132 - Nailed It or Failed It? Reviewing Our 2025 Macro Forecast

This week, we’re reviewing the 2025 macro predictions we made back in December 2024 — and the results are honestly insane.

We identified nine major macro trend themes heading into 2025 (plus a “miscellaneous chaos” category), and in this episode we break down exactly how each played out — the hits, the misses, and the monster trends that shaped the entire year.

🔥 BIG THEMES WE COVER:

1. Nuclear Energy
We predicted a massive boom… and it actually happened. Nuclear went from policy talk to full-scale implementation. Old plants reopened, new ones broke ground, and nuclear ETFs hit triple-digit gains at their peak.

2. Electric Utilities
Another home run. Utility stocks — the “boring ones” — saw year-to-date gains of 18% to nearly 40% thanks to the AI energy arms race.

3. Oil & Gas
Right prediction, weird execution. Policy shifted, but OPEC responded with a full-on oil glut, keeping prices suppressed around $60. Cheap gas kept inflation muted, but energy stocks lagged.

4. Artificial Intelligence
Hardware → application shift? Nailed. AI exploded across every sector, with Nvidia smashing earnings and multiple companies integrating robotics, automation, and new infrastructure.

5. Data Storage & Infrastructure
Growth? Way above expectations. The data center boom is underway, and the best part is — the move hasn’t even peaked yet.

6. REITs (especially mREITs)
We predicted mREITs would outperform equity REITs. Correct. Interest rate timing was messy, but the year still favored mortgage REITs by a wide margin.

7. Healthcare/Biotech
A mixed bag. R&D exploded thanks to AI, but big pharma lagged. 2026 looks promising for targeted healthcare plays.

8. BDCs
Everyone else said they’d boom. We said, “Nope, not this year.” And we were right. But 2026? They look loaded.

9. Finance & Crypto
Crypto broke ATHs early, then cratered as fear took over. Financials split cleanly: big banks crushed it, regionals dragged.

📊 The Results - Spreadsheet Link

We recommended 14 investments last year.
• Equal-weighted return: 18.19% (beats the ~10% market average)
• Without the OGN dividend implosion: 23.16%
• If using sell signals we discussed: ~23–48%

Every single pick was up at some point in 2025.
 Our “big picture” calls were shockingly accurate — even with volatility, tariffs, rate swings, and AI bubble fears stirring chaos all year.

🎯 Bottom Line

If you followed the macro logic — not the news cycle — 2025 was a killer year.

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**DISCLAIMER**
Ticker metrics change as markets and companies change, so always do your own research. The content in this podcast is based on personal experience and is for educational purposes, not financial advice. See full disclaimer here.

Episode music was created using Loudly.

Transcript

Welcome to roaming returns a podcast about generating a passive income with dividend stocks so you can secure your finances and liberate your life. 

Hey hey This week we’re reviewing the 2025 macro predictions we made last December — and honestly, the results shocked even us.

We called nine major themes heading into the year: nuclear, utilities, AI, data centers, REITs, crypto, BDCs, financials — and now that 2025 is almost wrapped, we get to see which predictions hit, which missed, and which blew up bigger than anyone expected.

From nuclear energy going parabolic to crypto faceplanting and utilities having their craziest year ever, we’re breaking down what we got right, what surprised us, and what these trends tell us heading into 2026. Let’s get into it.

