Predictions For 2026: 20% Crash, Political Trends, & Business Opportunities

Agentic commerce is going to become a thing. The Democrats are going to win the mail vote. Pinterest is going to become a player. Community replaces email list. And MicroStrategy is my top stock pick. These are my predictions for 2026. Last year I said that Alibaba was my top stock pick and it doubled. I also predicted that AI SaaS companies would become a thing. Nailed it. I said that the E commerce conglomerates were making a comeback and they did. In this video, I'll give you my top predictions for the year, my biggest stock picks, and the changes that I see happening in the business, e commerce and the political landscape. But first, we need to review and see how I did on the predictions for 2025. I don't like it when people make predictions and then don't hold themselves accountable. I'm looking at you, Robert Kiyosaki. 23 years ago, I warned why the biggest stock market crash in history is still coming and we're in it right now. I'm looking at you, Peter Schiff. I think what we're living through now is the beginning of the end of US dollar hegemony. I just think that's wrong. If you make a prediction, you should be able to stand on it and review your work. So let's review and see how I did in 2025. First, I gave three stock picks for 2025. Pfizer, Kellogg's, and my top pick, which is Alibaba. Pfizer didn't go anywhere. It was flat. I was wrong. Kellogg's was acquired at a 50% markup. My favorite story is Kellogg's because Kellogg's has been around for like a hundred years, but two years ago, they split into two companies. A company that everybody had overlooked but I had my eye on. They were bought out completely and owners of the stock had a more than 50% return, holding it for half the year. But my top pick was Alibaba and that thing just ripped. It more than doubled in 2025. I see that as an obvious play on China. I think China is going to just boom over the next 10 years and I think they're probably going to win the AI race. And Alibaba is one of the leaders there. I actually still really like Alibaba. I own quite a bit of Alibaba and I bought more of it this year. Stay tuned for my top pick for 2026. Let's talk about a new industry that I see emerging in 2025, and it's AI SaaS companies. My second prediction was that AI SaaS companies would become a thing. In retrospect, this looks obvious. I mean, doesn't everybody see this? But it wasn't so obvious a year ago. It was just becoming possible that you could spin up something on AI, turn it into a SaaS and start selling it. And we are seeing new companies pop up all over the place with some tool or some innovation that is built on top of ChatGPT or Claude. And that trend is probably going to continue. The one thing that might change is that I think the price points are going to come way down on those types of businesses. I don't know that I would want to be in the AI SaaS business right now because it's just going to be so easy to spin up tools that I think that's going to consolidate for the next couple of years. But As a prediction, AI SaaS companies became a thing. Nailed that prediction. Number 3. I predicted the return of the conglomerates, the group of businesses that were buying other businesses after. After the E commerce bust of 2022 and 2023, I predicted that there would be a resurgence of that activity in 2025. And we saw that start to happen. We saw Kimberly Clark buy Kenview. What? One publicly traded company buying another huge publicly traded company. One CPG company buying another CPG company. That's nuts. That's a huge conglomerate. We saw Ferrero buyout Kellogg's. And if you follow my work, you saw me talk all about how Dr. Squatch, who by the way was a member of our community back way in the early days. I take no credit for Jack Holdrup's results. He did it all himself. But that was really cool to see somebody that was in our community sell for $1.5 billion to Unilever in 2025. And even Elf Beauty bought Rode for a billion dollars in 2025. So we saw this big surge of these conglomerates buying up these consumer packaged goods companies. And I think that trend is going to continue into 2026. But more on that later. Next, in E Commerce, we're going to see a rise in luxury brands. The reason for this is because the race to the bottom is over. Next, I predicted the rise of luxury brands, specifically on Amazon and TikTok. And I'm gonna give myself an incomplete or too early on this one. There are brands who came out super premium and did extremely well. And I would even say the brands that I see winning in our community and our mentoring groups and among my peers and the businesses I invest in are the very high margin brands. For example, this one here, this is Correct Energy. This is made by the founders of Onnit. And their packaging is really good. The way that they have positioned the product in here is really strong, but it's just like a. It's. It's just a paraxanthine supplement. But they're super premium, and as a result, they're able to advertise very aggressively. They're crushing it right now. There were brands that launched this year at premiums, and they did great. That's what I see winning right now. But we didn't see the big surge of it that I expected. Some of the things I noticed were athletic greens. AG1 launched their first product in 15 years. They launched a sleep supplement, Super Premium. Not that great of a. Of a formula, not