The Smartest Investment for 2026

Why traditional assets may underperform — and what’s replacing them

Where should I invest my money in 2026?

Stocks, real estate, gold, silver. President Trump says that the stock market is going to boom in 2026.

But gold prices have been crushing the stock market. But real estate provides more stability.

If you’ve been wondering where you should invest your money to get the best return, stick with me for this story, because the two biggest mistakes that people make when they invest their money.

1. They assume that past performance guarantees future returns.

They say this asset did so well in 2025, this asset did so well in the past, and it’s going to continue to provide these big gains.

Well, past performance does not guarantee future performance.

2. They follow what a random guy on the internet says.

The reality is if somebody tells you that the best investment that you should make and the investment that you need is gold, or the investment that you have to make it’s better than anything else is real estate, or the only investment you ever need is stocks, chances are they’re selling you something, because reality tells you that there are many ways to get to the same destination.

Warren Buffett became one of the wealthiest people in the world through the stock market.
Donald Trump became extremely wealthy through real estate.
Michael Sailor became extremely wealthy through crypto and his business.

There are many ways to get to the same destination, but you have to know what it is that you’re investing in, which is why personal finance is personal.

The reality is, if we look into the future 10 years from now, 20 years from now, 30 years from now, the stock market’s going to be higher, real estate’s going to be higher, and gold is going to be higher.

All of these things tend to grow over time, but they don’t always grow at the same rate, at the same speed.

In 2022, when the stock market fell by 20%, crypto prices were hammered, Bitcoin fell by 60%, but real estate was booming.

Let’s go back to the 2008 crash. Between 2008 and 2012, real estate prices kept going down, down, down, down.

During 2012, real estate hit rock bottom, but the stock market was breaking brand new record highs in 2012.

When you start to zoom in, and you look at a period of one year or two years or even 5 years, you get very caught up in these swings up and down, it’s that trading mindset.

But when you start to zoom out over a period of 10 years or 20 years, what you start to see is that many assets go like this.

This is where understanding how to invest your money the right way can help you build wealth.

And I’ll tell you what I do. I don’t recommend what I do to anybody else. But I don’t know what’s going to happen tomorrow, I have no idea.

I know we’re going through craziness in the economy. I know that I have a firm that researches where money is moving and how they create opportunities.

The reality is, in the short term, markets are volatile. Things go up and down, but there are opportunities in many places.

So when I invest my money, I invest it in five different places.

I invest my money into my own business, Reefs Finance.
I invest my money in physical real estate.
I invest my money in stocks.
I invest my money into speculative assets, that’s startups and crypto. And then I own some physical gold.

So now when the stock market’s crashing, maybe real estate is going up, maybe gold is going up, maybe Bitcoin, I don’t know. But now you can understand how there are different benefits during different phases of our economic cycle.

What you want to understand as an investor are two things.

What are the changes happening?
Where is the money moving?

Because we have changes happening in our economy. We have a weakening dollar, not a theory; this is a fact.

2025 was the worst year for the United States dollar in about a decade. President Trump has talked about how he wants a weaker dollar because that can help our businesses sell more stuff to foreign countries.

So, we are seeing the weakening dollar. You can see it through gold prices. We’re seeing changes in interest rates.

At the end of 2025, the Federal Reserve Bank cut interest rates three times. In January 2026, the Federal Reserve Bank said that they want to pause cutting interest rates.

In May 2026, President Trump is going to replace the chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank, Jerome Powell, with somebody else who is probably going to want to cut interest rates aggressively. So, we’re going to see a lot of changes in monetary policy and interest rates.

We’re still seeing inflation; inflation has not gone away. It is still a problem. And inflation compounds.

The inflation problems that we’re seeing today are on top of what we saw in 2024, which is on top of what we saw in 2023, which is on top of what we saw in 2022, which is on top of what we saw in 2021.

If your income has not grown to keep up with that, well, you’re slowly becoming poorer because I’d need more of your salary to pay for your groceries, your rent, and your vacations.

So inflation hurts the average person for those reasons.

We have news saying that our economy is growing faster than expected, and unemployment is still low.

At the same time, when you look a little bit more granular, you’ll see that many people are underemployed.

Underemployed means I went to college, I got a good degree, I should be working at a big tech company as a computer science person, but I’m flipping burgers at McDonald’s.

A little bit of an extreme example, but you get the idea, where people are qualified to do this, but they’re working here.

We have a lot of underemployed people, while AI is changing the job market very fast. Well, the average person is not keeping up because the average person says that AI is stupid, and I use ChatGPT to help write emails.

There are a lot more use cases for AI than that, and unfortunately, the average person is just not keeping up with that.

