Jason Zweig

companies that are also being taxed at a somewhat lower rate thanks to, you know, legislation.

So, you know, when companies earn more money that gets taxed less, their stocks go up.

Well, I'm going to chicken out, but I think the best way to answer the question what is the stock market going to do in 2026 or what is any financial market going to do is really to say, well, what am I going to do?

And how can I conduct myself as an investor and position my portfolio so that whatever the market does, I can either respond in an appropriate way or choose not to respond at all because it isn't really called for.

No, I don't think so, because, you know, there's always something to worry about as an investor, and if there were nothing to worry about, that would be the most worrisome thing of all.

I'd be terrified if there were nothing to worry about.

What we do know about financial markets, and we know this from centuries of history, and we know it from human psychology, is that markets don't react...

to what people already expect.

Because that's already in the price of all the assets that are traded.

What markets react to is the unexpected.

So when we find ourselves worrying about the things we can already see, the one thing we can be pretty sure of is we're worrying about the wrong things.

Well, I think you'd be crazy not to be concerned about this.

And I guess there's two ways to think about it.

One is that

There are great companies like Nvidia, Google, Meta, you know, Facebook, that are planning to pour trillions of dollars of investment into AI.

And the people who run these companies are far from stupid.

And the track record of these companies is pretty phenomenal.

So that's definitely a positive.

What is a lot less positive is

is there's decades of very rigorous financial research showing that when companies invest a lot of money, they tend to have lower future returns.