Is Now a Good Time to Invest?

Seems to be a lot of uncertainty in the market at the moment. So in this video today, I'm going to run through some of your questions that you've been leaving me on Instagram to hopefully provide some clarity on what on earth is going on. So let's get right into it. The first question is from Jonathan, who asks, what do you think Q1 of 2026 will look like for crypto and stocks now? First things first. The predictions game, right, is for fools. Every single year all the investment banks come out and make their forecasts for the new year ahead and nobody remembers any of them come the end of the year because none of them were right. You should really be asking yourself the question back. Why do you feel the need to try and anticipate or forecast what the market will do? If you have your own process and you're not short termist, you're not gambling and you have confidence in it, then I don't know why you really care for what the market does because you'll follow your strategy regardless. They are ultimately both pro cyclical assets and that's best expressed by something known as beta. You might have heard of this. Now that's basically the sensitivity of any given market or indeed instrument that you're trading Bitcoin gold stocks to a given benchmark. And that's usually equity volatility. So to relative to the S&P 500, Nvidia will have a relatively high beta. So if it was one, it would move one for one with the general market. If it's above one, which in the case of Nvidia it certainly is, it will move a multiple of that. Defensive sectors and things like gold tend to have a lower beta. So just think of this as risk on and risk off. So if you open up trading view, for example, you can look at the ratio of two ETFs. So the first one is the high beta s and P500 ETF. And you can divide that by the low volatility equivalent. As the ratio rises, it indicates risk on. Conversely, when that ratio is falling, it's basically a risk off play. So those lower beta more defensive sectors or areas of the market should show better relative outperformance. Then if you overlay a chart of Bitcoin, you can see how it moves very, very closely with this ratio. This chart rules everything. Now just to break your bubble, it's all coincident, so there's no point making predictions. Everything is coincident anyway and hence market timing doesn't work consistently. And really you should be looking Inwardly and asking yourself why you want to know why are you asking that question? And I think you'll find an awful lot more in that answer through introspection than I could give you here, saying, yeah, we're in a bull market for stocks. Tariffs are doing this. It'll pass. Or talking it down and talking about all the worries, which I know as a global macro person previously, not that I did it, but it's the way the industry is set up. That's what sells and that's what you're paid. You're paid to have an opinion on risk. So you're paid to talk up risks. And that's why all the doom and gloomers out there, they're all over the Internet talking about recessions, the next market crash and all the rest, because fear sells. And that's how they stay in a seat. But that's also why they make for hopeless traders, hopeless investors. And ultimately, you're better off scrolling Instagram and looking at other stuff than you are listening to their opinions and forecasts on the market. So I truly hope that helps. Jonathan and yeah, let's get into the next question. So this one's from Rich. Is your strategy just to buy and hold, or do you rebalance or take profits? So again, in the context of what I do, investing in single stocks, it's usually 15 to 20 names. It's quite concentrated with investing for the long term. I'm not moving in and out of positions very often. And that means that the longer amount of time that you leave between buying something new or deciding to get rid of something, which has to be beyond two years, which is my minimum holding period for any given company, stuff's going to drift a lot. So what is rebalancing? If you're new to it, it's essentially where you will periodically reset your portfolio back towards like a target weighting. So let's say you began two years ago, 5% in each. Some stuff's gone up 20%, so it'd now be like a 6% weighting in your portfolio. Some stuff's fallen 20%, and it's a 4% weighting in your portfolio roughly. Now, a lot of people, when you read the trading books about how to manage your own money, will kind of imitate that and say, yeah, rebalance monthly, rebalance quarterly. But in my case, I rebalance annually. And it really isn't a big deal what you choose because it doesn't add any real edge. You can really nerd out, as I have over the years reading all these Academic studies, trying to optimise things even when it comes to something as dangerous dollars rebalancing, which excites me. And you'll see that the frequency didn't make any real material difference to performance. So once again take the path of least resistance. Occam's Razor Simplicity is often robust at best, so for me I'll just reset once a year. But that hopefully explains my thought process behind how I've arrived at that decision. I explain much more about this inside my program. There's a whole section dedicated within the portfolio management module to exactly this. How to weight your portfolio, how to manage your positions, including things like rebalancing and even hedging. So I hope that helps. Let's get stuck into the next one. So what are your thoughts on gold given that it's trading at records? Gold trading above $4,000 seems high, but I recognize in that statement that there's an anchoring bias there. I'm just anchoring to where it's been in a period of time before that and hence it seems high above 4k compared to where it was before. So that's something to be aware of. First and foremost is your framing and anchoring of where it is currently. Markets and new highs tend to go on to make consecutive new highs of course, more often than putting in a peak and it leading to a sell off. I was chatting