What are we doing here? Hey, what are we doing? What is it? What is this week's about? You should know this. You were the one ranting and raving about this all day. That's right.
In December of 2024, we... You. We came up with predictions for 2025. And well, since because the way the way the year lines up, it's kind of fucked because like the first two weeks of December are going to be portfolio reviews for dividends and whatnot.
And then the third week of December is going to be the whoopsie daisies of the year. And then the fourth week is going to be the predictions for 2026. So I didn't have a fifth week in December.
So I have to do that, the 2025 review at the end of November, which kind of sucks, but it is what it is. Is that what you're considering this? Yeah, this is the 2025 review of the macro trends that I identified heading into 2025. Oh, okay.
I had that. If you recall, if you're a new listener, you have no idea what I'm talking about. So cool.
What's up? If you've been listening for a while, you know that we went through this and there were nine areas for potential gains plus a miscellaneous area. So there was 10, I guess, but nine like actual macro trend themes. Well, the whole point of this was to see if anything you predicted would have been worthy.
Yes. Yeah. So the first one that we talked about was nuclear energy.
Nuclear energy is super duper important because they're actually using it to... Do lots of stuff. Power all these AI data centers. We should flash to a picture of TMI because it's only like 20 minutes away from here.
Yeah. But if you've been paying attention to news like Meta opened one, Apple has one, Microsoft has one. So the big tech companies are actually opening up nuclear power plants to support their energy needs.
Consumptions. And I thought this would be something that happened in 2025. And what happened this year was nuclear exploded from policy.
Nuclear went nuclear. Like from the policy and policy makers were like, oh, nuclear, nuclear, nuclear. But it went from just beyond that also to implementation where they actually started opening up old dilapidated nuclear power plants and making them better.
And they started building new ones. So at the highest this year, nuclear ETFs were up well over 100%. Even now after a really ridiculous month of November where there's been a huge pullback, you're still seeing gains of 75% year to date.
We nailed it out of the park on nuclear energy. Number one on this list. We smacked it.
The second macro trend that I saw was basically tied right into nuclear energy, which was electric utilities. Because AI requires electric infrastructure and electric power that the electric utility companies were going to explode. And like caveat for like electric companies to explode anything like above like eight percent's a wickedly high year.
What happened this year was electric utilities were up a lot. The utility index for electric companies is still up 18 to 25% year to date. And at one point this year in 2025, you were up around it was like 39.8% year to date, which is bonkers for electric.
That's crazy for utilities because utilities are supposed to be super boring. So we knocked it out of the park with the electric utilities. Shocker.
But the third area was oil and gas. I had the rationale was that Trump, the overlords drill baby drill policy would make the U.S. energy independent of the world. That actually happened.
Policy did create a drill friendly environment. But most companies will not see the benefit of this year, maybe next year, maybe 2027. What we saw instead was we saw an environment where there was too much oil.
There was an oil glut because the OPEC nations got super pissed because America was becoming energy independent. And so they just like they had like a way too much supply for the demand. So the price of oil was like depressed this year to like around $60 a barrel.
That's that's forecast to carry over into 2026, maybe the whole year, maybe only half the year. But it's going to carry over in 2026. And that means we're stocking up on supply, right? For when OPEC decides, like what we like when we discussed this, we said that was going to be a possibility where like there would be oil glut.
But it was American companies that actually were also able to transport and store the oil. So you want like the midstream companies. But I mean, that was good for everybody driving cars, right? It was.
Prices stayed down. And that's how they actually combated inflation for most of the years. They actually kept the price of energy way down because of this energy oil glut.
And I can't remember when Trump said it, but Trump did say something about wanting to keep the oil prices repressed so that, you know, the tariff crap or whatever he was doing, it counter set. Well, the tariffs are... I can't remember when he said that. They're inflationary by nature.
And like... But I'm saying that was his trade off. Not if you listen to the regime, but like by nature, the tariffs are inflationary. And so he probably said, oh, inflation is going to be up a little bit.
Let's counter it with gas, low gas prices. So three, we were kind of like we were we didn't hit out of the park, but we were right. But you'll see when we get to the actual like a spreadsheet of the stocks that I mentioned that we were wrong, but we were right.
The premise was right, but the execution was wrong. The fourth area was artificial intelligence. We were going to see a shift from hardware to practical applications, like, for example, biomedicine, enterprise, etc.
Basically, we knocked this one out of the park. AI basically took over everything this year. And right now people are freaking out because they think AI is in a bubble.
The bubble is about to pop, which is like we're literally at the very foothill. If you subscribe to the email, we talk about shit all the time, like in the economic stuff and AI, like NVIDIA just reported its earnings and they smashed it out of the park. The CEO of NVIDIA said, I don't see a bubble.
What he actually sees is AI is literally everywhere, doing everything all the time. Yep. And Tim's seen some companies with like eyeballs and now they're getting into robotics and stuff so they can see.
We actually went over that in the Growth Stock a few episodes back with a CGNX, so they make the eyeballs for robots. They're pretty sick. So, yeah, we've knocked out of the park on number four.
Number five was data storage and infrastructure. This ties into point one and point two because you need the power to power the data storage. The macro rationale for my thought at the time was 15 to 20% CAGR growth in data AI storage for the next decade.
I might have been low on that. I think the CAGR was like 50% this year. Holy shit.
