We hope you had a great Christmas. Quick question: where do you want to be by next Christmas?

To get there, we need to talk about market themes for 2026: what will be important and what won’t. What we know and what we can’t.

So today, we’re going to outline our top themes for 2026 in broad strokes to give you a heads up on what might be coming down the pipeline.

And we’re also going to show how you can get a bit more specific with your investing research, too!

Not financial advice. Always do your own research, and past performance doesn’t guarantee future results.

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We did an in-depth analysis of economic triggers in past decades (plus how they could play out next year). This is different though. Here, we’re hitting you with rapid fire themes that we’ll be glued to over the coming 12 months. 

In other words: if it isn’t on this list, we aren’t interested in it.

(That’s dramatic, but you get the point).

So without further ado, here’s theme number one:

This is just about the least brave thing we could say, but we’re saying it anyway. 

The heavy hitters of the AI industry (read: the Magnificent 7) are planning to spend over half a trillion on AI CapEx next year.

Elon Musk was just guaranteed a $1 trillion pay package if he scales Tesla’s market cap to $10 trillion over the next 10 years (that’s a 6.5x increase).

OpenAI and Anthropic both apparently plan on IPOing in 2026.

And, perhaps most importantly: the US government seems bent on outgrowing our debt through economic growth (i.e. AI and robotics development) instead of slowing down spending and cutting costs.

And yes, there has been a ton of talk about the AI bubble popping. But look at prices: 

We’re not saying that just because these 3 stocks are down, the AI bubble already popped; we’re just raising the point that maybe the market already sees AI as good but not invincible, and maybe the best AI companies are going to continue to rise. Maybe!

No, we don’t know for sure that Kevin Hasset will be the next Fed Chair. Heck, we don’t even know if he’ll lower rates for sure if he is.

But based on the pressure Trump is exerting on whoever will be the next Fed Chair… before he’s even in office… 

We think it’s likely we’ll see more rate cuts in 2026. Maybe a lot more. And that is good for stocks.

Also, inflation just came in 0.4% lower than expected (huge) and GDP growth came in 1.0% (even huger).

Who knows if that trend will continue, but all we can say for now is this:

If rate cuts + low inflation + higher-than-expected GDP growth are the norm, we think people with assets will be very happy.

Now, we’re not sure we think growth will be this crazy, but:

You heard it here first, folks (probably not). We think that even though gold and silver had an insane year in 2025, hitting new ATHs seemingly every week, there may still be significant upside left for the precious metals.

Why do we think it might be a good year for gold? Same reasons that 2025 was a good year for gold:

And hey, we might even get a little bit of geopolitical uncertainty thrown in the mix. That tends to boost gold as well.

We know these themes are general. Here’s how you can get more specific in 2026:

Ok, so those are the general themes of the year. But they won’t help you decide on individual stocks to buy (for the most part at least).

The Way to go for actual trades is to look at more data, not less. And AltIndex hands you all the key alternative data that traditional finance tools lack.

Here are some of the most important pages to check out on the AltIndex platform for investing due diligence, in our humble opinion:

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Of course, no one can predict the future. But these are the themes we’re seeing moving into 2026. It’s not rocket science, and we could be wrong, and this is certainly not financial advice; but we hope you enjoyed reading it and found it interesting. 

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That’s all for today’s special edition. We hope you got value from it. Reply and let us know if you did. 

Until next week,

— Brandon & Blake