that great of a supplement, but super premium. And that's why they're winning. I mentioned this example. Correct Energy. This one here, ZBiotics. These are $12 a supplement. It's absolutely ridiculous. So I do see this trend happening, but I didn't see the big surge. So I'll give myself an incomplete on this one. My next prediction was that we would see a return to unity in culture, specifically in politics. People may disagree with me on this. I think I nailed this one. When you see Marjorie Taylor Greene saying I was wrong, when you see Bill Maher going to the White House and saying favorable things about Trump, when you see pro family commercials being in vogue again, when you see the collective just sort of tired of people hating each other, I think that is evidence of us coming back together and just being tired of the extreme polarization. That trend is going to continue. And I think I was one of the lone voices who said that 2025 would be the year when we return to some semblance of unity. And I think that's exactly what happened. I give myself an A on this one. And finally, the prediction that I got way wrong was I said that markets would be flat. I thought that we would have a flat, boring year on the stock market, but actually the S and p rose about 16%, which is funny, because early in the year when tariffs were announced, it looked like we were going to have a really bad year. And instead we recovered through that and grew. And markets are up 16%. But crypto markets are flat. They're totally flat throughout the year. So maybe partial credit for Ryan. Overall, I got five out of six of my predictions correct. Now let's roll into my predictions for 2026. Prediction number one. We'll see a 20 to 25% pullback in markets. This is going to hurt. I think there is going to be a significant downturn in 2026, the likes of which we've only seen hundreds of times. There's going to be a pullback of 20 to 25% and everybody's going to freak out. And these are the types of pullbacks that are normal and natural and healthy, especially when you have AI stocks that are just on an absolute tear and could drop by 20% and lose a trillion dollars and still be the biggest company in the world. This is just a normal and natural correction. I don't know that we're going to have a big slowdown or a big recession, but I do think that we'll have a 20 to 25% pullback in markets. Because when the AI tech stocks and the Magnificent Seven have any sort of downturn at all, it's going to send shockwaves and panic through the rest of the market and there's going to be some panic selling. And I think for people like you and me, this is a really good opportunity. Let me explain why. I think that this bubble, if you want to call it that, is going to burst, because some people will say, there's no AI bubble. These are profitable companies. Well, I think that the technology is going to get way better, and I think all the incentives across the world are for these chips to become more efficient and more affordable. And that's going to hurt companies like Nvidia. So I think that we're going to see a pullback because things are going to get cheaper, faster and better. But when the sector of the market that's propping up the rest of the economy pulls back, it sends the rest of the market with them. And that's when people are going to panic. Sell. This creates a really good opportunity for people like you and me. Like, I'm an. I'm a value investor. I like to buy things that are on sale. Like my biggest holding is PayPal, which is down 30%. And I want to buy more of it because it just spits off so much cash. That's the kind of investor that I am. So if you are the type of person who looks for opportunities when everybody else is running away, I think 2026 is going to be a very exciting year. I don't think it is to be fun for Wall street, because I do think at some point we'll see a 20 to 25% pullback. But that's the opportunity for you and I to be able to make really smart investments that we plan on keeping for five to 10 years. So my number one prediction for 2026 is sometime throughout the year, we'll see at least a 20% pullback. Everyone's going to freak out and it's going to be fine. Prediction number two, agentic commerce becomes a thing. AI is going to change everything. We all know this. And I think the innovation that happens in 2026 is going to be agentic shopping. And that means that you can just say, hey, go buy me a shirt. And the AI will go find the shirts according to your size from your favorite websites and present you with the options. And your credit card will be on file and you'll hit go ahead, chatgpt, and it will buy it on your behalf without you having to put in any information about yourself. It will just go find it for you and you can say, hey, chat, go buy me some shoes. And it'll search Amazon, it'll search Nike, and it'll give you the ones that it thinks you want and you'll click a button and you'll buy it. That's going to be the trend in 2026. There are already early signs of this. For example, PayPal is trying to lead in this direction. They just released an ad platform that directly targets your previous purchase history and says, hmm, if you bought these things, you might also like to buy these things. And PayPal has all this historical data about things that you have bought in the past. They're also releasing a marketplace. This is going to be super fascinating. So when that combines with