Much like I think 2026 or 2030 is going to be the year of the data center. So we're going to have like a five to six year period where the year of the data center because you got in early. Yeah.
Yeah. So long as AI is a dominant theme, data centers will be a nice niche to invest in. And you'll find when we go at the end of the year, I have to bring them up again.
But to actually invest in data storage, you can't really go to data storage companies because they don't pay a dividend. So you kind of have to like segue in for ETFs. Circumvent that with REITs.
Oh, REITs. Okay. REITs that have our BDCs.
BDCs that fund data storage or REITs that actually rent the land out to them. Because of the dividend approach. Speaking of AI, on Friday, Tim sent out an email with an update for it with the jobs report and something with the integration with AI.
What were those statistics, Timothy? Well, there was a survey out of the University of London. So again, I don't know how much grain you can take with the survey. The survey out of the University of London, where they interviewed employees and employers or CEOs of companies.
Click on the email. What they found was staggering. Like this is something that nobody talked about.
70% of employees are using AI in their jobs. 93% of employees who receive AI training reported using AI in their jobs. 57% of employees with no AI training still used AI in their jobs.
So even like 57% of people that have no training in AI are still using AI. Employees that were using AI saved on average 7.5 hours per week. So think about that.
Using AI, they actually saved one day a week. Yeah, basically a day of work a week. But those who received AI training in the past 12 months saved 11 hours per week.
And that's crazy. And I know for a fact the government is using it because I was talking to my ex-boss and stuff and like they've implemented AI. You think it's a young man's game.
It's really not because 52% of the boomers surveyed said they used AI in their jobs. That's fascinating. That's half of them.
So this goes back to the AI. The implementation is actually happening in real time as we speak. And what they're actually doing is it's not replacing jobs yet.
But it's actually making things more efficient, more time-friendly. And at some point, they will actually start replacing jobs. But they're not right now.
What they're doing is they're training people to actually integrate with AI. The problem that I have with AI is that people think AI is open. What is open AI or chat GPT? That's all I think AI is because that's all I interact with.
It's like AI is everywhere, doing everything. It's way more than just the GPT stuff. But we were talking about data storage.
So every time you use AI, open AI or chat GPT. We should actually talk about this because I was trying to use it the other day and it freaking wouldn't load. It says about CloudFare and I was like WTF is happening.
And there was a thing and I was trying to search it in Reddit and stuff. And it popped up and it was like, how am I supposed to solve the problem of the internet when I don't have the internet to solve the problem? It's like a meme from South Park. But it was CloudFare went down, which was a data storage center or security something that they run everything through.
And that was down. So GPT was down across the board. Because people only think that it's the chat GPT.
They're like, well, I don't understand why we need data storage because the GPT actually just saves your thread continuously. Because they have to save it somewhere in the cloud. But I'm just saying that you just see that one little area of AI where they have to save it in the cloud because you have threads that are like.
Oh, my God. I've actually maxed threads out. A month long and stuff like that.
So just think about that extrapolated amongst billions of people. Data storage is going to be around for years. And again, back to the powering of things electric.
Those three themes in this. We knocked it out of the park on this one. The sixth one was REITs.
The sixth macro chain was REITs. But I've actually focused on mortgage REITs and health care REITs. Because? Just because.
What was your rationale? The interest rates were going to decline in 2025, which they did. They made a couple of cuts. We've had two already.
But the problem with that is when the interest rates were where they were for so long, it takes a lot while for REITs to actually generate the difference. Whereas MREITs are pretty much. Instantaneous.
Instantaneous because they're mortgage REITs. Oh, look at you sneaky sneaking. And a lot of MREITs actually use variable interest or floating interest rates, whatever they're called.
Oh, the flexible. Yeah. So if it drops to 5%, then they'll drop theirs down to 5%.
But I didn't think that their interest rates would decline as fast as people did. People are calling for six, seven, eight cuts this year. And we ended up with, I think, two or three.
Two so far. But I did whiff overall on the health care ones. I kind of messed up there.
But I did indicate that MREITs perform much better than physical REITs. MREITs actually vastly outperform physical REITs by over 5%. If you look at the mortgage REIT index versus the equity REIT index.
Because the interest rate cuts did not happen as quickly and as frequently as they were anticipated to do. Yeah, like way later in the year, right? But this is an area I do think is something to watch for 2026. And I do believe that MREITs actually, again, will outperform physical REITs in 2026.
So if you pre-positioned like we did, you're set up to go. That's the whole point of this. Yeah.
So you expected the cuts earlier in the year and they ended up being later. Is that what you're just saying? Kind of. I expected it to happen like in May and it didn't happen until like October.
Because it takes a while for like all that stuff to like start to percolate throughout the REITs. That's why I thought that the REITs. But like so 2026 is pretty good for REITs.
The seventh macro trend was health care and biotech. The rationale aging boomers equals demand for care, which equals plus a potential Trump policy tailwind. Like basically we got rid of everything that had to do with medical.
Mm hmm. So that actually was a negative. I thought the policy wouldn't be as bad as it was.
Like they literally got rid of everything. Yeah. Health care facilities boomed in 2025, but pharma companies lagged.
It does appear that the area that was the strongest in 2025 was research and development. So if we were to fall, if we follow the traditional trend in this particular sector, that would lead us to believe that pharma could be in for a strong 2026. And I do actually have that like a spoiler.
