What I Heard at the 2026 Strategic Investment Conference — and What I Think It Means for You
This is the final installment of my notes from this year's Strategic Investment Conference, and it covers the widest range of voices yet. Speakers included Jim Bianco (a bond market and inflation expert who has run his own research firm since 1990), Dr. Ed Yardeni (one of Wall Street's most famously optimistic economists), a panel with veteran technical analysts Jeff DeGraaf and Jared Dillian, political journalist Mark Halperin, and science writer Matt Ridley.
What made this group interesting is how much they disagreed with each other, which is exactly why I attend. As with the first two parts, none of this is a recommendation to do anything with your portfolio today; it's the background thinking that quietly shapes the decisions we make together over time.
1. Bianco: inflation is why a “good” economy feels bad—and why rates are staying up
Jim Bianco opened with a striking fact: consumer sentiment recently hit its lowest reading since the survey began in 1952—lower than during COVID or the financial crisis—even while the stock market sits near record highs. His explanation is simple arithmetic. Since 2020, cumulative prices are up roughly 30% while the average paycheck is up about 25%. Wall Street celebrates that the rate of inflation has come down; Main Street sees that everything still costs a third more than it did six years ago, and roughly half of households own few assets to offset it. That's the “K-shaped” economy—the top half doing well, the bottom half falling behind.
His interest rate outlook follows directly: over time, interest rates track nominal growth (real growth plus inflation). With the war pushing gasoline up over 50% in two months and the economy still growing at 3%+, rates “should” be rising, and they have, with the 10-year Treasury moving from under 4% to around 4.5%. Incoming Fed chairman Kevin Warsh was nominated promising rate cuts, but the bond market is now pricing in possible hikes. Bianco's blunt warning was that cutting rates with inflation near 4% could send long-term yields toward 5.5%.
He also flagged two facts most investors haven't absorbed. First, with birth rates at a 200-year low and immigration running negative, America may not need to create any jobs for the economy to remain healthy. Second, a surprising share of the recent S&P earnings boom comes not from selling products, but from tech giants writing up the paper value of their stakes in private AI companies.
Yardeni and other economists disagree with Bianco on this point. They believe that earnings are a solid reflection of U.S. firms selling real value and products at a more profitable rate due to higher productivity in their workforces.
For us, practical takeaway is this: don't build a plan around a return to 2010s-era rates, but do appreciate that savers and bond investors are finally being paid a real return again. Combined with good, solid earnings growth, is a recipe for staying appropriately allocated to stocks.
2. Yardeni: the Roaring 2020s — and a direct rebuttal to the gloom
Ed Yardeni, a self-described “permabull” who raised his S&P 500 target the weekend before the conference, offered nearly the mirror image. First-quarter earnings weren't just good—he called them explosive, up roughly 18% year-over-year and possibly 23–24% for the full year. That’s growth you normally only see coming out of a recession.
And it's broadening: over 80% of S&P 500 companies have rising forward earnings estimates, small and mid-cap profits are finally waking up after three flat years, and the Russell 2000 has pushed to new highs. In his view, companies froze hiring for a year or two while they figured out AI, and now productivity—what he calls “fairy dust,” because it delivers more growth, less inflation, higher real wages, and fatter profit margins all at once—is starting to show up.
His most memorable moment was a direct answer to Bianco's K-shaped economy. Yardeni thinks it should really be called a generational economy: baby boomers hold roughly $89 trillion in collective net worth, and as they retire, their paychecks disappear (making income statistics look weak) while their spending, on themselves, their kids, and their grandkids' activities, keeps flowing.
Nearly a third of young adults live with their parents, and boomer wealth is quietly bridging the affordability gap. That, he argues, is how consumer spending keeps defying predictions of collapse.
On rates, he was equally contrarian in the other direction. In his view, 4–4.75% on the 10-year isn't high; it's normal. The anomaly was the zero-rate decade, and the Fed should simply do nothing for a year or two.
He remains bullish on energy (as a geopolitical hedge), financials, and beaten-down healthcare. For the long haul, sees the S&P reaching 10,000 by the end of the decade.
3. The technicians: respect the trend, but this looks like a bubble
Jeff DeGraaf and Jared Dillian study market behavior rather than economic forecasts, and both flagged genuine warning signs. DeGraaf's “bubble indicator”—triggered when an index doubles within two years—just fired for semiconductor stocks, and similar signals lit up in South Korea and Taiwan for the first time since the late 1980s.
Market breadth is narrow. Only about 42% of S&P stocks are above even their short-term trend while the index makes new highs, meaning a small group of AI names is carrying much of the market. His historical market-cycle work adds that when inflation readings are this elevated, stock returns have historically been below average—the only zone in 80 years of data with negative average returns.
