Five Wall Street Investors Explain How They’re Approaching the Coming Year

The S&P 500 just completed one of its best three-year runs ever, rising around 80% from the start of 2023 through New Year’s Eve. Wall Street thinks the party is just getting started.

Few expect the good times to keep rolling indefinitely, but you would be hard-pressed to find a major bank predicting anything except more gains in 2026.

Yet worries abound about the stretched valuations of artificial-intelligence companies, the path of interest rates and the outlook in Washington, D.C.

So we asked five investors where they’re putting their money:

Alex Chaloff

Count Alex Chaloff among the investors concerned about a reckoning with the huge gains in AI stocks.

The chief investment officer at Bernstein Private Wealth Management fielded questions from clients on the topic all last year.

After several years of huge returns, he is advocating a more surgical approach to picking stocks.

“On one hand, they’re thrilled with the returns. On the other, they’re scared of what the next chapter is, because I’ve been telling them: It’s 1990-something,” Chaloff said, referring to the final years of the dot-com bubble.

“Our view is that we still have room to run, but there will be an end to this.”

Chaloff isn’t selling out of AI, but he is happy to help concerned clients seeking protection against declines in the whole index or a handful of individual big tech stocks.

One tool he is using is buffered exchange-traded funds, which seek to smooth out market swings. Those offer “some upside exposure with either defined or variable protection, and a great level of visibility, transparency and liquidity,” he said.

Bernstein is also working on an “AI loser” list, screening specifically for companies with high debt loads and low free-cash flow—those that have gotten AI hype, but might lack the fundamentals to survive an arms race.

He also holds an upbeat outlook for U.S. growth, especially if the Supreme Court ends up striking down President Trump’s tariffs: “I think that possibility is being overlooked a bit. It could reduce inflationary pressures, allow more rate cuts and accelerate the economy.”

Saira Malik

Tech bulls point out a key difference between now and the dot-com bubble: Today’s most-valuable companies, such as Nvidia, Microsoft and Alphabet, are some of the most profitable in history. And those profits are growing fast.

Saira Malik , who oversees $1.4 trillion as chief investment officer at Nuveen, thinks there is more upside ahead to the technology and AI trade, and she plans to add to some of her favorite holdings in 2026. It all comes down to profits.

The Magnificent Seven tech companies plus chip maker Broadcom —a group Malik is now referring to as the “Great Eight”—are forecast to grow earnings by 24% this year, well over double the forecast for the S&P 500 as a whole.

“We think the earnings growth and future growth justifies the premium valuations in tech, which will continue to dominate and lead the S&P 500 higher,” Malik said.

Tech stocks’ years long dominant run has made a handful of the biggest companies a larger share of the S&P 500 index than ever, making some investors fret over concentration risk. Malik shrugs those concerns off.

“I don’t necessarily say the market has to broaden out for it to be healthy. We’ve been living in this world of tech dominance for basically a decade straight…as long as the earnings power is there, the stocks will follow,” she said.

Outside of stocks, Nuveen expects municipal bonds and private equity both to bounce back in 2026.

Heavy supply of new muni bonds led to them lagging behind taxable bonds last year, a trend that Malik expects to reverse in a “catch-up trade.” Private equity, meanwhile, stands to benefit from lower interest rates and a pickup in deal activity, she has told clients.

Jack Ablin

Concentration risk isn’t just a stock-market issue, says Jack Ablin , chief investment strategist at Cresset Capital. He worries about the growing share of consumer spending coming from wealthy individuals, which he said puts the economy at risk as well.

“We have a narrowing prosperity on both Wall Street and Main Street, and it probably does create a vulnerability. A minority of the participants are accounting for most of the results,” Ablin said.

Stock owners are feeling a wealth effect that leads to freer spending. That could change quickly during a market downturn, however, leading to a scenario where a drop in the stock market could push the economy into a recession, Ablin said.

Cresset has leaned into value stocks and small-caps recently, expecting that both will benefit from interest-rate cuts and lower financing costs this year.

When it comes to AI, Ablin isn’t ready to pick winners and losers.

“I don’t have a crystal ball. So we buy everything for now, and the winners will ultimately pay for the losers.

Larry Adam

Raymond James Chief Investment Officer Larry Adam thinks stocks will have a more modest 2026, projecting around a 4% gain for the S&P 500.

Equity valuations will struggle to move higher than they currently are, meaning those gains will need to come from earnings growth, he said.

“I think the market is vulnerable to some disappointment after going so long with remarkably low volatility,” he said.

Raymond James is adding to bets on the industrials and consumer discretionary sectors this year. Industrials look like an indirect AI play, since they act as suppliers to utility companies and others helping build out AI infrastructure.

Consumer discretionary stands to benefit from a pickup in consumer spending, Adam reckons, with major tax refunds from the One Big Beautiful Bill Act set to hit pockets this spring.

Rob Arnott

Is there an AI bubble? Rob Arnott says yes, though the Research Affiliates founder and chairman cautions that it isn’t easy to profit on that idea.