I do have like some pharma companies are going to explode in 2026. Well, I would think with the AI boom and everything that R&D that we're talking about here with this biotech thing, like I think they're prepping for, you know, big things to come. Number eight was BDCs.
I remember going into 2025. You have such a hard time for BDCs. A lot of people are talking about how BDCs were the best thing ever in 2025 because of interest rates.
And we actually said you have to be cautious when dealing with the BDCs because the rate, the interest rate uncertainty, but that the select BDCs would still be pretty strong. I did say, unlike most experts, I did not see BDCs doing too well in 2025. Newsflash, they did not do well at all in 2025.
Oh, damn. Nailed that one too. Much like REITs, 2026 seems to be the year for BDCs.
So you actually. If you've been like, well, like the ones that are best value that we've been covering in the email for months now have been BDCs. So if you've been actually picking those up as we recommend in the email, you're going to be well positioned going into 2026.
I do believe BDCs are going to explode in 2026. We'll cover that more in next week's episode. No, 2026, perhaps in December.
So the last. We'll cover that in the coming episode. Last episode of 2025 will be the 2026 predictions.
So that'll be covered in that in more detail. But BDCs will be banging. Bang, bang.
The ninth and final macro trend was finance and cryptocurrency. The macro rationale was deregulation under Trump. Plus, there was also a speculation about Bitcoin reserve.
The speculation about Bitcoin reserve is still there. The deregulation under Trump did happen. But what happened is you have a tale of two segments in regards to crypto.
Segment one saw crypto smash the previous highs and establish new highs that were like out of the ballpark compared to their. What did Bitcoin hit? 125? 126. 126.
And it was like its previous high was like 102 or something like that. So as we did, if you took the profits as we did, we talked about a lot. You did quite well in 2025.
If you just hodled the entire year without taking any profits in 2025, you probably are down right now because segment two saw crypto crash down to earth as investors got fearful. The first thing that gets sold when investors are afraid is the riskier assets. Which would be crypto.
Yeah, because then Bitcoin pulled down. What the hell is it down to now? 82. 82.
That's a hell of a freaking pullback. 126 down to 82,000. But like we've been covering it throughout the year, whether it's the email, whether it's podcast.
Like we took crypto, we took our profits in Solana, we took up all profits. And it's the only one that we've actually hodled is Bitcoin and Ethereum. And I'll hold those forever.
Like it doesn't matter what the crypto market does. I might actually pick up more Bitcoin if it drops below like 70,000. Right, right.
Because if you're new to the channel, we haven't mentioned this recently. I have, I rolled my entire federal TSP into a crypto IRA. So we do have a huge chunk of funds that I cannot touch until retirement age in crypto.
And the last area that we smashed out of the park was financials. I was dead on balls when it came to financials. I said large banks were going to outperform regional and smaller banks.
And finance as literally perfect. If you do the KBW Banking Index, which is basically an index of all the large banks, it was returning 16% year to date. Whereas the regional banks as reflected in the KBW Regional Banking Index, which is all the mid, like the smaller ones are the regional banks.
They're only returning 4%. So the large banks smashed the smaller. Four times the amount.
That's crazy. Yeah. Nailed it.
That happened. Then we had some other like... Dead on balls. Dead on balls.
And we had some other stragglers that we like we did miscellaneous stuff. I predicted the market to actually gain 7% to 9%. And I expected there to be super high volatility, especially the post-inauguration.
Newsflash. It was super volatile. And I expected tariffs.
And I expected tariffs to be a problem. I expected there to be sticky inflation. And I expected the interest rate shifts as all risk factors.
Newsflash. Tariffs sucked. Inflation's high.
And interest rates basically have been risk factors all year long. And so you'd go to the first point where I said 7% to 9%. Is that not where we're at right now? The S&P is up 12.5%. The Nasdaq is up 15%.
The Dow Jones is up 9%. And the Russell is up 4.5%. So if you average that together, it's 10%. So I was 1% off on my high end.
Given that most experts were predicting 15% to 25%. Some were saying 35% gain in 2025. I think we actually smashed out of the park with a 7% to 9% gain.
Obviously, that a lot can change in December. So like it is... No, that's true. That's true.
But we didn't have the massive pullback we usually do in September. Seems to be hitting in November. And who the hell knows what's going to happen with the Christmas rally? Santa Claus rally? Whatever the hell it's called.
December? No clue. The last thing that we mentioned... Like one of the last things we mentioned was I expected Starlink to IPO in 2025. Still hasn't happened.
It did not. 2026, it could IPO. Either way, it doesn't matter so long as you... Like the two stocks that we mentioned, ASTS and STM, which is the backdoor way into Starlink.
If you recall, we said the way to make money from Starlink before it IPO was to hold these. ASTS was off the charts in 2025. That's our new Starlink.
We literally just got it. They don't sponsor us, so fucks. I wish they did.
STM was super strong for the first half of the year. And then because there was a tech sell-off in October into November due to AI bubble fears, STM actually pulled back a lot of its earnings. We'll show you that in the chart here.
I expect 2026 to be a strong year for STM and a moderate year for ASTS. And whatever the hell Starlink IPO is, you want to get into it. It could be next year.
I don't know. Who knows? Anyway, so to wrap it up, if you recall, we recommended 14 stocks, ETFs, or closing funds in last year's macro trend thing. They all returned 18.19% in 2025.
What do you mean they all? If you combine them all together, if you invested... Into the average across, equally across? If you invested in all 14 of them equally, you would have had 18.19% in return. If you exclude the dividend cut from OGN... Wait, wait, wait. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.
Okay. On average. That beats the market because the market was only up 10%.
Keep in mind. Now segue back to your thingy. If you exclude the OGN cut, it's dividend in the middle of the year, which caused the stock to literally crater.
It would have been 23.16 if you'd had 13 stocks without OGN, but I wanted to illustrate that so you can see what one lagger can do to your portfolio. Oh, IEP. We've had flashbacks.
