From streaming services and meal kits to fitness apps, cloud storage, and smart devices, more spending now happens automatically — quietly chipping away at monthly cash flow. At the same time, economic data and market leadership are shifting, raising important questions about how both consumers and investors should be thinking about 2026.
This episode connects what’s happening in the markets with what many families are seeing in their budgets.
While headline indexes remain close to record levels, the drivers behind those returns are evolving. Mega-cap technology stocks no longer dominate performance the way they did in prior years, and leadership has begun rotating into small caps, mid caps, and international markets.
Rather than signaling fear, this shift reflects investors becoming more selective. Valuations matter again, and capital is moving toward areas where prices better reflect long-term growth potential.
This kind of rotation often occurs after extended market runs and can help create a healthier foundation for future returns.
Alongside market shifts, Noah and Chris touch on something many listeners can relate to: subscription overload.
What once were occasional purchases have turned into dozens of recurring monthly charges. Individually, many seem small. Together, they can quietly rival major fixed expenses like utilities or insurance.
This “set it and forget it” spending makes it harder to feel the benefit of rising markets or stable income. Even in strong economic periods, households can feel stretched when cash flow is constantly spoken for.
The conversation highlights an important financial planning reality: investment returns matter, but so does controlling lifestyle creep.
The episode also reviews recent labor data, showing slower hiring and fewer new jobs being created. While unemployment remains relatively low, the pace of growth in the labor market has cooled.
When income growth slows at the same time fixed expenses rise, even modest spending increases can feel uncomfortable. That combination helps explain why consumer confidence can soften even when markets remain strong.
For households, this reinforces the value of emergency savings, flexible budgets, and avoiding unnecessary long-term commitments when possible.
On the corporate side, massive investment in AI and infrastructure is reshaping business priorities. Companies are spending heavily on data centers, chips, and energy needs, which affects short-term profitability even when long-term opportunities remain attractive.
Markets are now reacting more critically to those costs, rather than rewarding growth at any price. Execution and capital discipline are becoming more important factors in which companies outperform.
This mirrors what households experience as well: big investments can pay off over time, but only when balanced with sustainable cash flow.
As the year unfolds, the episode offers a useful reminder that financial health is built from both sides of the equation:
Strong markets can help build wealth, but recurring spending habits determine how much of that growth actually stays in your pocket.
With economic signals mixed and market leadership evolving, Noah and Chris emphasize focusing on long-term strategy rather than reacting to short-term headlines — while also paying attention to everyday financial decisions that impact real life.
Spending Deserves Attention: Small monthly charges can become major budget drains.
Rotation Is Normal: Markets don’t rely on the same leaders forever.
Income Stability Matters: Slower job growth affects consumer confidence.
Big Investments Need Balance: Whether for companies or households, cash flow matters.
Long-Term Thinking Still Wins: Discipline and diversification remain key.
Hey, welcome back to the first time we’re in the studio in 2026. I’m Noah and this is Chris. Happy New Year.
Noah Brooks (00:22)
Happy New Year. We might be the last ones to say that to you. We were halfway through the It’s like the 14th. Can we still say that? That’s that’s gets a little fringe. Yeah. I put it in an email today. Happy New Year. And I was like, I don’t don’t know. I don’t the rules are on that.
Before the 15th, we’ll say is okay. that okay? Yeah. I’m killing it on my New Year’s resolution. Me too. What is your so far? was yours? Basketball twice a week. Okay. I’m, riding the Peloton. I’m back on back on the bike. Look at us. I’m still fat, but living the good life. I’m getting there. I’m getting there. So we went into 2000. We exited 2025 at all time highs.
you know, right before the end of the year. And then we’ve been making them ever since in the stock market. Not you know, I think we’re down a little bit today. But you know, we’re right next to all time highs. And everybody is like, Yeah, this is great. This is awesome. Feels good. it is with breadth. Yeah, just tech, you know, honestly, the mag seven are kind of lagging a little bit. Well, it seems like it might be the mag two.
Yeah, right. Oh, the mag too. think we cut out the other five. Lop, lop those guys off. So last year, S &P was up a little over 16%. And only two of the mag seven actually beat the S &P. Google alphabet and Nvidia, right? Google up 65 Nvidia up almost 39%. The rest of them were all underperformers, you could say Microsoft was right there, but they were below.
Yeah, Microsoft at 15 % met at 13, Tesla at 11, Apple at nine and Amazon was the dog at at 5.2 % for 2025. And that doesn’t necessarily make me feel good, but it does make me feel better about the idea that all of the returns were just coming from these big, large growth stocks. Yeah, and that was the story for 2023 and 2024, where it felt like they were just pulling everything else upwards, obviously.
we’ve come into a concentration issue based on how large they’ve gotten. But no, the other 493 were accounting for about a little over 10 % of that about 16 % SMP 500 return for the year. So they outweighed the Mag7. I don’t have the data, but I feel like that’s the first time in at least three years, right? 2023, 2024. Well, maybe maybe
in the last three years. is this third year, 2025 was the one out of those three that it, didn’t work for those big guys. Yeah. ⁓ I don’t think that they’re done. I don’t think that they’re over. I mean, the trade is still there. The narrative is still there. I think some of the circularity, you know, the idea of one company buying the other company’s chips or the other company’s products and these deals, I think maybe that got under the skin of some investors later in the year.
And obviously some of the debt issuance out there, maybe I don’t think it scares anybody. I think it just goes, okay, well, they’re not just using cash now. Yeah. I, I think it definitely does scare the market a little bit. You see what happens. We just had Broadcom AVGO have a $4.5 billion debt offering. They’re down 5%.
And then they sort of dragged down the other one that the market’s concerned about Oracle again, who obviously has been beaten over that down 40 % from their all time high in late September, early October on the same concern. So they got dragged right back down. Hey, we didn’t issue more debt. Why are you pulling us down? listen, I don’t think the tech trade is going to go away in the short term. And quite frankly, when you think about it from a long term perspective, and I don’t necessarily mean
you know, 10 years or 20 years, but I mean like a hundred years, technology is not going to weigh, right? I mean, there’s going to be, ⁓ times when tech completely outperforms like it has now, but any company that can make other businesses more profitable through streamlining and productivity and efficiency, I mean, they’re going to have a place in the economy and they’re going to continue to grow.
you know, so I’m gonna switch gears for a second. Have you seen anything that was going on at CES, the consumer electronics show in Las Vegas? I’ve seen a couple interesting takeaways. Obviously Jensen was there that got a lot of attention. I’ve seen a few weird products. There’s futuristic. there I’ve watched some of these internet things. ⁓ Some of the regular reporting. And there’s some there’s some cool stuff coming down the pipeline. Some of the stuff is a little bit scary.
⁓ good old Boston Dynamics, have their humanoid robots that seem to be ready for the factory floor. ⁓ I they say factory floor, like, you know, working in a factory. I just think military. Yeah, that scares the heck out of me. ⁓ You know that they’re going to be ⁓ they’re going to be marching around, around shooting people. I think that would be probably a bad thing.
But what I think doesn’t matter, they’re probably going to be at some point in the future. Maybe not today. Have you seen those videos from Boston Dynamics where they have the big dog that carries all the stuff with the guys walking next to him? ⁓ I think of like Doe Machina or X Machina. Sorry, not the machine X Machina. How crazy that was. He built a humanoid. And then I think about I told you I was watching Alien Covenant last night and like Prometheus.
how they have David and Walter the humanoid robots and they’re like real humanoid. They’re like Terminator T 2000 ones where the skin sweats and everything. have not seen any of those. You’re missing out. Prometheus is awesome. You’re missing out. Go do that this weekend. I have been watching movies. We did ⁓ Eden. Have you seen that Jude Law? No, I’m telling you love Jude Law though. He’s great. He’s great. ⁓ for anybody listening out there,
If you want to watch a really interesting historical movie, it’s a Ron Howard movie. Jude Law plays a doctor and he travels to the Galapagos with him and his wife and he’s there to write a book. And then it kind of devolves a little bit. They learn how to ⁓ fend for themselves. They have some food. Someone else joins them, gets a little bit hairy and you know, trying to live off the resources that you have and then find new resources, build.
they don’t there’s no houses or anything there. So they’re building their own living quarters, if you will. And then there’s another party that joins them. It turns out that this was an actual true story that happened. ⁓ It gave me goose, it kind of gives me goosebumps thinking about it. But it is a great movie. Name Drop what a streaming service. It’s definitely on a yeah, okay. It’s a it’s one of them. It’s maybe Netflix, the wife and I are getting away from a date.
getting away for a date day. We have a couple returns from Christmas. So we’re going to do that. Pass the kids off on the grandparents. And I’m trying, I’m hoping we can get to see Avatar either IMAX or in another theater near us. And I said to you on the way into work, I’m like, I need the butter where I can put it on there, shake it all around, like triple dose the butter right into my veins. know that that’s not actual butter, right? No, it’s worse for you. It’s better.
It’s butter flavored oil. It’s great. Whatever it is. I’m not saying I don’t use it. Whatever it is more. The last time I was in a theater was really only about three weeks ago. And the time before that was probably three years ago. I don’t remember the last time I was in a theater. Yeah, it was good. That was it was good. It was worth going. ⁓ you know, I was it was the last time the old prequel Harry Potter what came out, I went down to the IMAX and saw that something of dumb secrets of Dumbledore. Yeah, yeah.
Speaking of movies, did you watch any of the Golden Globes? I did not. You did. You’re a hater. Just not my thing. Yeah, I got it. Never has been. We watch. Okay, well, more power to you. Was it good? It was interesting. So I watch it to kind of see what movies that I should, we should try to watch. I didn’t see any of the movies that were nominated or won. I didn’t even honestly know their names. There was Hamnet.
one battle after another. That had Leo in it. Leo. Yeah. They did best bot podcast for the first time. Did you know that we were nominated? Oh, interesting. We didn’t win though. didn’t win. The really interesting thing from from that show was they have Macaulay Culkin there. And it was the first time he was there in 35 years. He looks much better than he used to.
He was kind of in a hole there for a while. I his brother is going to surpass him in popularity. Is it Kirk and Kieran? Yeah, he’s great. He was on succession. Yeah, he’s awesome. Yeah, but he looked good. He looked healthy. He joked about himself, you know, made made light of himself. It was good to see him. I’d love to see him back doing a movie or something. 2026 should be a good year for in my opinion, movies. I have a couple on pump for I’m not a Spider-Man guy. I’m not pumped for Spider-Man, but that should be a big one.
