IDX's McMillan eyes $10K gold prices and higher long-term inflation
Release Date: 12/10/2025
Money Life with Chuck Jaffe
, chief market strategist at , is a market veteran who wasn't allowed to make annual forecasts until this year, and he's starting with an outlier, calling for the Standard & Poor's 500 to lose about 7% in 2026. Sosnick says a key issue for the market is investor expectations which are now so high that "it's hard to outpace that." Sosnick doesn't think the market is going in the tank, but he says that if investors see it struggle and lose some of their "buy-the-dips" nerve, it will create headwinds that will be hard to overcome. Travis Prentice, chief investment officer at , brings his...
info_outlineMoney Life with Chuck Jaffe
Gene Peroni, founder and president at , expects a "broad-based, well-balanced market advance" with a number of sectors and themes doing well in 2026. Peroni expects the small- and mid-cap advance that we have seen late this year to become full-blown leadership in the new year, but he's not down on large-caps either, putting a target of 53,000 on the Dow Jones Industrial Average for the year, which would represent roughly a 10 percent gain. He is concerned about heightened volatility, but does not see any oversized drawdowns in the offing. Bob Doll, chief investment officer at , returns to the...
info_outlineMoney Life with Chuck Jaffe
Brian Jacobsen, chief economic strategist at , says 2026 will be a year in which valuations and fundamentals really matter, as the broad market will see more volatility and will have less momentum. After three straight years of gains around 20% annually, Jacobsen says investors will need to curb their enthusiasm and settle for gains that, at best, he thinks will only get to high single-digit levels. He says that valuations in large-cap stocks "have created too many vulnerabilities for us to really sleep well at night," which is why he favors international, small- and mid-cap stocks and value...
info_outlineMoney Life with Chuck Jaffe
Brent Schutte, Chief Investment Officer at , sees "a lot of different parts of the U.S. economy that aren't working," and while the market and economy have overcome those concerns to this point — and may have the strength to keep that up — he is concerned about the potential for a fall and says investors need to be diversified properly to ride out the year ahead. "Diversification doesn't pay all the time," Schutte says, "but it often times makes up for all the costs that it has in periods where whatever you want to concentrate in actually doesn't work. And that's where I think...
info_outlineMoney Life with Chuck Jaffe
Fritz Folts, Chief Investment Strategist at Asset Management, says valuations are at levels reminiscent of bubble days in 1999 and the crash era of 1929, but that's not scaring him out of a mix of domestic and foreign stocks, because economic conditions can support further growth. He does worry about a policy mistake or other event which could trigger a downturn, but so long as it stays mild and doesn't "lurch" to where it's a 40% drop, he thinks investors should be comfortable riding it out. Todd Rosenbluth, head of research at makes an actively managed small-cap fund — the sister to an...
info_outlineMoney Life with Chuck Jaffe
Daniel Morris, chief investment strategist at , is expecting the economy and the stock market to continue to roll forward in 2026 but says he would like to see "not such a great year," because his primary worry for the year ahead is "too much of a good thing" that leads the economy to overheat. If that occurs, Morris said, higher inflation and consumers' response to it could change conditions quickly. Morris thinks growth can be solid without going too far, delivering modest growth with volatility due more to conditions like geopolitics than market sentiment. Jason Browne, president of and...
info_outlineMoney Life with Chuck Jaffe
George Bory, chief investment strategist for fixed income at , says inflation is "stuck" at around 3% despite efforts to shrink it, leaving the Federal Reserve struggling with policy decisions as the Trump Administration positions current levels as acceptable. He's expecting the Fed to cut rates once in 2026, toward the middle of the year, and says the market seems accepting, or resigned, to that. As a result, however, he says this is not a time for "set it and forget it" investment styles in fixed income, noting that the opportunities are changing with the shape of the yield curve today....
info_outlineMoney Life with Chuck Jaffe
Sam Stovall, chief investment strategist at , says that "Bull markets don't die of old age, they die of fright, and what they are most afraid of is recession." But he says the current bull market not only doesn't need to be too worried about recession yet, he says that after celebrating its third birthday, it has gotten into the rarified air of a market that can keep running and producing positive results for longer. While he is not expecting a big, double-digit year in 2026 for the stock market, he says modest gains — tempered by heightened volatility and a downturn or two to overcome —...
info_outlineMoney Life with Chuck Jaffe
Bryce Doty, senior portfolio manager at , says that history has shown that nearly every new Federal Reserve chairman does "something dumb" when they first get the job. With Jerome Powell soon to be out as Fed chair, Doty says the central bank is in a tricky place, where it could make a cut before the change and have the next chairman come in anxious to cut further, making a policy mistake that hurts the market, but creates buying opportunities for investors willing to ride it out. He's not the only one on today's show fearful of a Fed mistake, as that is the nightmare scenario for Dustin Reid,...
info_outlineMoney Life with Chuck Jaffe
Dan Fuss, vice chairman at , now 92 years old and having cemented a track record as one of the best bond fund managers ever, says he's not concerned about a recession because the economy is strong, and in some ways stronger than its ever been during his investing lifetime, but he also compares current times to the late 1930s, a period when geopolitics were dominating the global scene building up to World War II, and says that he is more concerned with those macro-level worries than he has been in his career. Fuss notes that the global scene is more important to what happens next with the U.S....
info_outlineBen McMillan, chief investment officer at IDX Advisors, says that "gold's run is not over," and while he thinks it could easily reach $5,000 an ounce in the short order, he says "It's not inconceivable that within the next half-decade, gold could be sitting at $10,000 an ounce." (Gold is currently trading at roughly $4,225 an ounce.) He also says he expects the Federal Reserve to reach a point in the next 12 to 24 months where it lives "with a new normal of inflation" and resets its target inflation rate to reflect different thinking, which will mean consumers and investors have to adjust to inflation rates running at 3 percent or higher for the foreseeable future.
Amanda Agati, chief investment officer at PNC Asset Management Group discusses the company's Christmas Price Index, which looks at the current cost of giving your true love all of the gifts from the "12 Days of Christmas." Thanks to higher prices with gold -- and the five golden rings -- it's no surprise that the rate of inflation shown in the company's 42nd annual holiday index is higher than inflation generally.
Plus, in a market that has been driven to near record levels on the strength of corporate earnings, Nick Raich, chief executive officer of The Earnings Scout, returns to the show for the first time since 2020, talking about his earnings-centric methodology and his expectations for continued earnings growth for the market.