Broadcast Retirement Network’s Jeffrey Snyder discusses the first week of stock market trading with Narrative Capital’s Oliver Renick.
Jeffrey Snyder, Broadcast Retirement Network
Oliver, it is always great to see you. Thanks for joining us this morning.
Oliver Renick, Narrative Capital
You’re very welcome, Jeff. Good to see you again, sir. Happy New Year.
Jeffrey Snyder, Broadcast Retirement Network
Yeah, happy New Year to you. All right, we’ve got the first full week of trading in 2026. I wanna get your reaction from my perspective, the layman’s perspective.
Markets come out really high. What’s your perspective?
Oliver Renick, Narrative Capital
Pretty much unstoppable, Jeff. S&P 500 pushing to 7,000. The market has been very resilient.
Coming after a year in which we already had good gains, 2025 was really somewhat of a comeback year. If you remember back in the spring with all the tariff stuff, things were getting kind of hectic in terms of the overall macro narrative. A lot of people were kind of as always writing very kind of doomy narratives about things, but in particular, 2025 was a very strong lesson in not overstretching one’s political analytical abilities, one’s geopolitical expertise, everything from terrible human events, wars around the world, things that have been going on, some new, some old, but really trying to project those onto a negative view for US equities in particular, and world equities too, was just wrong. What was really important to learn is that ultimately for the S&P 500, earnings is the main driving factor. It always is.
Earnings are the most correlated chart to the S&P 500 price chart, and valuations actually have not been that absurd. So there’s plenty of reason when you’ve got lots of AI tech still powering the market, when you have general risk on tone, a stable economy, people that are taking risk and taking their kind of livelihood into their own hands through investing, there’s a whole story about AI and how that’s pushed, I think, people into the investing world to be able to keep up. It’s really been a case study in the success of capital markets, how our economy is supposed to work, and that’s why we’re at all-time highs starting off this year fresh.
There were a lot of fun nuances that I’d be happy to get into, I think, from the last year and currently, but the baseline is capital markets go up in price for the stocks that are traded inside those economies when the economy is stable, and we’re inventing good new stuff that people use, and that’s what America does best, and that’s what we’re doing.
Jeffrey Snyder, Broadcast Retirement Network
Absolutely, you said it perfectly. You mentioned artificial intelligence. This first week of trading, are there sectors that are really popping out to you?
I mean, again, I don’t wanna put the cart before the horse.
Oliver Renick, Narrative Capital
Semiconductors, baby.
Jeffrey Snyder, Broadcast Retirement Network
We’re thinking about long-term investing, but what’s stepping out for you?
Oliver Renick, Narrative Capital
Semiconductors, it’s the core, it’s the center of basically where the growth is, where the innovation is. There are a lot of kind of subsectors and verticals within AI. If you go across industry right now, people are arguing that healthcare and smaller cap companies should be now recipients of some of these forces that first showed up in the Mag 7, but then showed up in some of the kind of ancillary trades, the infrastructure that was built out, memory plants, cooling, all of that took place really in the second half of last year, but that all kind of funnels up to semiconductors.
My kind of main view from an investment standpoint throughout the last year was, if you combine being long semiconductors and generally long tech with short, some of the more highly speculative leveraged stuff, like a micro strategy or some of the cryptos, then you’ve got a real clean way to be risk on in an economy that’s doing very well. Semiconductors are the core of that trade. Obviously, if you kind of wanna go down the list of sectors and look at things like banks that are doing really well right now, those charts look really strong.
I think there’s a lot of arguments to be made that you could see broadening out. Keep in mind the Mag 7 actually have largely been going sideways for the last several months. So there’s a very real possibility that stocks like Nvidia and now Apple, which has pulled back from all time highs, that those have reset to valuations that could then be kind of fertile ground for fresh rally.
So there’s a lot of ways it could go, but at the end of the day, you can get the most clear look at seeing how AI impacts the market by looking at semiconductors.
Jeffrey Snyder, Broadcast Retirement Network
Oliver, you talked about geopolitical tensions. It’s no, I think the audience is well aware of the wars that are going on around the world. I wanna mention Venezuela because it has an impact on the oil markets.
What does that mean for oil prices, commodity prices, and also affordability for so many Americans?
Oliver Renick, Narrative Capital
You know, Jeff, one thing I’ve always talked about in my coverage that I’ve kind of offered up as one of my self-criticisms or my weak spots has been oil, but actually it’s kind of not really. My view of oil has basically been that the chart is kind of a one-way train, lower in price generally, and that’s largely a function of the US production capacity growing enormously over the last five years with these incredible innovations, fracking, legal and legislative moves that have opened up oil production from both parties, by the way. The fact that we just now have a massive role in global production as a leader, as the leader in many metrics.
So it’s very hard to get the price of oil to move beyond a range that’s healthy for the US economy without real, real shock and awe. And unfortunately, a lot of the things that happen on the geopolitical stage just don’t meet that criteria in my mind. We’ve had seen areas that have been warring together for years, for generations, for decades, things that are awful from a humanitarian perspective that obviously we should be putting a lot of time and energy into figuring out how to stop, but what can we do?