Dune part three and Odyssey. are there were some good ones. There’s probably a couple more on this. I love doing it’s great. I saw the original dude. I know I said this on here before I saw the original dune 30 years ago or something like that and I just didn’t. Well one was crazy. Yeah, it didn’t do anything for me. like, yeah. So here we are kind of middle of January. We haven’t had.
too much economic data, but we did have a big jobs report that came out last Friday. ⁓ 50,000 new jobs created in December, the government told us. A little bit below expectations. I think the expectations were 55,000. This came out at 50, not that it’s a ⁓ giant miss, but a miss nonetheless. ⁓ But year after year, we seem to be getting a little bit lower since COVID.
⁓ unemployment did fall to 4.4 from 4.6 prior so that was an interesting little drop despite the blow consensus. and one of the reasons that that’s it seems like maybe happening is that I think 2025 was one of the first years that we’ve had a net negative on immigration. I don’t know what the actual number is but there was a I think it was around a negative 250,000.
where it’s normally between like two and four million. Yeah. So I think those numbers might start reflecting the fact that we’re not adding a lot of new people to the workforce. And so that, that unemployment number would certainly go down if there’s not other people looking for jobs. There’s also a report that more, more, more boomers are staying in jobs longer now. Right. So during COVID ⁓ we, everybody knows we lost 22 million jobs in two months, forced economic shutdown.
But then we had a lot of people, a lot of the near retirees just like screw it. I’m out. I’m not going to do it anymore. They took an early retirement or if they were to terminate, they’re going back and yeah, and now they’re going back and the mom did that. Did she? Yeah. I didn’t know that she had taken early retirement, but she retired and then she was just like, well, I’m bored. Guess I’ll work a little bit. Yeah, like a consultant capacity. Yeah. ⁓
But so we’re seeing people stay in jobs a little bit longer. And you know, a few years ago, we had the height of the quits, meaning you could quit a job, go get a new job, because 20 % pay increase, absolutely. And that has really come down as we’ve seen the number of job openings come down. We saw I think at the height of ⁓ job openings, I think it was roughly 12 million jobs.
Now it’s almost down by half. It’s just a little over 7 million job openings. And there’s still this idea out there that a lot of those job openings are just there. know, job quits were trending down. I think this last month report was the first time they ticked up. Not, not substantially, I come down dramatically over the last few years. So a lot less people quitting staying on, ⁓ so that you’re not getting those big raises by moving around anymore.
And I think, I mean, there’s something a little bit more to it. When you think about the cycle that we’ve had since COVID, we had this forced shutdown. Everybody was like, fire first and ask questions later. Then we realized, you know, it wasn’t the end of the world and we had to hire people back. don’t mean us per se, but businesses and the mindset was you got to hire. And certainly in technology companies because of the, zoom effect, right? Everybody’s working remotely and
working off site. And so you have to be stacking these tech companies with programmers and engineers. And so I really think that they may have over hired. Definitely. You know, and you get into 23 and 24. And it kind of the hiring maybe slows a little bit. You can see that in the numbers in 2000 and in 2022 was an average of 380,000 a month.
In 2023, it was 216 a month. 2024 was 165,000 a month. And then last year, it was the first time we had job losses in a few months. We had three months of losses. June was negative 13. August was negative 26. And they just revised October down 165.
So three months down, up down, alternating. Yeah. Yeah. Doesn’t make a lot of sense, right? That’s that kind of the no hire, no fire. Um, but the average for 2025 was just 56,000 jobs per month, a total of just a little over 600,000 jobs for the entire year. That would be other than recessionary times like global financial crisis. Um,
certainly COVID COVID. Yeah, that would be the least number of jobs added in a year since 2003. If you take out the negatives, yeah, right. If you take out the negatives. So maybe that that is a little bit skewed. And so I think there’s, you know, investors are rightly concerned to ask, well, is this, is this something that’s going to predicate, you know, a further job apocalypse? I don’t personally think that’s the case. I’m not there.
I think we’re in this more of a no hire, no fire. You have the situation with tariffs that really made employers, large businesses kind of pump the brakes till we figured out what was going on on new projects. I think it’s maybe more of a little lull in hiring until businesses shed, certainly big businesses shed some of the extra hires or over hires that they had done in 21, 22 and 23.
And if yeah, the cautiousness out there, obviously there was a lot of volatility in policy and things like that with tariffs. That’s a cute way of was a lot of caution for business owners. And I’m sure there was a lot of sleepless nights as we went through 2025. But largely, you know, despite we have the Supreme Court about to rule on tariffs next week, we were supposed to get that ruling today and they bumped it back.
kicking the can down the road one more week. But trade has largely stabilized. I’m not saying it’s perfect and there’s not risks to it. But you know, we haven’t seen a headline recently like, oh, we’re jumping 34 % on China on tariffs, we’re increasing it, you know, we’re not seeing those headlines anymore. So it’d be interesting if it truly was tariff related caution on hiring.
would be interesting to see 2026 if that trend continues and we start going negative more consistently, or if we see maybe ⁓ stabilization of like a 50 to 100 jobs a month. Yeah. Well, I think, you know, during the year, ⁓ there was a lot of ⁓ earnings calls where ⁓ CEO, CFOs on those calls mentioned tariffs, and there’s some tracker out there, tariff tracker. Fell off towards the end of the year and fell off for right exactly.
But our Q3 earnings in Q4. Yeah. What we haven’t really seen yet is so some of these numbers are government jobs, right? And we know what happened with Doge. We know that there were a lot of furloughed workers and we know that there was a lot of, ⁓ contracts that weren’t renewed in, in the government space and certainly actual federal workers. And so some of those were accounting for that October number.
right of negative 165. So I don’t know if that’s done. I don’t know if they’re still trying to. Didn’t we look maybe six months ago at if you take out health care, teachers and government jobs that like we were near negative already. Now granted health care was huge. care is a big one. 450,000 maybe something large. Last month, health care was I think almost 90 % of the jobs created. So it’s like 40,000, 45,000 out of
out of 50,000. And there were other jobs created, but net net, right? So healthcare is by far the largest. ⁓ Did you see that nurse strike in New York City? No, I didn’t. I think it was yesterday or Monday, 15,000 workers. I Starbucks strike. I don’t I don’t worry about the Starbucks. Nurses are heroes to me. I’ve spent a lot of time around nurses. So they’re they’re ⁓
They’re like angels actually. Uh, but no, they walked out, um, in New York Presbyterian, there was three different hospital complexes where they walked out of. Uh, and then the mayor of New York, the newly elected mayor of New York was with them at one of their protests. He certainly would like to see them get a raise. I, I can’t speak highly enough about nurses, anybody that’s been treated by a nurse in a hospital, spend any time there. You got to have pretty good opinions on them. least I do. Uh, so I think we should.
Give them more money, right? Yeah. No, but realistically, you know what else I saw in New York? It makes me think of New York. ⁓ Neiman Marcus, the parent company, sacks Neiman Marcus, right? Saks Fifth Avenue. they declared bankruptcy. I was under the impression that the high end consumer, the ultra high end consumer, and maybe that’s not even ultra high end. Maybe, you know, there’s a, I’m sure there’s a higher end.
consumer than Neiman Marcus. But I was under the impression that those people were their wallets were out they were spending. I think it’s a location where you know they were Neiman Marcus was like the anchor store of live the old guard malls and we don’t really see those smalls thriving anymore. You don’t it’s all these new outlets like Tanger Outlets, you know the premium outlets those type of things that are really succeeding now.
And it’s, it’s a tough time. This isn’t anything new. Obviously malls have been struggling for a long time now, but yeah, I think they were stuck as one of the anchors in malls that just got pillaged and there was nothing in the mall. So you either went to that single anchor or you didn’t go. And I think they kind of fell victim to that. They didn’t, they didn’t get in with the new guard with Tanger outlets and the premium outlets, because if you look at the stores at those locations,
Every single one of the Tanger outlets has the same exact stores. They’re just in different areas. But there’s nine Neiman Marcus in them. Well, I know personally, I said this in December, you know, I went into our local mall here in Redding, Pennsylvania, for us ⁓ sports card collectible. There’s a store in there. That’s where we went. And there was nothing else that I would want to go see. I mean, there was like 18 cell phone cases stores. ⁓ It was it was weird. Still any ends.
There might’ve been an any ends. know what? There was a shell of an orange Julius store that once, once existed. Every mall has one of them. They were great. RIP. Yeah. Uh, so going back to the markets a little bit, you know, this year, the large caps have not performed like they did last year, right? They’re off to, say a slow start. Um, but leading the charge, small companies, midsize companies, S and P 400 mid caps up over 5%.
small caps both the Russell 2000 and the S &P 400 are up over 5 % and then lo and behold, the big winners last year were international. Latin America was up over 50 % last year, developed markets were up over 30 % and emerging markets up over 30%. They’re all up over 5 % year to date. think it’s just a continuation of that November trade where valuation matters again.
⁓ So we see that continuing. What was cheap? It was mid caps. It was small caps. International has been cheap for a long time. Yeah, dollars haven’t gone there in several, several years. Yeah. And I think it’s a continuation of that. It makes sense. Well, when you look at new dollars, I’m not talking about money that’s invested. But when you when you look at new dollars coming into the the overall market and where you can place those dollars, right? Money flows where it’s treated best.
And so what you now see in the mega cap growth is you see, you know, you, you’ve said price to perfection. S and P 500 is priced at 22 times, 2026. Uh, Russell 1000 growth is priced at 29 times 2026. Whereas the Russell 1000 value is 17 and small caps are 14. Make caps right in there at 14 as well.
when you look at the EFA and emerging markets, they’re in single digits and they’ve been there. They’ve been undervalued. There’s been a lot of instability in emerging markets over the years. And so that people aren’t willing to pay 20, 30, 40, 50 times for a company unless they know it’s going to be around in five or 10 years. That instability has, has been there. I’m not saying it’s going away, but money is definitely flowing. I don’t, I don’t necessarily want to say out of large cap tech.
but it’s not necessarily flowing into it. Yeah. If you’re allocating new dollars, you you want to go to those locations that are a little cheaper because obviously large cap seems expensive relatively. And then you also have, think about small caps and to some extent, mid caps as well, which aren’t quite as profitable as large caps. We have the new OB BBA stuff with the R and D expensing.
sure they can expense all the R &D immediately, which will immediately go their bottom line and immediately make them more profitable. So if you can get in and buy at a forward, you know, profit mark, you know, PE of 16 or whatever small caps might be at, that’s much better when you have this sort of tailwind coming in for 2026. That’s going to really help out their income statements. one of the things is crazy. One of the things that I saw on the on the new tax law
is that ⁓ you can write off a business can write off 100 % of the purchase of a new vehicle of a heavy equipment. Heavy equipment is essentially the way it’s listed is over 6,000 pounds. Well, there’s a bunch of ⁓ regular cars that aren’t heavy equipment. Get a nice grand Wagoneer.