I'm looking at the predictions overall, all 14 at one point in 2025 were up and up pretty big. So if this is something I'm going to correct with this year, if I included a sell point in my ramblings last year, you could have been sitting on a maximum return of 48% on the 14 I recommended. Realistically though, it's impossible to time with the sell, but using data, the returns would have been around 23.65. And I know you're thinking, how the fuck could I possibly know that? Guess what? Well, I sold Biddo.
Yep. We actually have one. On January 29th at 24.82. So I actually was 9.5% higher than what Biddo actually is currently.
I sold OGN on 6.8 at 10.30. So I was actually 17% higher than where it is currently. I made the comments twice in July, once in the podcast and once in the email that 24 was the ceiling for AIO. I would have sold that, but we didn't hold that.
That was one of the ones we didn't hold. I would have sold it with that $24, which means I would have been 5% higher than where it currently is. It was overvalued at that time.
I still think it's overvalued. And I discussed NLR multiple times. I don't remember how many times.
I said, once you got your 100% up in that, you can take profits or sell it outright. If you did that, you'd made 47% compared to where it's at right now. And I think that was it, right? NLR, AIO.
So those four right there. So if I did that, so you would have made 23.65% had you followed what I said in the podcast as opposed to the 18.19, which would have... Did you take OGN out of that number too? No, I actually included it because we actually held it and we sold it. Oh, I'm sorry.
I missed that. Disregard me. I'm just a wee woman.
It's just a way like I'm not like suggesting to sign up for the email if you don't want to. But if you're only listening to the podcast and you're not subscribed to the email, you may be missing out on information. I do my best to actually include everything.
Yeah, if you're not familiar. Yeah, if you're not familiar, we keep up with the economics of weekly. Then we do our top picks for the week, which is a good time to get into certain ones.
And they're all valued. He does the dirty work for that. But then we actually give you what changed in our portfolio when we sell stuff, when we buy stuff.
So that's way more timely than the podcast. And the podcast, I try my best, but like sometimes stuff gets through. Now we're going to go to the actual spreadsheet.
Every stock I mentioned in the podcast last year. Okay, okay. So NLR is the first one.
That's a nuclear one. You see up here top here. Hip, hip, hooray.
It hit its high mark in, I want to say, like, July, I think, or something like that. 168.12. It's currently. I think I did this one on 11.21. You see at the current price, I have 11.21, 11.24, because it's like so time consuming.
Like I did some, I did half, and then the other half or whatever. And we've had some massive pullbacks in like the last week. But anyway, 126.44 is what it was when I did this.
It's January 1st price was 82.30. It hasn't paid a dividend yet this year. It's dividend has one dividend per year. Yearly.
It comes out in November. So right now you're sitting at 53.63, but you could have had 104%. And this is the one that I said, if you get to 100%, you could take your profits or like sell it completely.
So you actually could have had 100% in this one. High five, bro. And electricity and then the electrical utilities I chose.
Was it Eversource? Yes. It's high of 20.25 was 75.25. It's currently it's almost around its high 74.54. It started the year off at 57.87. It's paid out $2.26 in dividends. So you're sitting at a total return of 32.71. So that's a win.
Yeah, I thought you would have sold at the high just because. This is when you hold. This is when I actually say I probably hold for a decade.
Yes, I like yes a lot. And here's our AI thoughts that we brought up and like. A whole lot of.
We did pretty good. And NVIDIA, obviously awesome. That's up 56 percent, oh wait, 36 percent for the year. And we picked up NVIDIA because NVIDIA did a stock split, correct? Yeah. Yeah.
It's the only reason I grabbed NVIDIA because it did a stock split, so we got it around 92 or something like that dollars last year. Oh my gosh. Intel is one that we beat a lot.
We said a lot in the podcast, I wrote about it in the email a lot of times, like Intel, it's high of 2025, it was 42, almost 43 dollars. It was 20 dollars coming into the year, so it's returned 77 percent. Where'd you pick that one up at? I know we talked about it.
20 dollars. So if you would have bought it when we talked about when it plummeted its face off. This is one that we literally just talked about, where as soon as I got my 100 percent, I just took out my initial investment, so everything else is just profit.
So we do that a lot, so like if you say you invest a thousand dollars in Intel, as soon as you double, you just take your thousand out, you have a thousand dollars in that I can do whatever it wants and you have no skin in the game at that point. And Intel's one of those long-term stocks, you can just let it, set it, forget it, and take that initial investment out. So this one I didn't even include in that one because I didn't recommend it, but this is one of those that you actually would have made 100 percent instead of 77, so you would have had 23 percent more.
Amazon, yeah, did Amazon things. You did Amazon things? Two percent, but that's kind of what you want, a sideways, you want a sideways market with these ones sometimes. With Amazon? Yeah.
Okay. The next one, VRNT, I whiffed on that one, but that one wasn't the record. You really put five Y's on the yes one a lot? Yeah.
Nice. This one I whiffed on pretty hard, I expected better of it. He's got five N's in the no category.
Yeah, that was a bad one. But... It should have been five L's, loser. It could be a 2026 one, I don't know, now it's not.
What type is, hey, that's an AI stock. These are all AI stocks. Oracle did pretty well, it's up 32 percent.
NVDY, these are, now we're getting into the next three are yield maxes, you made 11 percent in NVDY, you made 14 percent in the Microsoft one, and you made 4 percent in the Amazon one. That's actually really good returns for those pieces of shit. Yeah, right, because they usually have that NAV decline.
But the one I recommended here was the AIPI, and you're actually made to about 10 percent. That's about market. With $12.75 in dividends for the year.
Yeah, so if you do what we do, so you bought it at say, $44, you've already accrued like 25 percent of your initial investment. So that's a win. The sector as a whole is like 17 and a half percent.
That's what that number over there on the right is, like I just averaged those up, you've invested equally across it. Then we get to the shit one, like the oil and gas one. But the one I picked is like one of the only ones that's up.
