Ed Yardeni

Two Long-Distance Runners: Forrest Gump & The US Economy

Jan 7, 2026 3 min read paid

In the movie “Forrest Gump,” Forrest is a long-distance runner. He crosses the United States five times before he finally decides he is "pretty tired" and stops. Forrest’s run lasted 3 years, 2 months, 14 days, and 16 hours. In the US, real GDP has been growing since the two-month pandemic lockdown recession ended in April 2020. So its run has lasted 5 years, 8 months, and

Ed Yardeni

WEEKLY WEBCAST: The Gen-Shaped Economy

Jan 7, 2026 1 min read paid

It’s an economic curiosity of our times: The US economy is undeniably strong, in fact remarkably resilient in the face of recent headwinds. Yet it’s in the midst of an affordability crisis that has hit Gen Zers and other lower-income folks especially hard. Even so, consumer spending is brisk, and Dr Ed expects it to remain so. What’s going on? The paradoxes can be explained largely by

Ed Yardeni

Will SMidCaps Outperform In 2026?

Jan 6, 2026 3 min read paid

Will the S&P 400 MidCaps and the S&P 600 SmallCaps (i.e., SMidCaps) finally outperform the S&P 500 LargeCaps this year? Maybe. They’re overdue to do so. However, we think investors would be better off focusing on select SMidCaps sectors rather than the broad indexes. We would overweight the same SMidCap sectors as we recommend overweighting in the S&P 500: Financials,

Ed Yardeni

Off To The Races

Jan 5, 2026 2 min read paid

It's been a good year so far, even though only two trading days have gone by in 2026. The S&P 500, DJIA, and Nasdaq all rose today despite the crisis in Venezuela over the weekend. The DJIA hit a record high. We've often observed that geopolitical crises create buying opportunities. This time, stock market investors chose to emphasize the positive effects of this crisis

Ed Yardeni

MARKET CALL: Don't Cry For Him, Venezuela

Jan 4, 2026 4 min read paid

We expected the first half of 2026 to be volatile for stocks. It's only January 4, and we can add Venezuela to our list of unsettling developments. Nicolás Maduro, the Venezuelan president captured by the United States on Saturday, is being held in a notorious Brooklyn jail. President Donald Trump said the US will "run" Venezuela. The geopolitical fallout could be troublesome. The Chinese government might

Ed Yardeni

ECONOMIC WEEK AHEAD: January 5–9

Jan 4, 2026 3 min read

With the holidays behind us, the first full trading week of the year is a busy one on the data front. The big focus, naturally, is on the December employment report. It's the first "full" release since the government shutdown caused data interruptions. It also marks a return to normalcy for investors eager to gauge how the Fed might proceed in the weeks ahead. Recent data

Ed Yardeni

MARKET CALL: 1920s And 2020s Not The Only Roaring Decades

Jan 2, 2026 4 min read

Goldman Sachs has been pushing the view that the stock market's return over the next 10 years is likely to be very low, at only around 3% per year. We disagree. Admittedly, there's logic to that forecast: The forward P/E of the S&P 500 is currently historically high at 21.8 (chart). That suggests that it's likely to fall in the

Ed Yardeni

CRIB SHEET: The New Year

Jan 1, 2026 4 min read paid

Happy 2026! It should be the seventh year of our Roaring 2020s scenario, with three more to go. We first wrote about this scenario on August 11, 2020, in our Morning Briefing titled "Another Roaring Twenties May Still Be Ahead." We predicted, "So far, the 2020s has started with the pandemic, but there are plenty of years left for the prosperous 1920s to become a precedent for

Ed Yardeni

Will Emerging Markets Outperform Again In 2026?

Dec 31, 2025 3 min read paid

The Emerging Markets (EM) MSCI stock price index may outperform both the US MSCI stock price index and the Developed Countries ex-US MSCI stock price index in 2026. It outperformed the former in 2025 but underperformed the latter and many of its constituents. The broader EM outperformance we expect in 2026 might last for a few years. That's because advanced economies have, on average, stagnated in both production

Ed Yardeni

WEEKLY WEBCAST: More Thoughts on 2026: Markets, Earnings, and Volatility

Dec 31, 2025 1 min read paid

Dr Ed Yardeni shares additional thoughts on the outlook for 2026, including why the economy and markets remain resilient and where risks may emerge. He discusses earnings-driven market gains, consensus S&P 500 targets, the impact of Fed easing and fiscal stimulus, and why the first half of 2026 could be volatile despite a constructive full-year outlook. Ed also covers AI competition, productivity trends, bond yields, deficits, gold, and

Ed Yardeni

DEEP DIVE: 2026--Another Year Of Living Audaciously!

Dec 29, 2025 10 min read paid

This is a reprint of our December 11, 2025 Morning Briefing. 2026 I: What Will Likely Go Right? The Roaring 2020s remains our base-case scenario. For 2026, we are raising our subjective odds of this prospect from 50% to 60%. We are less concerned about a meltup/meltdown scenario now, so we are lowering the odds of that from 30% to 20%. We are keeping our bearish scenario at 20%

Ed Yardeni

MARKET CALL: Both AI Story And Contrary Indicators Are Mixed

Dec 27, 2025 4 min read

The AI plot thickens: Chinese scientists have unveiled an optical computing chip that outperformed Nvidia’s top GPU by over a hundredfold in speed and energy efficiency—particularly for generative tasks such as video production and image synthesis. (Incidentally, YRI is working with a Korean media company that will use AI to synthesize Dr Ed’s speech in various languages.) One of our sage accounts observed that AI may be

Ed Yardeni

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