Yeah, a Grand Wagoneer, one of the giant expeditions, one of the Cadillacs, you know, they’re, they’re over 6,000 pounds. Yeah. So people are starting to expense them. My battery, my Tesla is pretty darn close to. Yeah, I’m sure. I’m sure. How many pounds does that weigh? I think it’s like 5,000. I know. I just work here. I don’t check that stuff. It’s in your door sill. You can look and see it. It says when it was made. Yvonne forgot to put on the sticker on mine. Hey, going back to CES a little bit, there was a lot of battery tech.
Yeah, there. ⁓ There was a lot of wearables, a lot of healthcare stuff. I mean, that is coming. I’m wearing an aura ring right now. Right? ⁓ You have your watch on that gives you all your vitals. ⁓ Weren’t you telling me about some brave ⁓ brain sensing device? Yeah, there’s a couple cool things. So yeah, there’s like this brain sensing earphones that somehow, you know,
work with your brain and somehow they improve your your reaction times and things like that. And they had people testing out there with and without. And it was like, they had someone try something and with the brain sensing device, they were much quicker. And then you know, they had practiced it, they knew what to expect, they had a little break and then did it again. And despite having experience and knowing what they were going to do and how to succeed at doing it, they were less successful afterwards.
So it was like, wow, this actually helps. was quantifiable rather than just theoretical. What would you use that for Chris gaming baby? Let’s go. There was an AR gaming like sunglasses. That was pretty cool. There was some goofy stuff too. I thought the rollable laptops were cool. I’m talking about the goofy things, not the real health functional things. a piece of paper. Just roll it up. Yeah. It’s pretty cool. Yeah. I mean,
What’s the battery life on a rollable laptop? Yeah, I don’t know. How do you roll a battery?
I just work here, man. Is it one time? is why it’s CES. Yeah, yeah, it’s the newest of the new. For 150 grand, you can roll up your laptop. Wonderful. Just what I wanted. the lollipop that plays music in your mouth through bone conduction. And then you take it out music stops. Didn’t know I needed that. But it’s kind of cool. A lollipop that you eat? Yeah, you put in your mouth lollipop through your jaw, like bone conduction right into your ear. So you hear music while you’re eating the lollipop.
Sir, we’ve spent the last 17 years working on this. You can now listen to music on your lollipop. Okay. How much does it cost? $200 a lollipop. $8.99 $8.99 and they’ve contracted with some artists. What will they come up with?
So one of the things that’s ⁓ at CES that I saw was LG has, and I’m sure this is, you we’ve talked about humanoid robots in the past, but LG has a ⁓ homemaker humanoid robot that they were showing off at CES that does, ⁓ you know, I don’t necessarily want to say menial tasks, but loading the dishwasher, unloading the dishwasher, doing laundry. I don’t know that it can fold laundry. I think Ailish would love it if it could fold laundry.
Cooking mild cooking, you know mopping the floor and sweeping and all that stuff. I told you that’s my word of the year humanoid. I don’t know how much I would pay for one of those. But if you think about it, if you can clean your house, I pay. I don’t know. It’s probably $250 every two weeks to the cleaners. How many cleaning if you could get one of those? How much would I pay for it?
to be able to clean my whole house and do the laundry. All day, every day, you don’t have to wait two weeks to have it done. It’s just your house is always perfectly clean, ready for a party, ready to host and entertain. That’s like my dream. Yeah. I don’t know about that. Would you do you think you would? Would you feel comfortable with an electronic device like humanoid robot in your house with your kids? Yes, Alexa is not okay with it. She hates it. It’s like
But I’m all on board. Go ahead and make my wife’s life easier, please. Like, why are you against this? You think it’s gonna replace you like the Megan Fox one? Yeah, yeah. No, I would never. Or like, like I said, ex machina. That was I don’t know what the actress’s name is. didn’t see that she was purposefully attractive. And the guy who was living alone with her clearly had some issues. ⁓ I didn’t didn’t I didn’t see that one. You know what we did watch though? The substance.
Have you seen it? It’s on one of the streamers. There’s this, older, older actress who’s kind of booted from her, her spot, ⁓ at this production company and she’s down on her luck if you will. And then someone sends her an anonymous letter and it’s this, it says, meet me here and come here and you’ll get a new life. And essentially she takes the substance, ⁓ and there’s this
procedure that she has to go through. But this new person pops out of her. I’m spoiling it. A new person pops out of her and is a younger better her. And but it’s a week on and a week off. It’s a little strange, a little gross. But it’s it’s worth it’s worth watching the substance. I would again, I don’t know which streaming service it’s on. Because on one of them all, you know, it’s really crazy.
beginning of the year, right? So we’re in April, sorry, we’re in mid January and kind of went through some of the home finances and looking at the statements and you know, doing some filtering on that’s on, you know, banking and checking and stuff. Not that anybody writes any checks anymore, but I feel like I’m getting a death by a thousand subscriptions and it’s not just the streaming services because we certainly have them. ⁓
I have subscriptions to websites for travel, three different subscriptions that I got some crazy $199 subscription fee in the last two weeks for a beach body, like California beach body thing that somebody in my household signed up. do you get for that? I have no training videos or idea. We do. We do meal subscription through blue apron, which I think is
great. mean, it’s well worth it. I wouldn’t cut that in a heartbeat, but I went through, uh, even this aura ring, I think it’s like $8 a month and yeah, okay. Eight bucks a month, but like it’s death by a thousand subscriptions and I didn’t go through, I didn’t tally it up yet, but I think we have about 27 subscriptions and it just seemed like I don’t need that many. We talked about cutting. So we use Dish network, but we also have every single streamer.
And we talked about cutting dish. We’ve been on it for so long. Hulu has live sports. Do you have Hulu? Yeah, of course. We don’t pay for the live sports, but we we pay. We still have ads in Hulu. How much? How much is dish? My dish is. Is it more than Comcast? Because Comcast is ridiculous. I got off of Comcast and went to Hulu. My dish is. Over $200 a month.
And it’s just for you still need internet. Yeah, Comcast is like 110. I’m 138 on just internet on com. I hate Comcast. Well, so Brian Roberts get lost. You know, there was a big ⁓ internet outage today or or Verizon outage and AT &T I saw it was everyone there was a panic. Yeah. So is this like that movie with De Niro where he’s the ex president? Is this what was that movie?
Well, we wouldn’t be doing this if if the entire internet went out for any period of time that I think it went out for a minute that first time or what was it in fallout fallout just sorry what’s if you can see the mushroom cloud around your thumb just you’re done. Is it my thumb or your thumb? Yeah, that was one epic start to the show. For anybody who’s not watching fallout. It was created from the video game fallout.
You don’t need to follow the video game. You have never had to play the video game to get sucked like last of us. Yeah. Yeah. I like what they’re doing. It’s great. It’s kind of, you know, after the bomb goes off, what happens to the rest of the people? And it’s wild. I always forget that guy’s name. The main character. He he has Goggins. Yeah. name is Walt Goggins. Yeah. He has some annoying ad that we see on Bloomberg every day. And I hate it. But I like him as an actor. He’s cool. He’s great.
Yeah, I’d watch almost anything that have with him in it. You know, speaking of watching, I did a fair amount of watching over the last few weeks, but I watched the Eagles lose the Niners on Sunday night. That was Kevin Petula was already gone. Thank goodness. Yeah, that was pretty rough. You know, it’s interesting. I’m watching this game and Tom Brady’s calling it with somebody else. I don’t even remember who it was.
And I’m thinking to myself, gosh darn it, this guy’s growing on me. Tall, dark and handsome. I kind of like him. When he first came on last year, he seemed uncomfortable. didn’t really know. He certainly knows what he’s talking about, but it wasn’t smooth. He’s coming into his own. Yeah. Well, Tony Romo came in and he was instantly like insane, awesome. And now he’s falling off and Tom Brady’s coming up. So the only person that I could really do without is Joe Buck.
Oh, I hate Joe. That guy rubs me. a wet towel. Yeah, he’s not. with you. I said to you the other day, he makes Chris Collins worth look good. And that’s tough. So during the Eagles game, I don’t know if it was halftime a little bit after that, but it was like six o’clock at night, this Google Gemini ad came on. And I’m going to put the ad out here. So the ad is the parents texting each other back and forth. Hey, I think we left
Lammy, which is their little kids, you know, stuffed animal on the plane. They’re like, Oh my gosh, they’re like, you left him. No, think we left, we left him. Yeah. So they leave Lammy on the plane and the kid wants to know where it is. And the guy says, well, I’m going to, know, it’s, and so the pictures on the screen and they should like trying to order it. And it says it’s back ordered. It’s going to take two weeks for Lammy to come in. So the mom goes, well, hold on. Maybe it’s the dad. Hold on.
And they go into Google Gemini. And it says, ⁓ he says, well, maybe we can start like photoshopping it into cool places and then turns into videos. So they put Lamy on the moon. They put them at the Eiffel tower, right? And so some of these are videos. Some of these meditating with monks meditating with monks near the Great Wall of China. And it’s a, it’s actually a really cute ad, but I think what’s happening is, and so
for this kid, like if somebody does that, that’s really cool. It’s cute, it’s interesting, and maybe the kid won’t freak out, right? Personally, I think you should say, hey, we left on a plane, man. You’re gonna have to deal with it, right? But I don’t have kids. So they do this work around, and they have these videos and everything. But what it’s doing is, everybody that’s watching this can go, ooh, I wonder what else, and that may be the, not maybe, that’s the whole point of it.
It’s not to get people to make just cute things for their kids, but anybody can go on there. And now we’re going to get all of this AI slop, which was the word of the year last year, right? And it just seems to me that it’s a downward spiral. We’re never going to know what’s real. What’s not real. If we can convince the four year old kid that Lammy’s on the moon or at the in Paris at the Eiffel Tower, isn’t there like, how do you control that?