SRV? Yeah. So that was the one that we said we would have prioritized. That's like basically just a conglomerate of all the MLPs that deal in the oil realm.
Now it just had a rights offering come out. Like we literally were just talking about this last week, and I got an email saying that there's rights offering for SRV, where like you can get one share for every three that you hold for like 95 percent of the price on such and such day. So you get like a 5 percent discount if you accept the rights offerings.
Yeah, it was funny. Right after we talked about that last week, but we were like, yeah, we don't have any of those stocks. It was like literally right after we recorded the podcast, we got the notification and he's like, oh, SRV literally just did what we said.
But if you look at like even OKE, it's down 27 percent. Citi's down 35 percent. All ET's down 7 percent.
Like if you look at what the could have is, like so you see the high price of the year is actually way higher than the 1.1 current price. So they all were in the green at some point this year. And the reason that this one, like they say NA is because like this current price is actually better than.
Oh, so you just did not apply? If you do the current price, then you add in the dividend is actually higher than the high because that one came in the beginning of the year. Oh, OK. I see what you're saying.
Don't we have EPD now? You didn't say that one. That's in your mom's retirement account. Did we have that beginning of the year? Oh, yeah.
I've had that one for a couple of years now. I like that one. I like all these.
So like I wouldn't if you've got them, I wouldn't get too worried. I mean, those top two kind of suck ass, but whatever. I still like SRV in this one here.
We put a lot in Citi. So we're down just as much as you are. The next one is the data storage section where we talked about data storage.
I didn't like any particular stock, which looking back probably was a bad thing considering WDC just like smash it out of the park and SDX smash it out of the park. So like I mean, but I didn't like either one because like I would like a closing the fund that holds those and like MBXG holds, I think WDC and I think AIO holds STX. Yeah, I thought you mentioned MBXG.
I love MBXG. It's like one of my favorite closing the funds, but like so like the ones that have the purple numbers are the ones that I recommended like in the actual podcast. I said, this is what we're taking in this sector.
Other than that, like that one's again, I expect all those to do exceptional this upcoming year. Oh my God, WDC's up 204%? 241%. Jesus.
Could have been up 295%. Yeah, if you would have known to sell the thing. But who would have waited past the 100 mark? Not many people unless you weren't paying attention to your account.
Palantir. Well, Palantir's a different story. Would you have guessed that with WDC? No, but it did a spinoff.
So like it really took off. Like it spun off like it's weaker stuff, whatever. The next one is the healthcare one.
I really like fucked the cooch on that one. Well, OGN, we wouldn't have seen that coming. We wouldn't have seen that coming, but as soon as they said it was cutting its dividend from 28 cents to two cents, I sold it.
Like that's like there's, I don't have a lot of like... I don't have a lot of like set in stone rules, but when they cut a dividend by like that, I learned from camping world. You just get rid of it. You literally just get a fake.
When they cut a dividend from like a pretty decent return to nothing, you get out of it. QVC. So like I sold this at $10 and 30 cents.
It happened like that's how quickly it went from like $16 down to $10. It was like a day. But I say like I exit it with a 28% loss as opposed to the 46% loss.
So it is what it is. So the next one is the Starlink one. You see ASTS, it was up 176% currently and SDM was it's down 9%, but you look at it, it could have been like SDM actually was there up about 34% before the tech pullback of the last month, month and a half.
Whereas ASTS was up, you see almost 400%. Oh my God. So you're going to keep holding both these through 2026.
I don't expect ASTS to return 175%. Again, it could return 50 or so. It may be, but I think SDM will actually return close to 100% in 2026.
And you're going to hold these for the duration until Starlink IPOs. Once Starlink IPOs, you're going to liquidate both these and just use the money and dump into Starlink. You're 100% sure of that? Yes.
Okay. Are you here to hear? Starlink is going to run the world. Run the world.
It already does. So like once it goes public, it's going to run the world. The next area is crypto.
For the purposes of the investing, we just stuck to ETFs or closed-ended funds when it came to crypto. I didn't want to actually wreck it. Get into the weeds, yeah.
What programs to invest in. You'll notice in the far right column that these were up all pretty decently. Back when crypto was doing really well before we had a huge sell-off.
11%, 38%, 30%. You'll see it where they currently are. It's not great, but.
We did just have a massive pullback in crypto, like we said. Remember, I got a bid on January of this year. So I got right at the 26th.
Right at the peak. Almost at the peak. What we currently use is YBTC.
That's what we currently are in for our Bitcoin exposure. And that has a massive dividend. It does have a pretty good dividend.
It's a weekly dividend that just keeps paying. That DIAX, that is basically an index fund of all the financial stocks that they hold. And that returned 5.5%. So they must have invested in a lot of regional and smaller banks.
Because if you remember, the larger banks kicked the shit out of us. Kicked the shit. But I still like that one.
For 2026, not sure. But then you still have the BDCs. That's the category where everyone was super high coming into the year.
You see where. All these reds. No, no, no, no, no.
Where it's currently at. The only one that's up is Main Street Capital. And we actually exited out of that one.
We even sold our position in that because it was high. We got $66. So we pretty much sold it at the high point of 2025 in Main Street Capital.
Because it was overvalued. Again, if you had been on the emails, you would have known this. But you'll see that they all were up pretty good amounts in the year at some point.
My favorite of this one is ARCC. We actually hold HTTC, ARCC and FSK in our portfolio right now. FSK had a really bad earnings.
So that might be the one that I recommend going into 2026 because it's down so far. And it shouldn't be. It has a pretty good yield.
Pretty good system. But we'll see because the BDCs will be mentioned again in the 2026 predictions. Then we come to the REIT section where, again, you'll look at the REIT.
