Here’s What Paradigm Editors Forecast for 2026

Last week, Paradigm Press Group held its year-end meeting in Baltimore. Almost all of our editors were in the room, which means many names that are familiar to subscribers. Everyone had a time slot to rehash the good (and bad) parts of 2025 and look ahead to 2026. Plus, almost all of the back-office team were there, the ones who offer wise counsel and make the emails and tech support appear so seamless.

Today, I’ll outline some of what we discussed. The idea is to offer a glimpse of just some of the big themes you’ll see in the coming year. And be forewarned, 2026 will be tricky in many ways. Ups and downs; downs and ups. So, be careful and don’t be impulsive.

Indeed, with investing as with life, prepare to button up and I mean fast. With markets as with weather, it’s getting c-c-cold outside with a whole bunch of snow as well. For example, this is my grill on the side porch of my house just this past weekend.

Your editor’s barbecue grill, symbolic of where markets are headed. BWK photo.

Yes, stay cautious as you approach the markets in the year ahead. You’ll see why below. Let’s dig in…

The Looming “AIpocalypse”

Former hedge fund manager Enrique Abeyta kicked off with a discussion of what he called the looming “AIpocalypse.”

And I assure you, Enrique is good… For example, last December he predicted that in 2025 Nvidia would lose $1 trillion of market cap in a single day and he was off by only a little bit because, at one point this past year, Nvidia dropped a trillion within about a week.

And yes, post-tumble Nvidia recovered its sell-down value and now trades at levels where the math indicates market cap over $4.2 trillion. But the point is that if you followed Enrique, you made some solid money during the roller coaster ride.

Meanwhile, more than a few of our other editors at Paradigm also believe that right now Nvidia is priced about 4x what it “ought” to be. Which is another way of saying that the market psychology behind most of the big tech names is off the charts. So, don’t get crazy on Nvidia.

Which brings me back to Enrique and his overview of the current and looming tech scene. He offered several examples of “unsustainable hockey stick” charts that have nowhere to go but up-up-up until they abruptly fall off a cliff into the wipeout abyss for any of many reasons. Which is to say that if you don’t know what you’re doing in this market you can lose your shirt.

Yes, of course, some companies in the artificial intelligence space (AI) are solid players with real business plans. They’re making progress towards whatever rainbow nirvana lies beyond the horizon, and perhaps there’s even a pot of gold. But again, many other AI plays are total, flea-bitten dogs. You need to know which is which.

Indeed, per Enrique, “(Company X – I’m holding back the name) will lose big, as in really big. Some people think that these guys will spend $150 billion, but I doubt it because it’ll become clear that they are losers and nobody will give them $150 billion to lose.”

With another choice use of words, Enrique noted that “Everyone knows that the AI space is filled with companies that are total bullsh!t, but the market hasn’t absorbed it yet.”

In 2026 Enrique foresees a continuing AI ramp-up towards a blowoff top, and then an “Enron moment” in which much of the sector crashes. So, be sure you are not on that ill-fated plane-of-doom when the wings fall off.

AI investors… Don’t be this guy. Courtesy X/Twitter-Buzz Patterson.

That is, expect an epic decline in tech values at some point this coming year. And unless you have your own version of a magic crystal ball, you should follow Enrique’s frequent trading notes and commentaries.

Buy Bitcoin Cheap

After Enrique’s sobering AIpocalypse forecast, Chris Cimorelli took the floor to commiserate about how he wishes he had bought Bitcoin long ago when it was $500 or $1,000 instead of the current price of about $85,000. Bummer, right?

Then again, there’s another method to buy Bitcoin and for a variety of reasons the price is way discounted from the daily quote.

I won’t give away too much here but check out Chris’s site if this line of thinking intrigues you.

Cycles of History

Then along came Mason Sexton, who presented a fascinating talk about long-term patterns of investment, namely “cycles and systems” as he put it, with astonishing 36-year periodicity.