Yeah, I don’t know. But I like what they did. You got lied to the kid. I’m sorry. I love my children. you can’t just say make that white lie. You do it. So you think it’s a right to lie to your kids? 100 % That’s how I know you don’t have kids as you say no to that. From my perspective. So glad they’re so young and they won’t won’t hear this.
definitely lie to him like real there is some joke about like this this comedian who’s like, you believe the government and everything they say that’s a bold stance to take and he goes on he says, I’m the father of just one son and I lie to that kid all the time. And it is hilarious. I’m like, yes, I’ve never I’ve never totally agreed with something more. Would you go through that process if you lost Lamy of trying to convince the kid that he’s on vacation?
I probably I’m not smart enough to think of that. I would just be like, yeah, I think he’s there. And we’re gonna pick him up on the way home. I wouldn’t have thought of like being so creative. I mean, like, look, you’re your guys living. He’s out here. He’s he’s at the beach. He’s also having a day of vacation. That’s smart. I would just said, I think he’s still there. And we’re gonna pick him up on the way home. So all of these large language models, all of this a genetic AI that’s coming our way, it needs to be
What it needs to be powered. Right. So you mentioned one of the outlets, Tanger outlets, which is down between here and Philadelphia, uh, right next to the Tanger outlets. They built limits next to the limerick power plant here in, um, in the area. Limericks owned by Exelon. I just saw yesterday that they are putting a 20. I don’t want to exaggerate here.
20 million square foot server farm next to the nuclear power plant. And it’s gonna use enough power to run 500,000 homes. That’s a lot of square, I can’t picture 20 million square feet. I mean, enough power for half a million houses and they’re putting it.
like 400 yards. I’m thinking of the CRE broker who sold that that is a massive commission. It’s two it’s 250 acres. Now don’t know how many that’s actually going to be buildings, but it’s 250 acres. And it’s butts up against the towers. So I lived about 30 miles from the limerick nuclear plant. When I was down in Potsdam after college. And by regulation, Exxon has to send out these like mailers every year. So I only lived there one year.
But like I was right on like the first like circle if there was a meltdown like you’re screwed. And the second one was like run get like at least 100 miles away like they they really put the circles down like I can’t imagine why people have like the NIMBY like not in my backyard. It makes sense when they have to buy regulation say if we melt down you’re done for living right here.
But you those property values go down, they should get extra cheap electricity. It’s funny you say that they had interviewed people that live next to it. And they were like, I didn’t really care about it until they offered me money, a lot more money for my property than it’s worth the house the houses that are right around it. So those guys are loving it. I mean, that’s what it seemed like. I was gonna say it was in the newspaper, but I didn’t read it in the newspaper because that’s not a thing anymore. Yeah.
⁓ Speaking of newspapers, did you see the creator of Dilbert died? didn’t see that. Yeah. And when that when it came on, I thought, man, I haven’t seen a Dilbert ⁓ cartoon in ages because I don’t get a newspaper. Follow the Dilbert Instagram. Well, I think he died now, so he’s probably not going to be on. No, no, I just think someone runs a different page. Well, what I later found out, they said this on the news the other day. ⁓ Apparently he said some pretty bad stuff.
a few years ago and he got himself canceled. I don’t know what he said. didn’t look it up, but he got himself canceled. ⁓ and then so they, all of the newspapers dropped him. But I mean, when I say growing up over the last 30 years, I’ve worked in an office since 1997. So almost 29 years and he was just all about office, whether it was the politics or the people in there or what was going on. And one of the, one of the, cartoons that I do remember from, I don’t know,
1520 years ago. It was the boss coming to him and saying, hey, on that anonymous survey that you filled out, you said you didn’t trust management. And then the next picture is just them looking at each other. And then the third one is the the the manager just going, right. The anonymous survey. But it was just stuff like that that kept us entertained. ⁓ I don’t know what he said, but I did think Dilbert was funny. And a few people.
I don’t know if this is good or bad. A few people have said that I look like Dilbert. really? I never thought that. good. good. Maybe it was just the hairstyle that I had back then, right? ⁓ In in news is a little bit closer to home for me. Bobby Weir, one of the ⁓ rhythm guitarist and the co founder of the rifle dead died this week. They were part of my and my wife, Alish’s.
Tom Petty tour. And I said this last year or the year before. ⁓ so Tom Petty died and he was one of those guys that we always wanted to go see, right? One of those old rockers. ⁓ and he died and then we were like, man, we should really go see, you know, people that are getting up there. And then soon enough, like later that day we heard that the Rolling Stones were coming to town and we just, you know, we, we made a commitment to like, Hey, if it’s possible to go some, see some of these guys that are
You know, probably going to die before they die. Let’s let’s go do it. So we had an opportunity to go see dead and company. Obviously Jerry Garcia died in 1995, but we had an opportunity to go see dead and co with John Mayer at the sphere twice, which was brilliant. And I would just say, you know, for anybody out there, I don’t care if it’s music, but some of these people aren’t going to be around. You have an opportunity to see comedians. mean, Seinfeld is not like 100 years old, but
You have an opportunity to see these people, you know, go do it, take the experience. They’re not going to be around forever. I guess maybe in a hologram or something. AI, right? So wrapping up here, we have a lot of stuff now that we started the new year to talk about. ⁓ 2026 is going to be kind of, I want to say a nutty year, but there’s a lot of, a lot of ways that this year can go and sitting here in the middle of January.
You know, I don’t know that anybody knows how it’s going to go. Yeah. What do you think? Uh, I mean, I’ve been throwing out this style a lot. I don’t know if we said it on the last podcast or not, but, uh, obviously we’ve had three years of 80 % return on the SMP 500. And if you look back in history, you average out the stats, uh, the forward subsequent returns are pretty low. So there’s been 14 instances and the next year’s return.
is on average 2.1%. The subsequent three years annualized is only 0.6%. Sounds bad, right? Yeah, it does. But if you take out the 1930s, the stats actually look pretty good. And the fourth year of a bull market in these stats is actually really strong. So we have our outlook tomorrow. We’re going to be doing for our advisors
And we have some slides on that and on valuation, of course. You dodged, we dodged inflation so far. We didn’t even get to the CPI report. You’re about to close up on us without doing CPI. We finally got a full CPI because October we had nothing. November, they did a report and they came out with a nice rosy number and a drop. like 60 % of the data was missing. So I didn’t know what we were going to come into this.
month and luckily it was another good number and we had all the data. Yeah. So 2.7 was it on the headline 2.7 headline 2.6 on core. Very happy with that. Yeah. So, ⁓ airlines were hot 5.2 and appliances were cool. Negative 4.2. the big ones, ⁓ gasoline was negative, right? used cars were negative. ⁓ shelter was still positive.
Right? So I mean, gas might continue to fall. We didn’t talk about Venezuela. I don’t know that we need to get into it right at the moment. Gas might continue to fall. But that only has so much of an impact. mean, we can’t consume that much more gas. And when you think about it, it actually impacts GDP. Yeah, right. So I mean, you can kind of take that out. I’m not saying that I don’t want cheap gas. I’m getting like
17 miles a gallon. I’ll take all the cheap gas I can get. We’re talking about nuclear electricity being cheaper for the people around it in the at risk zone. ⁓ My mom’s side of the family is from Warren, Pennsylvania. There’s a large refiner right there in Warren. And you would think they get cheap gas, you don’t have to pay for transportation. It’s right there. MPA gases from $2.80 to $2.90 when we went up there, just after New Year’s to see my cousins and my aunts and uncles. And
their gas was at $3.55 like they’re paying a premium for getting it fresh. Fresh I don’t give a darn if it’s fresh. I’ll take old gas. Well, unless about a year long as it’s combustible. Yeah, does even last that long. Fresh gas. I don’t know. I’m just saying $3.55. I’m like, what is going on here? My mom warned me she’s like, make sure you get gas in Clearfield. I’m like, okay. Thanks, mom. That’s funny stuff.
We’ll, we’ll, we’ll mark that one down. Fresh gas premium for fresh gas. Extra good. Better than your premium when it’s fresh. ⁓ anything else before we exit out of here that you want to say? Nope. All good. I’m just going to say, Hey, listen, we are at the beginning of a new year. ⁓ for anybody that’s out there contributing to their 401k or especially if you have
the ability to contribute to a 401k and you’re not, please start doing it. It’s a great time to look at the 401ks or any retirement plan that you might have access to raise it up a little bit. If you can, that’s going to help you all the best. One interesting thing with the OBBA bill was your catch up plan. So anybody who’s over 50 can contribute an extra $7,000 to a 401k. And if you’re over 60,
from 62 to 64. I think it is there’s an additional catch up. But all of the catch up has to be in the Roth. Right. So you pay tax on it now. I just learned that earlier in the week. ⁓ But you know, perfect opportunity to to look at your 401k is your retirement plans, jack it up to as high as you possibly can. It’s going to help you out in the end. It’s good little gig because you should be in your peak earning years. If you’re still working in your 60s. You should be making good bucks and theory goes Yeah, at you can but they only have the catch up for two years.
Like it’s not like after 60, you can put in all of this money. It goes back down. Interesting. It doesn’t make any sense to me. Anyway, take a look at your retirement plans. Jack them up to as, as high as you can. It’s going to help you in the end. ⁓ Bob Weir died from lung complications. Kids do not do any smoking out there of any kind. It will treat you wrong in the end. And as always, as Mr. Buffett used to say, maybe still does don’t bet against America. Anybody. Thanks so much. We’ll see you next time.
Have questions about how this impacts your investment strategy? Reach out to your advisor or email us at marketenthusiast@goodlifefa.com.
The opinions voiced in this podcast are for general information only and are not intended to provide specific advice or recommendations for any individual. To determine which strategies or investments may be suitable for you consult the appropriate qualified professional prior to making a decision. Economic forecast set forth may not develop as predicted and there can be no guarantee that strategies promoted will be successful. All performance referenced is historical and is no guarantee of future results. All indices are unmanaged and may not be invested into directly.
In Episode 53 of The Market Enthusiast, Noah Brooks and Chris Needs look at a question many households and investors are feeling at the same time: if markets are near all-time highs, why does everything still feel so expensive?
From streaming services and meal kits to fitness apps, cloud storage, and smart devices, more spending now happens automatically — quietly chipping away at monthly cash flow. At the same time, economic data and market leadership are shifting, raising important questions about how both consumers and investors should be thinking about 2026.
