Sometimes I come across something so good that I feel obligated to make sure you don’t miss it.
Many of you have been reading Everybody’s Wrong since we launched about a year ago, and I want you to know how much I appreciate the support. It means more to me than you probably realize.
If you’ve been following along, you’ve probably noticed that I rarely send you somewhere else to consume content.
I’ll reference other research, podcasts, or videos when it adds context, but this newsletter is usually about sharing my own work and perspective.
Today is an exception.
I want to very specifically point you to the latest episode of “The Compound & Friends” with Josh Brown and Michael Batnick.
Josh, Michael, and the entire team at Ritholtz Wealth Management absolutely won the “Finance + Social” game. What they’ve built is incredible.
A lot of us were there nearly 20 years ago when this whole FinTwit ecosystem was just starting to take shape.
Back then it was bloggers, traders, and analysts meeting at happy hours in SoHo and Midtown Manhattan, sharing ideas online while the traditional financial media still dominated the conversation.
Then the Great Financial Crisis happened. That moment changed everything.
People stopped relying solely on cable television and the big Wall Street institutions to tell them what was happening in markets. Investors started going directly to the source.
Blogs, podcasts, independent research, Twitter and eventually YouTube became the new distribution channels for market ideas.
A lot of people who were there early fumbled the opportunity. The Ritholtz team figured it out.
Today they manage more than $7 billion, and “The Compound & Friends” is the No. 1 podcast in finance.
I love it when my friends win. And the rest of us benefit from it too.
Their latest episode with Chris Verrone and Daniel Clifton from Strategas Research is one of the best market conversations I’ve heard in a long time.
If you’re serious about understanding where we are in this cycle, this is a must-listen.
Let me walk you through a few of the takeaways that stood out to me.
Zooming Out: The Big Picture Most Investors Miss
I knew this episode was going to be great the moment I saw who was on.
I’m a huge fan of Chris Verrone and the entire Strategas team. Early in the episode Josh and Michael even gave me a shoutout telling Chris what a big fan I am.
They know.
And I was right. This episode absolutely delivered.
I’ll admit I didn’t know as much about Daniel Clifton before this, but after listening to him it’s easy to understand why he’s considered such an important voice on their team.
The biggest takeaway for me, and for any trader or investor regardless of timeframe, is the importance of zooming out.
The guys do an incredible job of stepping back and putting the current market environment into a much broader context.
They spent time discussing the relative strength we’ve been seeing in energy and what that could mean for the next phase of the cycle.
They’re certainly talking our book there. We’ve had an outsized position in energy stocks for months.
But the part that really stood out to me was the broader rotation they described. Not just strength in energy, but a shift in leadership away from the consumer and toward the more industrial side of the economy.
That framework helped connect a few dots for me.
Another great point came from Verrone when he talked about how often investors confuse momentum with market breadth. Those two concepts get mixed together all the time, even though they’re measuring very different things.
It’s one of those observations that seems obvious once you hear it, but it’s not something I had fully thought through the way he explained it.
There were a lot of gems throughout the conversation. Those were just a couple that stood out right away.
Politics, Metals, and a Possible Regime Change
Clifton’s comments about midterm years were also excellent.
Every cycle it feels like the same story. Something always happens during midterm years that spooks the market. We saw it in 2018. We saw it again in 2022.
And 2026 may end up feeling similar.
But Clifton pointed out something important that most people forget. The U.S. has never entered a recession during the third year of a presidential term.
That’s a pretty remarkable statistic. The midterm scares are often overblown.
Meanwhile, the third year of the presidential cycle, the preelection year, has historically been the strongest of the four.
That’s something worth keeping in mind as we navigate the rest of 2026.
The conversation also shifted to metals.
Verrone made a pretty bold call that silver may be finished for this cycle, and that copper looks like the better opportunity.
We actually sold our gold and silver miners near the top and have been adding some base metal exposure, which you can see happening in real time in my portfolio.
That said, I haven’t been fully convinced silver is completely finished. My view has been that it’s probably over for now, not necessarily over for good.
Still, Verrone made some great points about the way copper is setting up, and that’s a thesis I already agree with.
The part of the conversation that fascinated me the most, though, was the discussion around leadership shifting from a consumer-driven market to one led by industrials.
I’ve been pounding the table on industrials for a while now across small caps, mid caps, and large caps, and we’ve been buying them on the way up.
But the idea of this being a broader regime shift away from consumer discretionary leadership is something I need to dig into more.
That relationship could tell us a lot about what the next phase of this cycle might look like.
Regardless of what I think, go listen to the episode and come to your own conclusions.
Reach out to Josh and Michael and give them some props. Tell Verrone and Clifton they’re at the top of their game.
And tell the guys JC says hello.
Here’s the link to the episode.
Stay sharp,
JC Parets, CMT
Founder, TrendLabs