We don't have very many actual physical REITs here. We have AG&C, which is an M-REIT. We have ABR, which is an M-REIT plus.
It holds some physical properties. And then we have NHI, which is a healthcare REIT that holds land that hospitals are on. I know ABR did not do what we expected.
We sent out a couple emails about that one. It still holds. I mean, if you have it, hold it.
If you do add to it right now, you're getting a pretty good dollar cost average. The problem that we have is I got it like $6, $7. So I can't even at the current price.
I'm still overpaying for it. So I'm just letting it do whatever. We sold half our position on that recently.
We still have the other half. AG&C, like nobody, like every article you read about AG&C, they're talking about how it's a shit stock because it has like a 15% yield. You want to avoid it, but they don't understand what it holds.
It holds a bunch of paper. And paper is king when interest rates are doing what they're doing. M-REITs are good.
I like what this one did for this year. 26% return is awesome. Right.
You'll take that. NHI did pretty good. It returned about 20% so far this year.
But I like AG&C. We actually hold that in the portfolio, and I'm super happy about that one. And then we come to all the miscellaneous crap I talked about at the end.
UPS, shit to bed. UPS, like if you're not in it, get into it going into 2026. It's a dividend growth stock that's severely undervalued.
We got into this one high, didn't we? Yeah, but we've been adding to it. So like our dollar cost average has come down a little bit. FedEx, yeah, avoid that one.
It's cost too much. You literally can get a better yield for the same exact company that's like a line above it. UPS and FedEx are pretty much the same fucking thing.
The hell is PHT closing on 9-25? PHT was a bond fund that we were in that I recommended, but it actually liquidated on September of this year. So it's no longer available. So I have no data on it.
I don't know what it did. Okay, we weren't in it? No, we got out of it. We sold it when we sold PDI.
Oh, we sold it before. Because all the bond funds were getting super high, so we sold them all. ARLP is our, I want to say... Royalties? Coal.
Oh, damn it. I always get this one wrong. Is it the coal? Yeah, it's our coal stock.
I'm all for that one. It's only up 0.8. So that's one that if you're in it, just stay in it. It'll rebound.
UAN is the fertilizer stock that if you're in it, you probably want to sell it because it's overvalued. Yeah, because that one hit good. Or turned the drip off.
That one hit good. Yeah, 45% return on a fertilizer stock is absurd. Super boring.
Nailed it. That's absurd. USA is a closing fund of all large cap USA companies.
I mean, I like the current price. It's under $6. It's awesome.
So if you're not in it, you might want to consider it. Because it does pay like a $0.17 dividend every quarter. I think it's $0.17. It's like a 7% yielder.
I don't know why you're asking me. I don't know these things. And then you'll see our nemesis is on their icon.
Our nemesis. It's actually returned almost 10% this year. If you would have got in it and not had the freaking downfall that we did.
And then we have the flying car stocks I talked about. That was last year. Archer and Joby are both flying car stocks.
Very nice. Well, Archer didn't really do too well. It did at one point.
Okay, so it did. But it had a massive pullback. But Joby freaking... It had a huge pullback.
Joby! That was the one that that little investing group was talking about. They were well ahead of the curve. I wonder if they sold out before this thing took off.
It was really... That one had a huge pullback. That's like 100% pullback. That one only had like a 60% pullback.
Are you talking about Archer or Joby? Joby pulled back over like almost 100%. Did it? Well, 154%. It's at 69.
Oh, shit. Where's 47? Do we have either one of those? No. We have a closing.
Makes you wonder why we didn't fly around one of them. Because we have Aurora. We have Aurora, which is the self-driving.
You went in that way. I went that way. That's right.
ASG is basically USA. It's the same. The same company has the closing of the fund.
And it has similar concept. Interesting. They both had like the same no column.
I like ASG actually a little bit more than USA. So that's why I recommend it last year. SPXX is a way to make income off the S&P 500.
It did, I guess, okay. Considering the S&P was up like 10% or 12%, that 3% seems kind of low. Now, here's the one that we talked about with the inflation crap.
Because that was the big play for that. Yes. WIW is an inflation protection closing the fund.
And I like it. And I'm actually... Spoiler, it's being recommended for 2026 again. 14%.
Basically, you're getting a 9% yield on something that literally doesn't move. Like you see that like it's 875. And it was at 832 at the beginning of the year.
Like it only moves like one or two cents a day. That's freaking fantastic. You want those sideways movers and you just drip, drip, drip.
So my picks came out to be 18.19%. That's all I have to say. I beat the market. I beat the market.
Even with all those freaking big no's. Well, those don't actually count as the purple ones. Purple ones are the ones I recommended.
But you had a couple of big no's. You had the GNC one. That's with a 47% loss in one stock.
Imagine... Where did OGN go? It's down. Duh, there it is. 47% loss on that one.
Imagine what I would have done without that. Right? You said 25, 26? Yeah, we've been a lot higher. 23 something.
23.82. Yeah, we've been a lot higher. But if you'll notice that blue column, they all were up this year. That's crazy.
Like every time I look at that, that's just crazy. That means every stock that I picked... Was up... At some point. Some point in 2025.
Some of them are hell in. That's crazy. NA, again, remember the NA's mean that if you actually... The total return is actually higher than if you just divide the high of 2025 divided by the January 1st price.
So if you divide 51.34 by 49.42, it comes out to be a smaller number than 9.61, which is the total return, which is the current price plus the dividends. That's what the NA means. So this is actually higher than that would have been.
Oh, so that's what you should have just said. That's what all those NA's mean. So that means... So total return would have been higher than if you would have sold it at a higher point.
There was no higher point than the total return. Man, you really made that complicated. No higher point than the total return column.
It's nothing. So like, well, what I'm saying is I'm pretty good. Tim's Oracle is finally getting dialed in and it's not four years out like it used to be.
Or you've been able to adapt. It's still four years out because I was literally... But you've been able to like stifle and adapt. I was literally researching 6G stocks today.