This episode connects what’s happening in the markets with what many families are seeing in their budgets.
Table of Contents
Markets Near Highs, But Leadership Is Changing
While headline indexes remain close to record levels, the drivers behind those returns are evolving. Mega-cap technology stocks no longer dominate performance the way they did in prior years, and leadership has begun rotating into small caps, mid caps, and international markets.
Rather than signaling fear, this shift reflects investors becoming more selective. Valuations matter again, and capital is moving toward areas where prices better reflect long-term growth potential.
This kind of rotation often occurs after extended market runs and can help create a healthier foundation for future returns.
The Cost of Convenience Adds Up
Alongside market shifts, Noah and Chris touch on something many listeners can relate to: subscription overload.
What once were occasional purchases have turned into dozens of recurring monthly charges. Individually, many seem small. Together, they can quietly rival major fixed expenses like utilities or insurance.
This “set it and forget it” spending makes it harder to feel the benefit of rising markets or stable income. Even in strong economic periods, households can feel stretched when cash flow is constantly spoken for.
The conversation highlights an important financial planning reality: investment returns matter, but so does controlling lifestyle creep.
Jobs, Income Stability, and Consumer Pressure
The episode also reviews recent labor data, showing slower hiring and fewer new jobs being created. While unemployment remains relatively low, the pace of growth in the labor market has cooled.
When income growth slows at the same time fixed expenses rise, even modest spending increases can feel uncomfortable. That combination helps explain why consumer confidence can soften even when markets remain strong.
For households, this reinforces the value of emergency savings, flexible budgets, and avoiding unnecessary long-term commitments when possible.
AI, Infrastructure, and Corporate Spending
On the corporate side, massive investment in AI and infrastructure is reshaping business priorities. Companies are spending heavily on data centers, chips, and energy needs, which affects short-term profitability even when long-term opportunities remain attractive.
Markets are now reacting more critically to those costs, rather than rewarding growth at any price. Execution and capital discipline are becoming more important factors in which companies outperform.
This mirrors what households experience as well: big investments can pay off over time, but only when balanced with sustainable cash flow.
Practical Lessons as 2026 Takes Shape
As the year unfolds, the episode offers a useful reminder that financial health is built from both sides of the equation:
• Growing assets through diversified investing
• Managing expenses that compound quietly over time
Strong markets can help build wealth, but recurring spending habits determine how much of that growth actually stays in your pocket.
With economic signals mixed and market leadership evolving, Noah and Chris emphasize focusing on long-term strategy rather than reacting to short-term headlines — while also paying attention to everyday financial decisions that impact real life.
Key Topics Covered in This Episode
• Market rotation away from mega-cap tech
• Small cap and international stock performance
• Slower job growth and labor trends
• AI investment and rising capital spending
• Subscription-based spending and household cash flow
Investor and Household Takeaways
Spending Deserves Attention: Small monthly charges can become major budget drains.
Rotation Is Normal: Markets don’t rely on the same leaders forever.
Income Stability Matters: Slower job growth affects consumer confidence.
Big Investments Need Balance: Whether for companies or households, cash flow matters.
Long-Term Thinking Still Wins: Discipline and diversification remain key.
Listen to the Full Episode
Full Episode Transcript
Hey, welcome back to the first time we’re in the studio in 2026. I’m Noah and this is Chris. Happy New Year.
Noah Brooks (00:22)
Happy New Year. We might be the last ones to say that to you. We were halfway through the It’s like the 14th. Can we still say that? That’s that’s gets a little fringe. Yeah. I put it in an email today. Happy New Year. And I was like, I don’t don’t know. I don’t the rules are on that.
Before the 15th, we’ll say is okay. that okay? Yeah. I’m killing it on my New Year’s resolution. Me too. What is your so far? was yours? Basketball twice a week. Okay. I’m, riding the Peloton. I’m back on back on the bike. Look at us. I’m still fat, but living the good life. I’m getting there. I’m getting there. So we went into 2000. We exited 2025 at all time highs.
you know, right before the end of the year. And then we’ve been making them ever since in the stock market. Not you know, I think we’re down a little bit today. But you know, we’re right next to all time highs. And everybody is like, Yeah, this is great. This is awesome. Feels good. it is with breadth. Yeah, just tech, you know, honestly, the mag seven are kind of lagging a little bit. Well, it seems like it might be the mag two.
Yeah, right. Oh, the mag too. think we cut out the other five. Lop, lop those guys off. So last year, S &P was up a little over 16%. And only two of the mag seven actually beat the S &P. Google alphabet and Nvidia, right? Google up 65 Nvidia up almost 39%. The rest of them were all underperformers, you could say Microsoft was right there, but they were below.
Yeah, Microsoft at 15 % met at 13, Tesla at 11, Apple at nine and Amazon was the dog at at 5.2 % for 2025. And that doesn’t necessarily make me feel good, but it does make me feel better about the idea that all of the returns were just coming from these big, large growth stocks. Yeah, and that was the story for 2023 and 2024, where it felt like they were just pulling everything else upwards, obviously.
we’ve come into a concentration issue based on how large they’ve gotten. But no, the other 493 were accounting for about a little over 10 % of that about 16 % SMP 500 return for the year. So they outweighed the Mag7. I don’t have the data, but I feel like that’s the first time in at least three years, right? 2023, 2024. Well, maybe maybe
in the last three years. is this third year, 2025 was the one out of those three that it, didn’t work for those big guys. Yeah. ⁓ I don’t think that they’re done. I don’t think that they’re over. I mean, the trade is still there. The narrative is still there. I think some of the circularity, you know, the idea of one company buying the other company’s chips or the other company’s products and these deals, I think maybe that got under the skin of some investors later in the year.
And obviously some of the debt issuance out there, maybe I don’t think it scares anybody. I think it just goes, okay, well, they’re not just using cash now. Yeah. I, I think it definitely does scare the market a little bit. You see what happens. We just had Broadcom AVGO have a $4.5 billion debt offering. They’re down 5%.
And then they sort of dragged down the other one that the market’s concerned about Oracle again, who obviously has been beaten over that down 40 % from their all time high in late September, early October on the same concern. So they got dragged right back down. Hey, we didn’t issue more debt. Why are you pulling us down? listen, I don’t think the tech trade is going to go away in the short term. And quite frankly, when you think about it from a long term perspective, and I don’t necessarily mean
you know, 10 years or 20 years, but I mean like a hundred years, technology is not going to weigh, right? I mean, there’s going to be, ⁓ times when tech completely outperforms like it has now, but any company that can make other businesses more profitable through streamlining and productivity and efficiency, I mean, they’re going to have a place in the economy and they’re going to continue to grow.
you know, so I’m gonna switch gears for a second. Have you seen anything that was going on at CES, the consumer electronics show in Las Vegas? I’ve seen a couple interesting takeaways. Obviously Jensen was there that got a lot of attention. I’ve seen a few weird products. There’s futuristic. there I’ve watched some of these internet things. ⁓ Some of the regular reporting. And there’s some there’s some cool stuff coming down the pipeline. Some of the stuff is a little bit scary.
⁓ good old Boston Dynamics, have their humanoid robots that seem to be ready for the factory floor. ⁓ I they say factory floor, like, you know, working in a factory. I just think military. Yeah, that scares the heck out of me. ⁓ You know that they’re going to be ⁓ they’re going to be marching around, around shooting people. I think that would be probably a bad thing.
But what I think doesn’t matter, they’re probably going to be at some point in the future. Maybe not today. Have you seen those videos from Boston Dynamics where they have the big dog that carries all the stuff with the guys walking next to him? ⁓ I think of like Doe Machina or X Machina. Sorry, not the machine X Machina. How crazy that was. He built a humanoid. And then I think about I told you I was watching Alien Covenant last night and like Prometheus.
how they have David and Walter the humanoid robots and they’re like real humanoid. They’re like Terminator T 2000 ones where the skin sweats and everything. have not seen any of those. You’re missing out. Prometheus is awesome. You’re missing out. Go do that this weekend. I have been watching movies. We did ⁓ Eden. Have you seen that Jude Law? No, I’m telling you love Jude Law though. He’s great. He’s great. ⁓ for anybody listening out there,
If you want to watch a really interesting historical movie, it’s a Ron Howard movie. Jude Law plays a doctor and he travels to the Galapagos with him and his wife and he’s there to write a book. And then it kind of devolves a little bit. They learn how to ⁓ fend for themselves. They have some food. Someone else joins them, gets a little bit hairy and you know, trying to live off the resources that you have and then find new resources, build.
they don’t there’s no houses or anything there. So they’re building their own living quarters, if you will. And then there’s another party that joins them. It turns out that this was an actual true story that happened. ⁓ It gave me goose, it kind of gives me goosebumps thinking about it. But it is a great movie. Name Drop what a streaming service. It’s definitely on a yeah, okay. It’s a it’s one of them. It’s maybe Netflix, the wife and I are getting away from a date.
getting away for a date day. We have a couple returns from Christmas. So we’re going to do that. Pass the kids off on the grandparents. And I’m trying, I’m hoping we can get to see Avatar either IMAX or in another theater near us. And I said to you on the way into work, I’m like, I need the butter where I can put it on there, shake it all around, like triple dose the butter right into my veins. know that that’s not actual butter, right? No, it’s worse for you. It’s better.
It’s butter flavored oil. It’s great. Whatever it is. I’m not saying I don’t use it. Whatever it is more. The last time I was in a theater was really only about three weeks ago. And the time before that was probably three years ago. I don’t remember the last time I was in a theater. Yeah, it was good. That was it was good. It was worth going. ⁓ you know, I was it was the last time the old prequel Harry Potter what came out, I went down to the IMAX and saw that something of dumb secrets of Dumbledore. Yeah, yeah.
Speaking of movies, did you watch any of the Golden Globes? I did not. You did. You’re a hater. Just not my thing. Yeah, I got it. Never has been. We watch. Okay, well, more power to you. Was it good? It was interesting. So I watch it to kind of see what movies that I should, we should try to watch. I didn’t see any of the movies that were nominated or won. I didn’t even honestly know their names. There was Hamnet.
one battle after another. That had Leo in it. Leo. Yeah. They did best bot podcast for the first time. Did you know that we were nominated? Oh, interesting. We didn’t win though. didn’t win. The really interesting thing from from that show was they have Macaulay Culkin there. And it was the first time he was there in 35 years. He looks much better than he used to.