Briefly, Mason took us back 36 years to 1989 and the fall of the Berlin Wall, and events that ended the Cold War in one previous cycle. Then back another 36 years to 1953 and the end of the Korean War and beginning of the Eisenhower era for another cycle. Then back another 36 years to 1917 and the entry of the U.S. into World War I, coupled with the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia. And then back to 1881 and the beginning of the so-called “Gilded Age” in America.

For reasons that I won’t reveal here, Mason sees trouble brewing early in 2026, culminating with market dynamics essentially derailing in late February and early March. “We’ll see market capitulation, in which financial assets will panic out and transfer over to hard assets like real estate, agriculture products, metals and energy.”

Indeed, I marked my own calendar to be safely away from most risks towards the end of February. But don’t take my word for it; read what Mason is writing.

Technology Still Offers Big Upside

Don’t get entirely wigged-out about the looming AIpocalypse though, because 2026 will offer upside opportunities too. Along these lines, colleagues Ray Blanco, Davis Wilson and Zach Scheidt foresee a number of phenomenal technological leaps in 2026.

Ray discussed several themes, beginning with the fast-growing and rapidly evolving space economy. He has several ideas up his sleeve concerning orbital data centers and telecommunications that will break out in the coming year. Truly, these are some tales to astonish.

Plus, Ray foresees leapfrog medical advances, particularly with a group of biotech companies that have made breakthroughs in diabetes treatments.

Colleague Davis Wilson laid out a set of military tech companies that are well positioned to benefit from current defense spending, and no I don’t mean the same-old-same-old traditional names within the military complex. These are smaller entities, but with key technologies in the nuclear weapons space, as well as logistics, up-and-coming drones, and related autonomous systems. Hey, I was impressed!

Zach had his own list of technology plays that involve not AI itself, but useful applications of AI within a variety of sectors. In essence, Zach foresees AI finally showing its stuff within the highly touted “internet of things.” It can do things to make your life better; imagine that!

I should mention that our favorite commodities trader, Alan Knuckman offered a couple of ideas on hard asset upside plays. One is a large mining company whose multi-million-ounce gold resource – ounces in the ground – is way undervalued; currently, it reflects about $1,750 per ounce in a world of $4,300 gold. And if (make that “when”) the market ever figures this out, the upside is gigantic.

Meanwhile, Alan also discussed an energy play with phenomenal upside, pretty much independent of the price for oil and natural gas. This company is just that good; but it’s been beaten down by anti-oil market psychology. The floor is solid. The opportunity is spectacular.

We also heard a thoughtful talk by James Altucher, whose background as a stand-up comic in New York showed through with his overall delivery. That is, he discussed his vision of the future while passing out crisp $2-bills to help reinforce the message. Or as he put it, “Are you going to remember the guy who told you a story? Or remember the guy who told you a story and handed you a $2-bill?”

James Altucher’s calling cards. Courtesy U.S. Treasury.

James addressed the current growth in output and installation of robots in general, a sector that is heavily dominated by China for a long list of reasons. Indeed, in recent years China has installed about 85% of the world’s robots in its factories and… well, thus are Chinese factories able to produce more and more goods at lower- and lower-unit prices. The West has a huge challenge ahead, that’s for sure.

One part of James’s talk focused on global output of “humanoid” robots, namely robots that look like a person versus a clearly mechanical contraption, i.e., the latter like what you see welding metal parts together in an auto assembly plant.

Humanoid robot. Courtesy technewsworld.com.

In 2023 global output of these humanoid devices was about 1,000, and then 10,000 in 2024. And the world will see about 25,000 humanoid robots in 2025, with likely over 100,000 coming off the line in 2026.

James’s point is that it’s not “just” the robots; it’s the fact that robots are connected to the internet and benefit from AI. So every robot will become a teacher, in a sense, to every other robot that’s in the loop. “Robots will learn from each other,” he noted. And every mistake will immediately go into a feedback system that improves the overall performance of entire families of robots.

