Weekly Update: My 2026 Retirement Portfolio
Good evening, and welcome to this week’s edition of Stealth Trades!
Here’s how I am allocating my retirement account for 2026:
- 40% Equities
- 25% Energy
- 25% Metals
- 10% Real Assets & Infrastructure
Today I am going to lay out my full allocation with ticker symbols, exact percentages, and the rationale behind each.
I am not instructing you to do the same. This is where I, at 42 years old, am putting my money. And it is based on a number of assumptions you may or may not agree with.
Only you can decide that.
Now, to be clear, this is the play for ONLY my retirement account. Most of us have multiple investment accounts.
I, for example, have 529 accounts for each of my children’s college savings. They hold a simple market index fund and get automated deposits every month. I don’t touch them.
I also have a few trading accounts where I am more active. I go from long and on margin to completely in cash sometimes overnight.
But I am far less active with my wife and my retirement accounts. These are dollars I don’t want to take big risks with. And they are invested with a much longer time horizon.
My approach – and I’m not saying this is right or wrong – is to be tactically diversified. I want broad exposure but focused in the areas likely to outperform over the next few years.
What will the world look like 20 years from now? I have no idea.
But 2 years from now? That’s a little easier to predict.
I only hold ETFs – exchange traded funds. These are the modern-day equivalent of mutual funds. They hold a basket of stocks in a given sector, index or region.
My goal is to avoid single-stock risk and stay focused on leading themes.
For the last few years, that has been AInce.
The artificial intelligence ETF, ticker AIQ, has nearly doubled over the last 2 years.
Would you have done even better putting it all in Nvidia? Sure. But you also could have suffered unrecoverable losses. Again, no single-stock risk.
But looking at things today, at the tail end of 2025, are AI stocks likely to keep going higher?
It’s hard to say. Valuations have reached extremely elevated levels. Some are calling it a bubble.
In my opinion, the AI trade is a bit long in the tooth. Buying here feels like the equivalent of showing up to a baseball game in the 8th inning.
Instead, I am focusing on what I believe will be the big winners in 2026 and 2027 – energy, metals and physical assets.
I could go on for hours about the flaws of government physical policy, but the short and sweet of it is this – Uncle Sam will never stop spending.
The government will never live within its means, the debt will continue to spiral out of control, and the money printer will keep being used to fill the gap between what comes in and what goes out.
That gap is widening. And we have some of the best economic conditions in decades.
When things turn south? They’ll print trillions more.
Inflation is going to get worse. It is an unavoidable reality. And I expect this to be a tailwind for asset prices for many years to come.
Housing will become less affordable, not more. Gold and silver will double again. And by 2030, expect your power bill to be twice what it is today.
And since Washington has no intentions of steering their bloated ship toward anything resembling responsible stewardship, we must take action to protect our wealth.
My allocation, which I noted earlier, is as follows:
- 40% Equities
- 25% Energy
- 25% Metals
- 10% Real Assets & Infrastructure
At first glance, this might look overly conservative. But as you will see, the bulk of the dollars into energy are going to energy stocks. The same is true of the metals and infrastructure allocations.
So, in reality, the percentage going to equities is much higher. The 40% only refers to index fund investments.
That equities bucket looks like this:
I used Vanguard ETFs which are not only liquid but offer the lowest management fees in the industry.
I have also tilted the funds away from mega-cap AI stocks by putting half to value stocks, small and mid-caps, and emerging markets.
40% of the S&P 500 is dominated by just 10 companies. Nvidia alone is nearly 8%. That stock is up 12-fold. I do not want a bunch of money in an index that can be tanked by a single company.
My rationale for each ETF is detailed above.
Next is energy…
I am putting 25% toward energy stocks – split between renewables like solar and nuclear and traditional oil and gas.
This, to me, is one of the biggest investment opportunities of my lifetime. Data centers are creating huge demands for energy. Municipalities located near them are seeing energy prices surge.
There is a nationwide race to generate enough juice to power these AI data machines.
Another 25% is being allocated to metals which is further split between precious metals that I expect to rise as the dollar weakens and industrial metals used in infrastructure projects.
This email is getting long, so I will let my rational notes above do the talking here.
And finally, a 10% weight to real assets and infrastructure. This is achieved with three ETFs that are pretty self-explanatory.
This is my plan. Will it outperform the market? I hope so. It definitely feels safer than betting it all on a continuation of the AI bubble.
But there are no guarantees.
This portfolio meets my objectives. It aligns with my macroeconomic views. And it will let me sleep soundly at night.
Do with this what you will.
Best wishes for your trading,