He was kind of in a hole there for a while. I his brother is going to surpass him in popularity. Is it Kirk and Kieran? Yeah, he’s great. He was on succession. Yeah, he’s awesome. Yeah, but he looked good. He looked healthy. He joked about himself, you know, made made light of himself. It was good to see him. I’d love to see him back doing a movie or something. 2026 should be a good year for in my opinion, movies. I have a couple on pump for I’m not a Spider-Man guy. I’m not pumped for Spider-Man, but that should be a big one.
Dune part three and Odyssey. are there were some good ones. There’s probably a couple more on this. I love doing it’s great. I saw the original dude. I know I said this on here before I saw the original dune 30 years ago or something like that and I just didn’t. Well one was crazy. Yeah, it didn’t do anything for me. like, yeah. So here we are kind of middle of January. We haven’t had.
too much economic data, but we did have a big jobs report that came out last Friday. ⁓ 50,000 new jobs created in December, the government told us. A little bit below expectations. I think the expectations were 55,000. This came out at 50, not that it’s a ⁓ giant miss, but a miss nonetheless. ⁓ But year after year, we seem to be getting a little bit lower since COVID.
⁓ unemployment did fall to 4.4 from 4.6 prior so that was an interesting little drop despite the blow consensus. and one of the reasons that that’s it seems like maybe happening is that I think 2025 was one of the first years that we’ve had a net negative on immigration. I don’t know what the actual number is but there was a I think it was around a negative 250,000.
where it’s normally between like two and four million. Yeah. So I think those numbers might start reflecting the fact that we’re not adding a lot of new people to the workforce. And so that, that unemployment number would certainly go down if there’s not other people looking for jobs. There’s also a report that more, more, more boomers are staying in jobs longer now. Right. So during COVID ⁓ we, everybody knows we lost 22 million jobs in two months, forced economic shutdown.
But then we had a lot of people, a lot of the near retirees just like screw it. I’m out. I’m not going to do it anymore. They took an early retirement or if they were to terminate, they’re going back and yeah, and now they’re going back and the mom did that. Did she? Yeah. I didn’t know that she had taken early retirement, but she retired and then she was just like, well, I’m bored. Guess I’ll work a little bit. Yeah, like a consultant capacity. Yeah. ⁓
But so we’re seeing people stay in jobs a little bit longer. And you know, a few years ago, we had the height of the quits, meaning you could quit a job, go get a new job, because 20 % pay increase, absolutely. And that has really come down as we’ve seen the number of job openings come down. We saw I think at the height of ⁓ job openings, I think it was roughly 12 million jobs.
Now it’s almost down by half. It’s just a little over 7 million job openings. And there’s still this idea out there that a lot of those job openings are just there. know, job quits were trending down. I think this last month report was the first time they ticked up. Not, not substantially, I come down dramatically over the last few years. So a lot less people quitting staying on, ⁓ so that you’re not getting those big raises by moving around anymore.
And I think, I mean, there’s something a little bit more to it. When you think about the cycle that we’ve had since COVID, we had this forced shutdown. Everybody was like, fire first and ask questions later. Then we realized, you know, it wasn’t the end of the world and we had to hire people back. don’t mean us per se, but businesses and the mindset was you got to hire. And certainly in technology companies because of the, zoom effect, right? Everybody’s working remotely and
working off site. And so you have to be stacking these tech companies with programmers and engineers. And so I really think that they may have over hired. Definitely. You know, and you get into 23 and 24. And it kind of the hiring maybe slows a little bit. You can see that in the numbers in 2000 and in 2022 was an average of 380,000 a month.
In 2023, it was 216 a month. 2024 was 165,000 a month. And then last year, it was the first time we had job losses in a few months. We had three months of losses. June was negative 13. August was negative 26. And they just revised October down 165.
So three months down, up down, alternating. Yeah. Yeah. Doesn’t make a lot of sense, right? That’s that kind of the no hire, no fire. Um, but the average for 2025 was just 56,000 jobs per month, a total of just a little over 600,000 jobs for the entire year. That would be other than recessionary times like global financial crisis. Um,
certainly COVID COVID. Yeah, that would be the least number of jobs added in a year since 2003. If you take out the negatives, yeah, right. If you take out the negatives. So maybe that that is a little bit skewed. And so I think there’s, you know, investors are rightly concerned to ask, well, is this, is this something that’s going to predicate, you know, a further job apocalypse? I don’t personally think that’s the case. I’m not there.
I think we’re in this more of a no hire, no fire. You have the situation with tariffs that really made employers, large businesses kind of pump the brakes till we figured out what was going on on new projects. I think it’s maybe more of a little lull in hiring until businesses shed, certainly big businesses shed some of the extra hires or over hires that they had done in 21, 22 and 23.
And if yeah, the cautiousness out there, obviously there was a lot of volatility in policy and things like that with tariffs. That’s a cute way of was a lot of caution for business owners. And I’m sure there was a lot of sleepless nights as we went through 2025. But largely, you know, despite we have the Supreme Court about to rule on tariffs next week, we were supposed to get that ruling today and they bumped it back.
kicking the can down the road one more week. But trade has largely stabilized. I’m not saying it’s perfect and there’s not risks to it. But you know, we haven’t seen a headline recently like, oh, we’re jumping 34 % on China on tariffs, we’re increasing it, you know, we’re not seeing those headlines anymore. So it’d be interesting if it truly was tariff related caution on hiring.
would be interesting to see 2026 if that trend continues and we start going negative more consistently, or if we see maybe ⁓ stabilization of like a 50 to 100 jobs a month. Yeah. Well, I think, you know, during the year, ⁓ there was a lot of ⁓ earnings calls where ⁓ CEO, CFOs on those calls mentioned tariffs, and there’s some tracker out there, tariff tracker. Fell off towards the end of the year and fell off for right exactly.
But our Q3 earnings in Q4. Yeah. What we haven’t really seen yet is so some of these numbers are government jobs, right? And we know what happened with Doge. We know that there were a lot of furloughed workers and we know that there was a lot of, ⁓ contracts that weren’t renewed in, in the government space and certainly actual federal workers. And so some of those were accounting for that October number.
right of negative 165. So I don’t know if that’s done. I don’t know if they’re still trying to. Didn’t we look maybe six months ago at if you take out health care, teachers and government jobs that like we were near negative already. Now granted health care was huge. care is a big one. 450,000 maybe something large. Last month, health care was I think almost 90 % of the jobs created. So it’s like 40,000, 45,000 out of
out of 50,000. And there were other jobs created, but net net, right? So healthcare is by far the largest. ⁓ Did you see that nurse strike in New York City? No, I didn’t. I think it was yesterday or Monday, 15,000 workers. I Starbucks strike. I don’t I don’t worry about the Starbucks. Nurses are heroes to me. I’ve spent a lot of time around nurses. So they’re they’re ⁓
They’re like angels actually. Uh, but no, they walked out, um, in New York Presbyterian, there was three different hospital complexes where they walked out of. Uh, and then the mayor of New York, the newly elected mayor of New York was with them at one of their protests. He certainly would like to see them get a raise. I, I can’t speak highly enough about nurses, anybody that’s been treated by a nurse in a hospital, spend any time there. You got to have pretty good opinions on them. least I do. Uh, so I think we should.
Give them more money, right? Yeah. No, but realistically, you know what else I saw in New York? It makes me think of New York. ⁓ Neiman Marcus, the parent company, sacks Neiman Marcus, right? Saks Fifth Avenue. they declared bankruptcy. I was under the impression that the high end consumer, the ultra high end consumer, and maybe that’s not even ultra high end. Maybe, you know, there’s a, I’m sure there’s a higher end.
consumer than Neiman Marcus. But I was under the impression that those people were their wallets were out they were spending. I think it’s a location where you know they were Neiman Marcus was like the anchor store of live the old guard malls and we don’t really see those smalls thriving anymore. You don’t it’s all these new outlets like Tanger Outlets, you know the premium outlets those type of things that are really succeeding now.
And it’s, it’s a tough time. This isn’t anything new. Obviously malls have been struggling for a long time now, but yeah, I think they were stuck as one of the anchors in malls that just got pillaged and there was nothing in the mall. So you either went to that single anchor or you didn’t go. And I think they kind of fell victim to that. They didn’t, they didn’t get in with the new guard with Tanger outlets and the premium outlets, because if you look at the stores at those locations,
Every single one of the Tanger outlets has the same exact stores. They’re just in different areas. But there’s nine Neiman Marcus in them. Well, I know personally, I said this in December, you know, I went into our local mall here in Redding, Pennsylvania, for us ⁓ sports card collectible. There’s a store in there. That’s where we went. And there was nothing else that I would want to go see. I mean, there was like 18 cell phone cases stores. ⁓ It was it was weird. Still any ends.
There might’ve been an any ends. know what? There was a shell of an orange Julius store that once, once existed. Every mall has one of them. They were great. RIP. Yeah. Uh, so going back to the markets a little bit, you know, this year, the large caps have not performed like they did last year, right? They’re off to, say a slow start. Um, but leading the charge, small companies, midsize companies, S and P 400 mid caps up over 5%.
small caps both the Russell 2000 and the S &P 400 are up over 5 % and then lo and behold, the big winners last year were international. Latin America was up over 50 % last year, developed markets were up over 30 % and emerging markets up over 30%. They’re all up over 5 % year to date. think it’s just a continuation of that November trade where valuation matters again.
⁓ So we see that continuing. What was cheap? It was mid caps. It was small caps. International has been cheap for a long time. Yeah, dollars haven’t gone there in several, several years. Yeah. And I think it’s a continuation of that. It makes sense. Well, when you look at new dollars, I’m not talking about money that’s invested. But when you when you look at new dollars coming into the the overall market and where you can place those dollars, right? Money flows where it’s treated best.