And we literally don't even have 5G fully implemented. I was already researching 6G stocks. So that was part of the course.
Yeah. Part of the course. But we noticed this back when we were doing all those earnings reports and the crap we were doing before when he finds his notepads every now and then and he's got stuff chicken scratched all over the place.
And he's like, I nailed that one. I nailed that one. He's like, when was this? It's like a four year lag.
It's pretty bad, but this was really good. This was really good. So if we can make the adjustment for next year of potentially sell price.
Yeah, I'm going to have a sell price, yeah. Or you guys get on the freaking email and the ones that Tim has bolded because those are the ones usually that we're in or the best plays, then we'll try to keep up with it. Or we are potentially considering doing a mid-year checkup on the thing.
I don't know exactly what we're going to do yet. I think it would depend on how the year unfolds because it could be who the hell knows what. Most likely what it's going to be is like we're going to have like we did last year where we're going to have the buy-in to price.
And then I'm actually just going to have a sell. So if I think that the S&Ps or if I think the markets on average are going to go up say 12%, then like 12% above where you buy it will be like the sell price. That way you just cover your ass.
Like if you're making 12% on every investment, you're going to beat the market. I might do that. I don't know yet.
But there's certain stocks that you're going to hold forever. Like NVIDIA, you're not going to sell. Like AIPI, you're not going to sell.
Like there's just certain ones that you're not going to sell. So like there's no point in having to sell price. Like UPS, like if you get into UPS $80, you're not going to sell it no matter what happens in 2026.
Unless you like quadruple your money. But like well I do like throughout the year I do give hints like okay well this one's up 100%. So we're taking our profits.
Taking our profits is our way of saying if you want to get out of it, you doubled your money. I never would recommend someone to liquidate the entire position. But like I like to let the winners run.
So like I just take out my initial investment. But other people just want to take all your risk off the table. Just double their money and then they have like that to put towards something else.
And take all your risk off the table. Unless I'm extenuating circumstance like with a dividend complete cut. But you have to remember what happened in this year was we had a tariff tantrum in April, which brought the prices way down.
And then we had AI bubble risk in October and November, which brought the prices way down. So this has been a very volatile year. The fact that like 18% is what you would have made had you invested equally across what I recommended is pretty fucking good actually.
It's almost double than what the market actually came out. But again, don't know until the end of December. Yeah, the end of December.
But like. But usually December is down because people are doing that tax loss harvesting thing. So they sell their positions.
I'm not really worried. I'm just saying. This is our 2025 predictions.
No, no. But I'm saying like it's possible the market's going to go down more with tax loss harvesting. So like for the people out there that don't think we're qualified to talk about stuff.
Oh man. Tim's like not enough suits. I'm actually going to get.
I'm going to get a piece of paper. I'm going to get like what I'm going to take one of those like. I feel like you should get those cardboard like outfits.
Financial advisor tests. I'm going to say pass your financial advisor test like a practice test. I'm just going to like post it behind me.
So you guys like if I wanted to, I could actually be a financial advisor. But like what's the point? Yeah, what is the point? I have a piece of paper. I better fix my time.
But like, I mean, if that's what it takes to be qualified, then maybe you are looking at the wrong podcast. Where this comes from real quick is when we did the gold episode. Remember, I said it's going to piss people off.
It pissed some people off. They can't wrap their head around the fact that gold actually returned less than inflation percentage. Yeah.
And it's like, do the data like I'm not manipulating the data. I literally just here's the data. There's what the data suggests.
Yeah. If you want to ignore it, ignore it. If you don't want to follow us, don't follow us.
What the data doesn't include is the part that we kept like I kept harping on, like it doesn't include the storage fees. It doesn't include the insurance fees. It doesn't include the transaction fees.
As you accumulate gold, you're actually paying the transaction fee every time you accumulate gold. Those fees run about 4%. So if it's only returning 8% and inflation is 4% and then you lose 4% fees, you're basically running even with inflation or like some a little bit down.
That's all I said. Some dude went cray cray. I'm not qualified to talk about stuff.
Nobody said we never said we were experts. That's the other thing. You claim to be an expert.
Did we ever say that? I'm not an expert, but if you ever want to see a really cool YouTube channel, check out not the expert. He is really cool. He's like, yeah, yeah.
I think he's a young kid that just does like crazy shit. Like she was listening to me the night. She's like, I really like his voice.
He has a really good cadence. That was his sports ball guy. His name is not the expert.
That's actually really funny. Yeah, he's a really, he's a really, he didn't have that tag. I feel like you should have that tag.
He's a really cool dude with a really like. He does. It's a very nice, like his presentation and cadence.
Everything is fun, like soothing. Next week is we're going to review the income generated by the retirement account. Oh yeah.
Our dividends update for the quarter. Newsflash. Not as good as the Vanna portfolio.
Well, duh. That one's for spoiler. That one is for capital preservation, which ours did not have very well of.
Yeah, I think I was looking at this like they were during the last like six weeks. They both lost about the same amount. Percentage wise.
Well, that's interesting. It's interesting. That is interesting.
Percent is good. Total value. Not so much.
Well, it's what you have to do if you have 190,000 in one and you have 104 and something else. So that means you need to work on my mom's. I do.
I have to do. You need to work on that. Correct a couple of things.
It should not be like losing as much as our fucking crazy, our cray cray account. That's that. Next week, we'll see you going over dividends.