Up and up we go!
Last month, the S&P 500 was at 6,800 on the nose and, since our Dec 17th Review, we are up 177 points (2.6%) – just 23 points from 7,000 which is, unfortunately, the top of our predicted range for the S&P 500 for 2025 and, so far, we have not seen any good reasons to raise our levels for 2026. Of course, Q1 earnings start this week so maybe they’ll be better than we expect and also – there’s nothing unusual about overshooting the range by a segment (200 points in this case) or even two – so we could keep going – but a retrace is more likely.
As you can see, it’s been an uneven 30 days with much of Tech taking a hit and Credit Services and Railroads suffering. That’s because Consumer Spending is now concentrated in the Top 10%, who spend 50% of the money but that’s not because they buy 50% of the things – they just buy more expensive things and, because they pay off their credit cards at the end of the month – it doesn’t help the Credit Card companies or the Railroads – both being volume businesses:
The same goes for Oil & Gas E&P and Midstream, who need VOLUME and even the Top 1% can only drive one car at a time so, even if they use more gas per mile – it’s still not going to make up for the tens of millions who have to decide between gas and milk on the weekends. Big Oil is doing well as Trump is giving them Venezuela and Defense, of course, is BOOMING – because Trump is doing things like taking over Venezeula and there are NO consequences to these things – EVER!!! Right?
PFE, our Trade of the Year for 2026, is down 2% since we picked them and MRK is up 10.6% – so that’s disappointing at the moment but not really as we sold short-term calls and puts and we’d be kind of upside if PFE popped 10% against our short calls. When you are running income strategies – your favorite stocks are the flat ones!
2025 was an amazing year – especially as we cashed out ahead of the April crash and began brand new Member Portfolios on June 4th, when the S&P was at 5,850. We’re up 20% since then and we’ll have to play 2026 a lot more cautiously than we did 2025 but we have about 50% CASH!!! and a 100-item Watch List (s) and now it’s earnings season – so we’ll see who is going to deserve half of our cash into Q2 (if any).
There’s also our Top 20 List and our Bonus 10 List – just in case you don’t know which earnings reports we will be watching closely but, for now – let’s get to our reviews:
Money Talk Portfolio Review: I was just on the show on Dec 16th and we talked about our “Picks and Shovels” approach to investing in 2026 and that narrative, of course, has now caught fire but we’ll have plenty of chances to pick up those who stumble out of the gate on earnings. We can’t touch the Money Talk Portfolio outside of our Quarterly show appearances (though, if there were and emergency, I would make emergency changes but it’s never happened yet).
The MTP is our oldest portfolio – this version started with $100,000 on Aug 21st of 2024 and, though it’s very low-touch and generally conservative, in a year and 5 months we’re already up to
IN PROGRESS