And so what you now see in the mega cap growth is you see, you know, you, you’ve said price to perfection. S and P 500 is priced at 22 times, 2026. Uh, Russell 1000 growth is priced at 29 times 2026. Whereas the Russell 1000 value is 17 and small caps are 14. Make caps right in there at 14 as well.
when you look at the EFA and emerging markets, they’re in single digits and they’ve been there. They’ve been undervalued. There’s been a lot of instability in emerging markets over the years. And so that people aren’t willing to pay 20, 30, 40, 50 times for a company unless they know it’s going to be around in five or 10 years. That instability has, has been there. I’m not saying it’s going away, but money is definitely flowing. I don’t, I don’t necessarily want to say out of large cap tech.
but it’s not necessarily flowing into it. Yeah. If you’re allocating new dollars, you you want to go to those locations that are a little cheaper because obviously large cap seems expensive relatively. And then you also have, think about small caps and to some extent, mid caps as well, which aren’t quite as profitable as large caps. We have the new OB BBA stuff with the R and D expensing.
sure they can expense all the R &D immediately, which will immediately go their bottom line and immediately make them more profitable. So if you can get in and buy at a forward, you know, profit mark, you know, PE of 16 or whatever small caps might be at, that’s much better when you have this sort of tailwind coming in for 2026. That’s going to really help out their income statements. one of the things is crazy. One of the things that I saw on the on the new tax law
is that ⁓ you can write off a business can write off 100 % of the purchase of a new vehicle of a heavy equipment. Heavy equipment is essentially the way it’s listed is over 6,000 pounds. Well, there’s a bunch of ⁓ regular cars that aren’t heavy equipment. Get a nice grand Wagoneer.
Yeah, a Grand Wagoneer, one of the giant expeditions, one of the Cadillacs, you know, they’re, they’re over 6,000 pounds. Yeah. So people are starting to expense them. My battery, my Tesla is pretty darn close to. Yeah, I’m sure. I’m sure. How many pounds does that weigh? I think it’s like 5,000. I know. I just work here. I don’t check that stuff. It’s in your door sill. You can look and see it. It says when it was made. Yvonne forgot to put on the sticker on mine. Hey, going back to CES a little bit, there was a lot of battery tech.
Yeah, there. ⁓ There was a lot of wearables, a lot of healthcare stuff. I mean, that is coming. I’m wearing an aura ring right now. Right? ⁓ You have your watch on that gives you all your vitals. ⁓ Weren’t you telling me about some brave ⁓ brain sensing device? Yeah, there’s a couple cool things. So yeah, there’s like this brain sensing earphones that somehow, you know,
work with your brain and somehow they improve your your reaction times and things like that. And they had people testing out there with and without. And it was like, they had someone try something and with the brain sensing device, they were much quicker. And then you know, they had practiced it, they knew what to expect, they had a little break and then did it again. And despite having experience and knowing what they were going to do and how to succeed at doing it, they were less successful afterwards.
So it was like, wow, this actually helps. was quantifiable rather than just theoretical. What would you use that for Chris gaming baby? Let’s go. There was an AR gaming like sunglasses. That was pretty cool. There was some goofy stuff too. I thought the rollable laptops were cool. I’m talking about the goofy things, not the real health functional things. a piece of paper. Just roll it up. Yeah. It’s pretty cool. Yeah. I mean,
What’s the battery life on a rollable laptop? Yeah, I don’t know. How do you roll a battery?
I just work here, man. Is it one time? is why it’s CES. Yeah, yeah, it’s the newest of the new. For 150 grand, you can roll up your laptop. Wonderful. Just what I wanted. the lollipop that plays music in your mouth through bone conduction. And then you take it out music stops. Didn’t know I needed that. But it’s kind of cool. A lollipop that you eat? Yeah, you put in your mouth lollipop through your jaw, like bone conduction right into your ear. So you hear music while you’re eating the lollipop.
Sir, we’ve spent the last 17 years working on this. You can now listen to music on your lollipop. Okay. How much does it cost? $200 a lollipop. $8.99 $8.99 and they’ve contracted with some artists. What will they come up with?
So one of the things that’s ⁓ at CES that I saw was LG has, and I’m sure this is, you we’ve talked about humanoid robots in the past, but LG has a ⁓ homemaker humanoid robot that they were showing off at CES that does, ⁓ you know, I don’t necessarily want to say menial tasks, but loading the dishwasher, unloading the dishwasher, doing laundry. I don’t know that it can fold laundry. I think Ailish would love it if it could fold laundry.
Cooking mild cooking, you know mopping the floor and sweeping and all that stuff. I told you that’s my word of the year humanoid. I don’t know how much I would pay for one of those. But if you think about it, if you can clean your house, I pay. I don’t know. It’s probably $250 every two weeks to the cleaners. How many cleaning if you could get one of those? How much would I pay for it?
to be able to clean my whole house and do the laundry. All day, every day, you don’t have to wait two weeks to have it done. It’s just your house is always perfectly clean, ready for a party, ready to host and entertain. That’s like my dream. Yeah. I don’t know about that. Would you do you think you would? Would you feel comfortable with an electronic device like humanoid robot in your house with your kids? Yes, Alexa is not okay with it. She hates it. It’s like
But I’m all on board. Go ahead and make my wife’s life easier, please. Like, why are you against this? You think it’s gonna replace you like the Megan Fox one? Yeah, yeah. No, I would never. Or like, like I said, ex machina. That was I don’t know what the actress’s name is. didn’t see that she was purposefully attractive. And the guy who was living alone with her clearly had some issues. ⁓ I didn’t didn’t I didn’t see that one. You know what we did watch though? The substance.
Have you seen it? It’s on one of the streamers. There’s this, older, older actress who’s kind of booted from her, her spot, ⁓ at this production company and she’s down on her luck if you will. And then someone sends her an anonymous letter and it’s this, it says, meet me here and come here and you’ll get a new life. And essentially she takes the substance, ⁓ and there’s this
procedure that she has to go through. But this new person pops out of her. I’m spoiling it. A new person pops out of her and is a younger better her. And but it’s a week on and a week off. It’s a little strange, a little gross. But it’s it’s worth it’s worth watching the substance. I would again, I don’t know which streaming service it’s on. Because on one of them all, you know, it’s really crazy.
beginning of the year, right? So we’re in April, sorry, we’re in mid January and kind of went through some of the home finances and looking at the statements and you know, doing some filtering on that’s on, you know, banking and checking and stuff. Not that anybody writes any checks anymore, but I feel like I’m getting a death by a thousand subscriptions and it’s not just the streaming services because we certainly have them. ⁓
I have subscriptions to websites for travel, three different subscriptions that I got some crazy $199 subscription fee in the last two weeks for a beach body, like California beach body thing that somebody in my household signed up. do you get for that? I have no training videos or idea. We do. We do meal subscription through blue apron, which I think is
great. mean, it’s well worth it. I wouldn’t cut that in a heartbeat, but I went through, uh, even this aura ring, I think it’s like $8 a month and yeah, okay. Eight bucks a month, but like it’s death by a thousand subscriptions and I didn’t go through, I didn’t tally it up yet, but I think we have about 27 subscriptions and it just seemed like I don’t need that many. We talked about cutting. So we use Dish network, but we also have every single streamer.
And we talked about cutting dish. We’ve been on it for so long. Hulu has live sports. Do you have Hulu? Yeah, of course. We don’t pay for the live sports, but we we pay. We still have ads in Hulu. How much? How much is dish? My dish is. Is it more than Comcast? Because Comcast is ridiculous. I got off of Comcast and went to Hulu. My dish is. Over $200 a month.
And it’s just for you still need internet. Yeah, Comcast is like 110. I’m 138 on just internet on com. I hate Comcast. Well, so Brian Roberts get lost. You know, there was a big ⁓ internet outage today or or Verizon outage and AT &T I saw it was everyone there was a panic. Yeah. So is this like that movie with De Niro where he’s the ex president? Is this what was that movie?
Well, we wouldn’t be doing this if if the entire internet went out for any period of time that I think it went out for a minute that first time or what was it in fallout fallout just sorry what’s if you can see the mushroom cloud around your thumb just you’re done. Is it my thumb or your thumb? Yeah, that was one epic start to the show. For anybody who’s not watching fallout. It was created from the video game fallout.
You don’t need to follow the video game. You have never had to play the video game to get sucked like last of us. Yeah. Yeah. I like what they’re doing. It’s great. It’s kind of, you know, after the bomb goes off, what happens to the rest of the people? And it’s wild. I always forget that guy’s name. The main character. He he has Goggins. Yeah. name is Walt Goggins. Yeah. He has some annoying ad that we see on Bloomberg every day. And I hate it. But I like him as an actor. He’s cool. He’s great.
Yeah, I’d watch almost anything that have with him in it. You know, speaking of watching, I did a fair amount of watching over the last few weeks, but I watched the Eagles lose the Niners on Sunday night. That was Kevin Petula was already gone. Thank goodness. Yeah, that was pretty rough. You know, it’s interesting. I’m watching this game and Tom Brady’s calling it with somebody else. I don’t even remember who it was.
And I’m thinking to myself, gosh darn it, this guy’s growing on me. Tall, dark and handsome. I kind of like him. When he first came on last year, he seemed uncomfortable. didn’t really know. He certainly knows what he’s talking about, but it wasn’t smooth. He’s coming into his own. Yeah. Well, Tony Romo came in and he was instantly like insane, awesome. And now he’s falling off and Tom Brady’s coming up. So the only person that I could really do without is Joe Buck.
Oh, I hate Joe. That guy rubs me. a wet towel. Yeah, he’s not. with you. I said to you the other day, he makes Chris Collins worth look good. And that’s tough. So during the Eagles game, I don’t know if it was halftime a little bit after that, but it was like six o’clock at night, this Google Gemini ad came on. And I’m going to put the ad out here. So the ad is the parents texting each other back and forth. Hey, I think we left
Lammy, which is their little kids, you know, stuffed animal on the plane. They’re like, Oh my gosh, they’re like, you left him. No, think we left, we left him. Yeah. So they leave Lammy on the plane and the kid wants to know where it is. And the guy says, well, I’m going to, know, it’s, and so the pictures on the screen and they should like trying to order it. And it says it’s back ordered. It’s going to take two weeks for Lammy to come in. So the mom goes, well, hold on. Maybe it’s the dad. Hold on.
And they go into Google Gemini. And it says, ⁓ he says, well, maybe we can start like photoshopping it into cool places and then turns into videos. So they put Lamy on the moon. They put them at the Eiffel tower, right? And so some of these are videos. Some of these meditating with monks meditating with monks near the Great Wall of China. And it’s a, it’s actually a really cute ad, but I think what’s happening is, and so
for this kid, like if somebody does that, that’s really cool. It’s cute, it’s interesting, and maybe the kid won’t freak out, right? Personally, I think you should say, hey, we left on a plane, man. You’re gonna have to deal with it, right? But I don’t have kids. So they do this work around, and they have these videos and everything. But what it’s doing is, everybody that’s watching this can go, ooh, I wonder what else, and that may be the, not maybe, that’s the whole point of it.