Dillian added that valuations sit in the top decile, which has historically meant weak forward returns, and he's positioning for downside using option strategies that cost little if he's wrong.
Yet here's what I found most valuable: neither one is selling. One quoted “Bubbles run further than anyone expects, so the costliest mistake is exiting too early.” DeGraaf told the story of Isaac Newton, who tripled his money in the South Sea Bubble, sold, watched it keep doubling, piled back in near the peak, and was ruined—prompting his famous line that he could predict the motion of celestial bodies but not the madness of men.
The disciplined approach is to trim gradually, de-risk rather than short, and accept that you'll only get out after the peak, never at it. Both also shared how they hunt for opportunity on the other side—buying when a negative story becomes “common knowledge,” as Dillian did with Nike after its brand was declared dead, with alcohol stocks when headlines insisted nobody would ever drink again, and with Intel four years before its recent revival.
That patient, contrarian temperament—not the specific trades—is the lesson worth keeping. Although we don’t necessarily trade based on these tactics for our clients, they reinforce the broader principle of embracing volatility and buying when fear and excessive negativity create opportunity.
4. Halperin: the midterms hinge on gas prices — and a first look at 2028
Political journalist Mark Halperin, interviewed by advisor David Bahnsen, laid out the November base case: history (the president's party has lost House seats in 18 of the last 20 midterms), a sagging approval rating, and sourness about prices all point toward Republicans losing the House.
More striking, he says the private polling Republicans themselves commission suggests losses could reach as high as 44 seats—and that even the Senate, which looked untouchable in January, is now genuinely in play, though Democrats would need to win essentially every competitive race.
But he stressed that the single most powerful variable isn't redistricting fights or candidate quality. It's whether the war ends and gasoline prices come down. If they do, the entire map shifts back toward Republicans.
The most painful number he cited for the White House was that polls now show voters rating Joe Biden as good or better a steward of the economy than President Trump—which tells you inflation—not ideology—is driving the public mood.
Looking ahead to 2028, he called the Democratic field weak, with Gavin Newsom, Kamala Harris, and Pennsylvania's Josh Shapiro the most viable. On the Republican side, he sees a strong chance JD Vance runs with President Trump's endorsement, possibly pairing early with Marco Rubio as a unified ticket.
For investors, Bahnsen made the practical point that the Senate matters more to markets than the House because of appointments and committees. Either way, expect a noisy political year, and remember that markets have historically done fine under every configuration of divided government.
5. Ridley: the innovation famine is over
Matt Ridley, author of The Rational Optimist, closed the conference on a genuinely hopeful note. Five years ago, he wrote that outside of software, the West was living through an “innovation famine.” After touring America meeting entrepreneurs, he thinks the famine is ending.
Founders are moving “from bits to atoms,” building supersonic jet engines, small nuclear reactors, thought-controlled prosthetic limbs, and autonomous vehicles rather than just apps. Private fusion companies are targeting net energy gain within a couple of years, versus the 2039 timeline of the big government project. It’s part of what his interviewer called the “gray handoff,” where industries move from government monopoly to competitive private hands and suddenly speed up (think NASA to SpaceX).
In biotech, he sees a Cambrian explosion: GLP-1 weight-loss drugs he considers potentially as transformative as AI, gene editing that can correct a single letter of DNA, and mRNA cancer vaccines showing real promise in early pancreatic cancer trials.
Two of his points stuck with me. On fears of an all-powerful AI, the evolutionary biologist in him is calm: the world is already full of hostile agents, and none takes over because they compete with each other. The solution to a bad AI will be other AIs, just as antivirus software tamed the computer-virus panic of the early 2000s.
And on the long view, as long as a society keeps energy abundant and speech free, the innovation engine keeps turning. Europe, he fears, is regulating itself out of the race, but America, for all its problems, still does both.
Putting it all together
What I valued most this year was the disagreement. Bianco sees a structurally higher-inflation world where the bottom half of the economy is hurting, and the bond market is on guard. Yardeni sees a productivity boom with boomer wealth cushioning everything. The technicians see a market that's right to be rising but stretched enough to warrant trimming. Halperin reminds us politics will be loud but is mostly downstream of gas prices. And Ridley reminds us that beneath the daily noise, the long-term machinery of progress is accelerating.
My takeaways for our work together are consistent with all of them: stay invested but stay diversified, don't chase the hottest corner of the market, hold quality bonds with realistic expectations that rates stay higher for longer, and let rebalancing—not headlines—drive changes to your portfolio.
As always, if anything here raises questions about your own plan, call or email us. I'd rather have the conversation now than after the market forces it.