AI and PayPal did just announce a partnership with ChatGPT. I think that this just creates a perfect feeding ground for the AI tools that we use every day to be able to make suggestions for things that you want to buy and have your credit card data right on hand. This is going to be great for e commerce. This is going to be great for customers. It's going to be interesting to see what this does for, you know, Amazon and Shopify. But this is a really big opportunity for those of us who are in e commerce. Agentic shopping is the trend in 2026. Prediction number three. I'm an E commerce guy. I sell physical products. And I think we're going to enter what I call spring season or growth season. All markets go in cycles. Spring, summer, fall, winter. Spring is when you plant seeds. Summer is when you work like hell to grow. Fall is when you harvest all the fruits. Winter is when things die off. We are coming out of winter. 2022 and 2023 were the winter of e commerce. It's when all of these conglomerates collapsed. And that's why I said that 2425 was going to be when the conglomerate started to buy up companies again, when new opportunities would start to swoop in. That happened in 2024 and 2025. With things like TikTok shop and live shopping and now new marketplaces like PayPal and big companies buying up more brands, we're starting to turn. This means that this is the time in e commerce to plant seeds and to work like hell. Because that means that in about four to six years there's going to be that harvest period where you have all of this big money that moves into the market to buy up really good businesses. Prediction number four, Community becomes the new email list. So I am an Internet marketer by trade and people have lived and died by email lists. I think that communities are gonna become the new thing now. That means Facebook groups, school communities. What's that one that's competing with school? Wham Wap? No, that's wet ass Wamp wap. The hub where your people live is the new email list. Now you've got to be really old in Internet terms to be excited about this. But I grew up in the time of the Internet forum. Do you even know what that is? It's basically before Reddit you had forums on private sites and there would be These groups of 500 to 1,000 people who are all talking about one thing. Bitcoin was launched on a forum. A group of people got together and launched this thing. They started using it and that group of like a thousand super fans took it to the rest of the world. That's how bitcoin started. I think that we are going to see that trend come back. And that means that the Facebook group that you nurture and the people that you have real connections with, that's your audience. Now. It's not how many people are on your email list, it's how many people you have a genuine connection with and how big of a group you lead. It's movements instead of numbers. It is connections instead of opt ins. Community is the new email list. And that is going to be the nucleus of how small and large businesses grow in 2026 and beyond. Number five, this is a bit of a wild card. I think Pinterest is going to become super relevant for marketers and entrepreneurs. I think that Pinterest is going to be the new ad platform for e commerce entrepreneurs. I think that Pinterest has the best opportunity to gain market share. And I think that Pinterest is the best positioned social media platform to take advantage of AI shopping and agentic commerce. I've got Pinterest on my watch list of stocks that I am very interested in making a significant investment in. They are reporting record number of users, record revenues, their profits are going up and if they go in the direction that they say they're going to go, where they're looking at it more like a shopping platform, I think this is going to boom. This is an interesting stat. Pinterest actually sends the most off site clicks than any other social platform in the world. So because it's so image based and because it's, it's sort of crowdsourced from all of these other sources, Pinterest sends a ton of external traffic. Well, that's because people are saving things they like and might want to buy. Well, if that's the case, then they have all of this data about things that you would want to buy. And as soon as they turn on agentic commerce here, oh, I just think it's going to be a absolute boom for this company. So I'm, I am very curious to see what happens with Pinterest and my prediction is that they become a player in E commerce and, and they have the fastest growth of any of the other social media platforms. Total sleeper pick here, but I'm going with Pinterest. I'll give you one more prediction and then I'm gonna give you my top stock picks of 2026. Let's talk briefly about politics. 