In essence 2026 will be a year when a critical mass of humanoid robots goes online at global scale, begins to perform tasks, and then “talks” with each other to learn and improve.

And what will these robots do? Probably some of just about everything, in the sense that nobody in 1913 knew what they might do with an early Model T automobile from Henry Ford… but large numbers of affordable vehicles really did change the world.

Again, the robot upside is immense and 2026 will be the year when things begin to take off.

The Year the Visa Scam Melts Down

As for me? I spoke about gold, silver, rare earths, other critical metals and energy. And yes, I have a long list of companies. Finding great assets and management teams is what I do.

But my focus at the Baltimore event wasn’t on minerals, mines and metals. Rather, it was on the American workforce and how, in general, American workers have been betrayed by American corporations. And in 2026 that dam is going to burst wide open, likely to the downside of share prices for many companies.

That is, just as American business consciously deindustrialized the nation in the 1980s, 90s and 2000s by shipping manufacturing jobs overseas, a new generation of managerial class has also ripped the guts out of the so-called “tech” jobs sector by importing cheap, sweatshop labor.

Certainly, in the past decade or 15 years, millions of American workers have lost jobs to foreign workers under H-1B visas, as well as an entire alphabet soup of other programs like OPT, J-1, L-1 and others; all that, plus outsourcing jobs to low-wage nations, mostly India.

Right now, over five million Indians hold H-1B visas to work in the U.S.; and over one million Chinese also hold such visas. The excuse we hear from corporate America is that “Americans lack the necessary skills,” which is – to use Enrique’s above-referred term – “total bullsh!t.” The proof is that almost all H-1B visas that are advertised are for “entry level” jobs, meaning that the company must train the new hire.

No, it’s not that America is a nation of lazy, entitled, privileged, latte-swilling dummies who “lack skills.” It’s that American businesses want to hire foreign labor at 40% (or 50% or 60%, whatever…) the cost of an American worker. Businesses want to avoid the salaries, benefits and taxes that come with domestic workers, and then book the profits to please Wall Street.

Originally, this H-1B visa program was conceived in 1990 under President George H.W. Bush. The idea was to alleviate what some people thought would be a looming worker shortage in the 1990s, and to bring in future Einsteins, Teslas, and Fermis, if not more Werner von Brauns. But over the past three decades, the program transformed into raw, shameless, low-cost, intercontinental labor arbitrage.

That is, U.S. companies love to charge U.S. price levels for their services and products but then turn around and pay third world wages to key parts of the workforce. Indeed, much of current Silicon Valley is a sweatshop of foreign visa workers who get paid low wages, often pay little or nothing in the way of state and federal taxes, live many to a rental house, collect public benefits like EBT food supplements, and can’t complain lest they get fired and deported on the next jet to Hyderabad.

For some bizarre and very un-MAGA reason, President Trump appears to support this if you take literally his visa-friendly comments in front of the usual suspect tech execs like Apple-man, Microsoft-man, Google-man, IBM-man, Facebook-boy and others.

Apparently, under even the Trump administration Americans must now compete with visa-scam workers from across the globe just to find a job here in their own country. And yes, it’s sheer lunacy and exactly why Trump’s approval rating among Millennial youth has cratered. And it’s why Republicans will likely get slaughtered at the polls next November absent a full court press to end the visa insanity.

If President Trump wants to rebuild American industry, reshore manufacturing, create jobs-jobs-jobs and all the rest, he has to focus on putting young American citizens back into the workspaces, versus Indians, Chinese, and people from whatever other faraway nation manage to scam a visa to work here for dimes on the dollar.

And absolutely, there’s much more to say on this topic, but you get the flavor of my brief talk last week.

And with that, I’ll call it quits for now.

Thank you for subscribing and reading. Best wishes…