So I think the market has kind of also realized that with crude oil having a few spikes along the way, but just looking at the chart as I pulled up, we traded 80 bucks in crude 52 weeks ago. I don’t really think that WTI, I think by the same token, you have to have some kind of novel force to push WTI and crude futures below basically 55, low $50. I think the same forces in the US that are producing a lot of oil and making sure the prices don’t get too high are also going to be the same forces on the flip side of that coin that don’t want prices to go too low, obviously.
So I think crude oil basically is an asset that just, it’s something that from an analytical perspective, I think it’s kind of a one-way chart or maybe a two-way chart in terms of either being lower or range bound. So I think the geopolitical events, their main function for markets this year was to create buying opportunities for risk assets.
Jeffrey Snyder, Broadcast Retirement Network
Oliver, I want to close our conversation part of the discussion around the Federal Reserve. We got a positive jobs report today or what I would term a positive jobs report. It looks like just based on our conversation, the economy seems to be doing pretty well.
There may be some soft spots. What does the Fed do? First, we need a new Fed chairman or chairperson, but what does the Fed, what do you think the Fed might do at its next meeting?
Oliver Renick, Narrative Capital
Well, that subject is kind of rife with, I feel like that’s actually a risk point. I’m a general believer of don’t fix it if it ain’t broke. And there’s actually good logic market-wise and statistically to apply that view in this case because by the same token, if you look at the chart going up and to the right, let’s call it the S&P 500.
Let’s call it during Jerome Powell‘s tenure. That’s a good chart. That’s a trend.
Trend is your friend. You want to ride trend until there is a force that acts upon it. Newton’s law too, right?
You have motion until an outside force. And that’s kind of my view for Powell. When you look at his start date and where we are now, things have gone about as well as I think anybody could have asked for.
I think I’m a pretty smart person. I don’t think there’s a lot of people have better macro views than me. I would be happy to criticize somebody if they weren’t doing a good job.
And over the course of my career during Powell’s tenure, there have been moments where I’ve said, I think he could have done things differently or said things differently, or had a better understanding maybe of how the yield curve works at different points. But there are all these people that have these criticisms with him that seem largely political in nature. And the fact of the matter is that when you look at the performance under his tenure, I think he’s going to go down in history as one of the best feds ever.
We’ve seen inflation come down from levels that were some described as being fixed. People thought that after COVID, inflation was never gonna come down. They thought that all of the monetary influx was going to create hyperinflation, it did not.
We’ve had elevated inflation by some metrics, but compared to where it was at the peak, it has come down basically according to plan. Maybe was there a timing effort that could have been more perfectly articulated? Sure, but everybody’s got hindsight, 20, 20 vision.
Everybody wants to be a backseat driver. Unfortunately, I think that the timing of some of those shifts in inflation and some of the weak spots that we had in the economy, the unknowns aligned with elections and political headwinds that were sort of out of Powell’s control. And now I think that we’re likely to replace him just because too much has been said and too much political energy and credibility has been spent, criticizing him now that we need to, it feels like we have to replace him.
Like you said, we need to. In my mind, I look at the results, we don’t need to. We’re at all time highs in the S&P 500.
The United States took a massive leapfrog over the rest of the world during COVID. That’s the reality of it. Some of that has started to equalize a little bit if you look at in the past year and a half how international stocks did have some moments of outperformance against the US, but by all measures, our economy is number one.
We have widened the gap against our peers like China. So, job well done basically. And I think there’s a real risk to fixing something if it ain’t broke.
And I think that that biggest risk is that if you bring in a Fed chair who’s just gonna start cutting rates because it looks good on the surface to meet some political need, there’s a high likelihood then that the bond market will react in a way that they don’t expect. A lot of people think you cut rates, yields go down, but we’ve actually seen that that is not the case when the Fed did start its cutting campaign. We saw yields go up for a very long time.
It’s possible if you overcut again, then you could blow out the bond market and create some risks. So, yeah, it’ll be interesting. I think there’s a lot of fun and drama around it to see who’s gonna get the role.
But unfortunately, I think it’s just a political issue that probably has gone too far, but it’s past the point of return.
Jeffrey Snyder, Broadcast Retirement Network
Yeah, well, it’s always for the clicks, right? I mean, people do stuff for the clicks. Except for you and myself.
Oliver, we got about a minute. Hey, it’s all about getting the right information, which is why I always come to you. Oliver, we got about a minute left.
We had a great conversation this morning. What are some of your key takeaways in the last minute?
Oliver Renick, Narrative Capital
Takeaways for last year and this year are, don’t fade semiconductors in tech until you have very clear technical reason on the charts to do so. But at the same time, don’t over lever risk and get carried away into the pockets of mania that have shown up in some places, whether it’s crypto, if it is meme stocks, if it is some of the commodity moves that we’ve seen, you still have to be worried about those things because I do think our market generally, its life has been extended. This bull runs lifespan continues to be extended because instead of allowing the broad market to get too expensive and bubbly, we have these isolated siloed off areas, pockets of euphoria and madness that explode up and then explode back down.
So as long as you dodge those potholes along the way, I think that price is king right now. The chart suggests we could keep going. The economy suggests there’s still stability in it, but I do worry that tampering with policymaking in the Fed could potentially be one threat to that in 2026.
Jeffrey Snyder, Broadcast Retirement Network
Well, one week of full wicket trading down, Oliver. Great to see you. Excellent analysis.
And we look forward to having you back again very soon, my friend. Thank you, Jeff.