It’s not to get people to make just cute things for their kids, but anybody can go on there. And now we’re going to get all of this AI slop, which was the word of the year last year, right? And it just seems to me that it’s a downward spiral. We’re never going to know what’s real. What’s not real. If we can convince the four year old kid that Lammy’s on the moon or at the in Paris at the Eiffel Tower, isn’t there like, how do you control that?
Yeah, I don’t know. But I like what they did. You got lied to the kid. I’m sorry. I love my children. you can’t just say make that white lie. You do it. So you think it’s a right to lie to your kids? 100 % That’s how I know you don’t have kids as you say no to that. From my perspective. So glad they’re so young and they won’t won’t hear this.
definitely lie to him like real there is some joke about like this this comedian who’s like, you believe the government and everything they say that’s a bold stance to take and he goes on he says, I’m the father of just one son and I lie to that kid all the time. And it is hilarious. I’m like, yes, I’ve never I’ve never totally agreed with something more. Would you go through that process if you lost Lamy of trying to convince the kid that he’s on vacation?
I probably I’m not smart enough to think of that. I would just be like, yeah, I think he’s there. And we’re gonna pick him up on the way home. I wouldn’t have thought of like being so creative. I mean, like, look, you’re your guys living. He’s out here. He’s he’s at the beach. He’s also having a day of vacation. That’s smart. I would just said, I think he’s still there. And we’re gonna pick him up on the way home. So all of these large language models, all of this a genetic AI that’s coming our way, it needs to be
What it needs to be powered. Right. So you mentioned one of the outlets, Tanger outlets, which is down between here and Philadelphia, uh, right next to the Tanger outlets. They built limits next to the limerick power plant here in, um, in the area. Limericks owned by Exelon. I just saw yesterday that they are putting a 20. I don’t want to exaggerate here.
20 million square foot server farm next to the nuclear power plant. And it’s gonna use enough power to run 500,000 homes. That’s a lot of square, I can’t picture 20 million square feet. I mean, enough power for half a million houses and they’re putting it.
like 400 yards. I’m thinking of the CRE broker who sold that that is a massive commission. It’s two it’s 250 acres. Now don’t know how many that’s actually going to be buildings, but it’s 250 acres. And it’s butts up against the towers. So I lived about 30 miles from the limerick nuclear plant. When I was down in Potsdam after college. And by regulation, Exxon has to send out these like mailers every year. So I only lived there one year.
But like I was right on like the first like circle if there was a meltdown like you’re screwed. And the second one was like run get like at least 100 miles away like they they really put the circles down like I can’t imagine why people have like the NIMBY like not in my backyard. It makes sense when they have to buy regulation say if we melt down you’re done for living right here.
But you those property values go down, they should get extra cheap electricity. It’s funny you say that they had interviewed people that live next to it. And they were like, I didn’t really care about it until they offered me money, a lot more money for my property than it’s worth the house the houses that are right around it. So those guys are loving it. I mean, that’s what it seemed like. I was gonna say it was in the newspaper, but I didn’t read it in the newspaper because that’s not a thing anymore. Yeah.
⁓ Speaking of newspapers, did you see the creator of Dilbert died? didn’t see that. Yeah. And when that when it came on, I thought, man, I haven’t seen a Dilbert ⁓ cartoon in ages because I don’t get a newspaper. Follow the Dilbert Instagram. Well, I think he died now, so he’s probably not going to be on. No, no, I just think someone runs a different page. Well, what I later found out, they said this on the news the other day. ⁓ Apparently he said some pretty bad stuff.
a few years ago and he got himself canceled. I don’t know what he said. didn’t look it up, but he got himself canceled. ⁓ and then so they, all of the newspapers dropped him. But I mean, when I say growing up over the last 30 years, I’ve worked in an office since 1997. So almost 29 years and he was just all about office, whether it was the politics or the people in there or what was going on. And one of the, one of the, cartoons that I do remember from, I don’t know,
1520 years ago. It was the boss coming to him and saying, hey, on that anonymous survey that you filled out, you said you didn’t trust management. And then the next picture is just them looking at each other. And then the third one is the the the manager just going, right. The anonymous survey. But it was just stuff like that that kept us entertained. ⁓ I don’t know what he said, but I did think Dilbert was funny. And a few people.
I don’t know if this is good or bad. A few people have said that I look like Dilbert. really? I never thought that. good. good. Maybe it was just the hairstyle that I had back then, right? ⁓ In in news is a little bit closer to home for me. Bobby Weir, one of the ⁓ rhythm guitarist and the co founder of the rifle dead died this week. They were part of my and my wife, Alish’s.
Tom Petty tour. And I said this last year or the year before. ⁓ so Tom Petty died and he was one of those guys that we always wanted to go see, right? One of those old rockers. ⁓ and he died and then we were like, man, we should really go see, you know, people that are getting up there. And then soon enough, like later that day we heard that the Rolling Stones were coming to town and we just, you know, we, we made a commitment to like, Hey, if it’s possible to go some, see some of these guys that are
You know, probably going to die before they die. Let’s let’s go do it. So we had an opportunity to go see dead and company. Obviously Jerry Garcia died in 1995, but we had an opportunity to go see dead and co with John Mayer at the sphere twice, which was brilliant. And I would just say, you know, for anybody out there, I don’t care if it’s music, but some of these people aren’t going to be around. You have an opportunity to see comedians. mean, Seinfeld is not like 100 years old, but
You have an opportunity to see these people, you know, go do it, take the experience. They’re not going to be around forever. I guess maybe in a hologram or something. AI, right? So wrapping up here, we have a lot of stuff now that we started the new year to talk about. ⁓ 2026 is going to be kind of, I want to say a nutty year, but there’s a lot of, a lot of ways that this year can go and sitting here in the middle of January.
You know, I don’t know that anybody knows how it’s going to go. Yeah. What do you think? Uh, I mean, I’ve been throwing out this style a lot. I don’t know if we said it on the last podcast or not, but, uh, obviously we’ve had three years of 80 % return on the SMP 500. And if you look back in history, you average out the stats, uh, the forward subsequent returns are pretty low. So there’s been 14 instances and the next year’s return.
is on average 2.1%. The subsequent three years annualized is only 0.6%. Sounds bad, right? Yeah, it does. But if you take out the 1930s, the stats actually look pretty good. And the fourth year of a bull market in these stats is actually really strong. So we have our outlook tomorrow. We’re going to be doing for our advisors
And we have some slides on that and on valuation, of course. You dodged, we dodged inflation so far. We didn’t even get to the CPI report. You’re about to close up on us without doing CPI. We finally got a full CPI because October we had nothing. November, they did a report and they came out with a nice rosy number and a drop. like 60 % of the data was missing. So I didn’t know what we were going to come into this.
month and luckily it was another good number and we had all the data. Yeah. So 2.7 was it on the headline 2.7 headline 2.6 on core. Very happy with that. Yeah. So, ⁓ airlines were hot 5.2 and appliances were cool. Negative 4.2. the big ones, ⁓ gasoline was negative, right? used cars were negative. ⁓ shelter was still positive.
Right? So I mean, gas might continue to fall. We didn’t talk about Venezuela. I don’t know that we need to get into it right at the moment. Gas might continue to fall. But that only has so much of an impact. mean, we can’t consume that much more gas. And when you think about it, it actually impacts GDP. Yeah, right. So I mean, you can kind of take that out. I’m not saying that I don’t want cheap gas. I’m getting like
17 miles a gallon. I’ll take all the cheap gas I can get. We’re talking about nuclear electricity being cheaper for the people around it in the at risk zone. ⁓ My mom’s side of the family is from Warren, Pennsylvania. There’s a large refiner right there in Warren. And you would think they get cheap gas, you don’t have to pay for transportation. It’s right there. MPA gases from $2.80 to $2.90 when we went up there, just after New Year’s to see my cousins and my aunts and uncles. And
their gas was at $3.55 like they’re paying a premium for getting it fresh. Fresh I don’t give a darn if it’s fresh. I’ll take old gas. Well, unless about a year long as it’s combustible. Yeah, does even last that long. Fresh gas. I don’t know. I’m just saying $3.55. I’m like, what is going on here? My mom warned me she’s like, make sure you get gas in Clearfield. I’m like, okay. Thanks, mom. That’s funny stuff.
We’ll, we’ll, we’ll mark that one down. Fresh gas premium for fresh gas. Extra good. Better than your premium when it’s fresh. ⁓ anything else before we exit out of here that you want to say? Nope. All good. I’m just going to say, Hey, listen, we are at the beginning of a new year. ⁓ for anybody that’s out there contributing to their 401k or especially if you have
the ability to contribute to a 401k and you’re not, please start doing it. It’s a great time to look at the 401ks or any retirement plan that you might have access to raise it up a little bit. If you can, that’s going to help you all the best. One interesting thing with the OBBA bill was your catch up plan. So anybody who’s over 50 can contribute an extra $7,000 to a 401k. And if you’re over 60,
from 62 to 64. I think it is there’s an additional catch up. But all of the catch up has to be in the Roth. Right. So you pay tax on it now. I just learned that earlier in the week. ⁓ But you know, perfect opportunity to to look at your 401k is your retirement plans, jack it up to as high as you possibly can. It’s going to help you out in the end. It’s good little gig because you should be in your peak earning years. If you’re still working in your 60s. You should be making good bucks and theory goes Yeah, at you can but they only have the catch up for two years.
Like it’s not like after 60, you can put in all of this money. It goes back down. Interesting. It doesn’t make any sense to me. Anyway, take a look at your retirement plans. Jack them up to as, as high as you can. It’s going to help you in the end. ⁓ Bob Weir died from lung complications. Kids do not do any smoking out there of any kind. It will treat you wrong in the end. And as always, as Mr. Buffett used to say, maybe still does don’t bet against America. Anybody. Thanks so much. We’ll see you next time.
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Disclaimer
The opinions voiced in this podcast are for general information only and are not intended to provide specific advice or recommendations for any individual. To determine which strategies or investments may be suitable for you consult the appropriate qualified professional prior to making a decision. Economic forecast set forth may not develop as predicted and there can be no guarantee that strategies promoted will be successful. All performance referenced is historical and is no guarantee of future results. All indices are unmanaged and may not be invested into directly.
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