2026 is midterms and I think the Democrats are very well positioned. This isn't going to win me any friends, but I think that this year the Democrats win the men back. I think the Democrats have been very rightly criticized for the last like, I don't know, 12 years for speaking negatively about men, for prioritizing other groups of people. And as a result, creating men is sort of this enemy. And the right, the Republicans, has done a good job of sopping up that energy and turning it into votes. And this is the year that that trend is going to switch. There's really nobody on the right who stands out as a voice of kind masculinity. And unfortunately for those of us who tend to lean more right, the voices on the left, people like Scott Galloway, Sam Harris, even Pete Buttigieg, represent more of the kind male Persona. And so I think that they're gonna win the family vote and they're gonna win more men in this cycle. And that's a really good move for The Democrats. And if they do that, I think they're, I think they're going to win midterms and the next few cycles. However, I think that the Republicans are going to run more women. I think the only way that Republicans have a shot at winning in the next presidential election is if they run a strong, feminine female. And so we're going to see this very interesting turn of events over the next few years where the left gets more of the men and the right gets more of the women. I know that's a weird take, but that's my prediction for 2026. Okay, I'm going to give you my top stock predictions for 2026. I already gave you one, which was Pinterest, but I'm going to put that to the side because I have not developed my full thesis on that one yet. I'm going to give you three picks that I've been looking at all year that I think are poised to break out in 2026. So first I'm going to go big cap company. The big cap company that I think is best positioned in 2026 is Amazon. I don't think it's Tesla, I don't think it's Nvidia. I think Amazon is in the best position to grow and they haven't had that huge surge in valuations just yet. So they're still reasonably priced. They also have way more going on in AI than people know or give them credit for. The E commerce platforms are still booming to this day. Amazon is just maybe the best company in the world and I think that they're going to perform the best out of the magnificent seven, maybe even out of the top 20. So Amazon is my top mega cap company for 2026. My next pick, my number two pick of the year. And I really went back and forth between number two and number one. My number two pick is Uber. And Uber is basically for me a value play at this point. Now they came way up in price this year, but their profits exploded. The new CEO is doing a phenomenal job at running Uber like it is a very highly cash producing asset rather than a big tech play that is going for, for, for more market share. And they're making really good moves into freight forwarding and Uber eats. And I think that autonomous is gonna be great for Uber. It's gonna drive down their costs dramatically. So I don't think that Uber is under threat by Robotaxi or by Waymo. I think they'll benefit from autonomous driving and I think Uber is gonna continue to become More profitable and they're trading at, you know, like 12 times earnings. So I view Uber as a really good play for me long term. I'm an idiot on the Internet. Don't listen to anything that I say. I'm not your financial advisor. But Uber is my number two pick for 2026. My number one pick for 2026, MicroStrategy. This just looks obvious to me. MicroStrategy is down 70% in 2025 because Bitcoin hit all time highs and now it's just back to what it was earlier in the year. If you are not familiar with MicroStrategy, they're basically, you might even call them like FinTech, built on Bitcoin. They have all kinds of new financial models and financial structures that are built on bitcoin. So they are highly dependent on the price of bitcoin for their stock price. They're also the largest holder of bitcoin in the world. Bitcoin was flat this year. MicroStrategy down 70%. That just seems weird to me. I mean, the holdings that they have on their balance sheet are worth as much as the entire company. So I just see this as kind of obvious now. Part of the reason why people are selling the stock is because they believe in this thing called the four year cycle of crypto. This is a theory that crypto and bitcoin move in these cycles of growth, consolidation, peak, and then dying. And I just don't know that that's relevant anymore now that we have ETFs and all this big money flowing into the sector. So I think MicroStrategy, if Bitcoin recovers, MicroStrategy is gonna be the biggest winner of this. They're down like 70% this year. I see no reason why they shouldn't double this year and go back to what they were a year ago. Just don't see it. I know there's risks involved. It just seems like an obvious play to me. So again, I'm not your financial advisor. I'm an idiot on the Internet. I do get things wrong all of the time. Please don't listen to anything that I say. But my number one pick for 2026 is MicroStrategy. Jim Rohn used to say that things are mostly the same year after year, but how we change determines how our life changes. So predictions are fun and they're fun to look back on. And I think they give us evidence for if our beliefs about the world are correct. But ultimately it's how we change that changes our life. If you want to make a change this year and you want to build a business. I have resources around this video that will help you come up with your idea. Launch your business, get closer to a million dollar run rate because I invest in businesses and brands once they're at a million dollars, so I have a financial incentive to help you get to $100,000 a month so that I can invest in your business and mentor you towards an eight figure exit. If you need help building your seven figure thing in 2026, check out the resources around this video and I'd love to work with you in 2026. My name is Ryan Danny Moran with capitalism.com thanks for being here. See you next time.