with it was actually Rich who asked the previous question on Instagram a few days ago. He's really keyed into the macro stuff and the way that he put it is that it's essentially the devaluation of fiat currency. So it's not just the inverse of the dollar, but it's basically fiat money that has gone down in purchasing power rather than gold on the chart having gone up. So think of it that way. It may look as though gold's gone up, but really gold is just gold and fiat currency, paper money has just gone down. So for it to reach such an extreme as I perceive it, I would heed caution, especially as that market commodities in general have a lot of open interest, a lot of speculators in those contracts. So you should be looking at things like the open interest for the futures contracts. It will of course be technically overbought if you look at a technical indicator, a price indicator, but you really need to be aware of positioning. And you've got to remember if you have to pay a cost or fees to own something and it doesn't pay you in return like a dividend or have any cash flows or Like a rental income, like a property does, it's not an asset. So if you're really scared and you've got a decision between giving you money to the US government or giving it to Microsoft or somebody with a slightly higher earnings yield of similar caliber, your money's arguably better off. At least for me, my money's better off. In the best quality companies, earnings have a degree of inflation protection built into them because the company will just increase the prices, particularly when they command such dominance. They have pricing power like they're not going to go out of business for the sake of not putting up prices. When you stop viewing the stock market or the markets in general. If you're a crypto investor in particular as a casino, and you remember and focus on what the price ultimately represents, in the case of crypto and gold, it's pure speculation because it's not an asset, it's a speculative instrument. But in the case of equities, it is the future of earnings stream of that company. You will be compensated as an investor through those. I've kind of digressed there, but my thoughts on gold are that if you're really worried about inflation and the erosion of purchasing power, the erosion of value of paper money, fiat currency, hell yeah, you need to own assets. But why gold in particular? Is it this unique inflation hedge? No, but that's what people seriously misunderstand about stocks. A lot of you are asking me questions about crypto and in this case, what are your thoughts on the future of xrp? Now for those of you that know me well, per everything that I've explained in this video, you'll know that I don't have any dog in the fight when it comes to Ripple or any other crypto for that matter. Curiously though, there was a time when I bought some Ripple. It was back in 2017 and I bought it for my dad for Christmas. I'll flash up the PDF that I made for him as a gifted in it. And I remember I bought 64 ripple for a dollar each at the time and I wrote him this letter explaining like what it was, how to check and I was trying to bring him into the crypto world at that time. I had some early interest back then in Bitcoin and some other things I think even litecoin and Ethereum back then. And yeah, it was a bit of fun, it was a novelty at Christmas. But by the by I made a life changing amount of money in crypto in 2021, as many people did. So I have nothing bad to say about that. Particular chapter and how it helped me to build out my freedom and to some extent how I ended up here in combination with the other investments that I was making. And then what I went on to do with that capital and those profits in recycling it into my broader portfolio. I've since stayed away from it. So, not to be facetious, but my thoughts on Ripple are that it was my favourite childhood ice cream. The raspberry ripple is really just a cry for. A desperate cry for making some quick money. It's all the same trade. You're just trading beta. It gives you more bang for your buck and that's why retail investors like it. So with this one, I'd just refer you back to the answers that I provided to the other questions at the beginning, because I don't think there's anything new really to contribute here. I wish you the best of luck if you're invested in it. We all get what we want from the market. That's one of the best lessons or sayings that I was taught by my mentor Lex, early in my career. We can all get what we want from the market. So whether you're a bull, whether you're a bear, whether you seek drama, whether you seek entertainment, whether you just want to make money and treat it as a business, which is the case obviously with, with how I invest money now, we all get what we want from the market. So just look, look inwardly once again and ask yourself, what is it that you want to get? Because you will get it. And it seems that you want to get rich, but it seems that you want excitement, you want that feeling of having a lottery ticket and that's probably because you haven't got your other things in order. I'm sorry if this is coming across wrong, but deep down, if you're having to look at this stuff in these ways, these Hopium ways of buying lotto tickets and getting that break that you otherwise feel absent of in your life. That's probably why you're looking at it. The wealthier you get, the more it becomes about preservation and ultimately the less risk tolerant, the more risk averse you become. It's more about protecting what you've got and grinding it out. And I know that's a luxury of a position to be in, it's a privileged position. But that's the only advice I can give you here to, to hopefully help you. I guess I'll leave it there. If you want to leave any questions in the comments. Happy to do another video and also check out Instagram, where I'm posting the daily reels if you like the videos like this and you can get to know me, get to know my strategy a lot better. It's all for free and yeah, when I get out the sun's getting hot.