longer was too big to fail and it didn't have to keep the extra reserves on their balance sheet. And guess what? It failed. So I mean, it's just, oh my goodness, I want to take all these politicians and kill 'em all.

Lisa James (32:12):
Anyway. So anyway, I don't think Kevin War is trying to do anything specifically to help any

Speaker 3 (32:17):
Given

Lisa James (32:17):
Bank. No, I think, I think that he just wants there to be a more streamlined system of regulation and more targeting of understanding who are the risks, which banks are the risks, what are the people involved in the market who are systemic risks to our financial system, and to make sure that they are set up in a way that the risk can be somewhat mitigated.

Lori Zager (32:41):
Lisa knows my joke that whenever there's a disaster or a crisis, banks are always at the scene of the crime. I mean, if you look at what's happening in the market right now, people seem to think that private equity is the one that's taking all the risk, but private credit and private credit. But we're learning that the banks are loaning money to the private equity and the private credit firms and to the hedge funds. And so I don't think they're still involved. They're still involved. I guess the bottom line is it's 2026, and this is a quote at the end of our blog, which I just love, which is that it's shaping up to be another year where thoughtful positioning rather than passive exposure makes the difference. And I think for a long time, investors could just say, I'm going to buy the s and p 500 and I'm going to walk away and I don't have to worry about it. And what we're finding is that there's big divergence between the s and p and between other indices in the us, between the US markets and other markets around the world between stocks and bonds, gold and bonds. So really you do have to think about the way that you're positioned.

(33:48):
So that's it from us. If you want to contact us, I'm Lori at two x wealth.ingles.net. And Lisa is Lisa

Lisa James (33:59):
At two x wealth ingles.net. Please visit our website as well.

Lori Zager (34:04):
Yeah, there's tons of information, two x wealth.ingles.net. In the next couple of months. I think there's going to be a big redo. So hopefully you'll see someone other than those two people with a surfboard that drive me crazy on the front page. Anyway, reach out if you have any questions. We'd love to talk to you, and that's a wrap. Until next time, thank you.