“Shorting a bubble is a very fast way to go bankrupt. Bubbles can last longer and go further that you can imagine,” he said.

Like many on Wall Street, Arnott is convinced that AI is the “real deal” and a technological revolution is coming.

But he also warned that technological revolutions take time to play out—and said it is far too early to know which companies will emerge from the pack. During the dot-com boom, he said, Lucent and Nokia numbered among the world’s most-valuable companies.

“Dating back to the industrial revolution, every time you see major disruption there are winners and losers. A lot of losers,” he said. “The disrupters get disrupted.”

Arnott is now running a strategy that automatically trims exposure to stocks if their valuations soar quickly. “Just like averaging in is a time-honoured way to build a position in something cheap, averaging out is a great way to reduce exposure to what’s frothy and expensive,” he said.

With the profits taken from trimming exposure to fast-growing names, Arnott is putting money into areas that look cheaper and less loved, such as international and value stocks, to boost diversification.

Gold is one of the market’s go-to hedges in rocky times. Don’t forget that gold miners’ stocks are too.

The stock market’s gains in 2026 belie the rocky macroeconomic picture: elevated inflation, heightened geopolitical tensions, and jitters about the artificial-intelligence trade. That backdrop, in theory, should be the time for gold to shine. Instead, the price of the yellow metal has tumbled more than 5% so far, after last year’s blistering 65% rally. In part, the U.S. dollar’s recovery has stymied gold, which benefited from the greenback’s weakness in 2025.

Even with the precious metal’s recent weakness, gold mining stocks could be the best way to profit from this year’s uncertainty.

Gold miners “are a valuable hedge against macro risks that would likely be damaging for equities,” BCA Research’s Noah Weisberger and Rishabh Shah wrote this week.

Concerns about the Federal Reserve’s next moves to tackle inflation, the increasingly crowded AI trade, and steep valuations for tech stocks are just some of the drivers that could help gold’s price get on even footing— and lead to even bigger gains for miner stocks.

These stocks’ prices tend to outpace gold’s moves, because the companies have fixed operational costs. So when gold’s price rallies, their profit margins soar, and vice versa. For instance, the VanEck Gold Miners GDX +7.39% exchange-traded fund has fallen 11% this year as the metal has slumped.

Now, gold’s price just needs to stabilize to help miners’ stocks take off, and that seems to be happening. The precious metal has recently found support above the $4,000 level, and has stuck in a narrow range since the end of June. But its price rose ever so slightly in July, ending a four-month losing streak for the metal. Technical analysis also suggests that gold is due for a comeback.

Barron’s recently wrote that the pullbacks for both gold miners and the metal itself are overdone. Senior technical analyst Doug Busch noted that the VanEck ETF is on the “verge of a breakout” and has the potential to hit $11o in early 2027, up more than 40% from its current price.

Gold miners also have more than their role as a market hedge going for them. Their fundamentals are solid, too, says Chris Mancini, portfolio co-manager of the Gabelli Gold Fund.

“Precious metals miners are generating substantial amounts of free cash flow given profit margins of over $2,000 per ounce, and are returning this cash to shareholders through buybacks and dividends,” he said in an email.

“Buying the miners is a cheap way to get exposure to the price of gold,” he added. His fund owns Newmont NEM +6.71%, a Barron’s stock pick last year, and Agnico Eagle Mines as top holdings, as well as miners Northern Star Resources, Endeavour Mining, and Kinross Gold K+8.59%.

Miners are better businesses than they used to be, the BCA team added.

“Capex is more disciplined, margins are high and rising…and they are largely independent of the AI story,” Weisberger, BCA’s head of equities, and Shah, a senior analyst, wrote.

That last part is key. AI is disrupting the software industry and many other services and information-oriented businesses, and investors have piled into AI stocks. But ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, and other large-language models aren’t going to replace the need to mine for metals.

“Equity portfolios can benefit from exposure to quality that is uncorrelated to AI risk, and gold miners fit the bill,” the BCA team said.

They recommend that investors buy the VanEck Gold Miners ETF, which owns top miners such as Agnico, Barrick Mining ABX +7.24%, and Newmont.

An important bonus for big gold miners’ stocks is that their valuations are attractive after the gold’s pullback, too. The VanEck ETF is now trading at just a little more than nine times next year’s earnings estimates. That’s a big discount to its five-year average price-to-earnings ratio of 14, according to FactSet.

What’s more, the ETF is currently valued at a more than 50% discount to the S&P 500 SPX -0.17%, which is trading for about 19 times earnings estimates for 2027. Mining stocks have typically traded at just a 25% discount to the broader market over the past five years. So there is significant upside for the group if valuations move back toward normal levels.

One factor that complicates mining stocks as a market hedge, of course, is if stocks bounce back, which has been the case so far in August.

But both the market and economic outlooks remain cloudy, and investors remain nervous about the Fed’s next moves and AI stocks. Gold miners should do just fine, even if the anxious mood on Wall Street persists.