Then [snorts] there’s uncertainty. Uncertainty leads to volatility. The reason why Business Insider says that we are in one of the most volatile stock markets that we have seen in decades is because of all the uncertainty.

This uncertainty is not just in the government. We have the uncertainty with tariffs. Yeah, we have uncertainty of geopolitics.

But we also have uncertainty in the economy. We have reports saying that consumer confidence is low, people are concerned about a recession, and people have concerns about the job market.

Then you get the news that unemployment is really good, that people have jobs, that the economy is growing.

So you have this growing dichotomy where, on one hand, the stock market keeps booming, but people are feeling more and more pain in the economy, and that can only last so long.

But we know that the government wants to see markets boom. President Trump says that he wants to see a booming stock market in 2026.

The Federal Reserve Bank wants to see markets boom, but the most expensive kind of money is free money. Because every time you print money to boost markets, it creates a short-term boost for an expensive long-term cost, because that long-term cost is inflation.

Inflation disproportionately hurts the average person, but it makes the wealthy wealthier because the wealthy want to own investments.

So we are seeing those changes happen in the economy. Now it goes back to the question, what do I buy? Well, understand why you are buying an asset.

#1. When you invest in the stock market, what you’re buying is the future value of a company, the future value of an economy.

Because you can invest in the broad United States stock market, some funds can do that, but you can also invest in individual companies. So, instead of buying the Nike shoes, you can buy the Nike company.

But the only reason why you would do that is if you believe that these companies are going to make more money in the future.

Because if you thought Nike is going to go bankrupt tomorrow or next year or five years from now, you probably are not going to want to buy that stock.

When you buy a stock, you do it because you believe in the future of that company. [snorts] You believe in the future of an economy.

Compare that to gold, because gold has very little economic utility. When you buy gold, that gold that you buy is not being used in the economy; it’s not being used in manufacturing.

There’s very little economic utility of gold as opposed to investing in the Amazon stock or Nike stock, because people go to Amazon and Nike to spend money. Gold just sits there and looks back at you.

But gold prices have been crushing the stock market over the last 5 years.

That’s a concern because people generally buy gold not because they believe the gold is going to be so valuable in the economy, but they buy it because they’re concerned that their dollar is losing value.

They buy it because they’re concerned about the economy, they buy it because they’re concerned about something happening.

They run to gold because it’s been a haven.

Now, silver is a little bit different because silver has that precious metal commodity side to it, but it’s also used in our economy because you use silver in EVs, you use silver in solar panels, nd other things like that.

So, that’s been contributing to these big run-ups in the prices of silver. And then real estate provides cash flow. You own a hard asset; you can see, feel, and touch the real estate that you buy.

When I buy a rental property, I can touch the bricks. When I buy a share of Amazon, well, I don’t get a discount on Amazon products.

When you buy real estate, you also get tax breaks. As an attorney who is not your attorney, I can tell you that real estate has some of the biggest and best tax breaks that the tax code has to offer.

So when people start to think about where they should invest their money, a lot of times, what they’re doing is they get caught up in the next 60 days or the next six months, when they need to really be thinking about the next six years or the next 16 years if they want to see the biggest returns.

The reality is, the best way to get those returns is just to find where the beaten asset is.

And that beaten asset is going to change from time to time. When markets go down, stocks are going to take a beating, but stocks are probably going to be a lot higher in 10 years, 20 years, and 30 years.

So if you can buy stocks at a discount, that creates an opportunity. Now, if you know which industries are going to see more growth because you’re doing that research, that can give you even more upside potential.

But in general, we know that stocks are probably going to do better.

Gold has been booming the last 6 years, but don’t forget that between 2012 and 2020, gold prices were getting hammered.

Gold prices went up after the 2008 crash because all the money printing was happening, all the quantitative easing was happening between 2008 and 2012.

In 2012, when it was clear that hyperinflation wasn’t happening, gold prices crashed, and they didn’t hit new highs until 2020, 8 years later.

From 2020 to 2026, gold has been crushing it. But there are these asset cycles.

There are periods when real estate goes up, and there are periods when real estate goes down.

There are periods when stocks go up, and there are periods when stocks go down.

There are periods when gold goes up, and there are periods when gold goes down.

And there’s no one-size-fits-all answer. The goal is to build wealth. That’s why people want to invest their money.

They want financial freedom, they want wealth, they want cash flow.

Whatever it is, different assets are going to provide different things.

You can invest in stocks for cash flow; these are dividend-paying stocks.
You can invest in stocks for growth.
You can invest in real estate primarily for cash flow.

I don’t recommend real estate for growth. But now the answer is, well, where do you put your money?

This is where, again, all of them have potential. Find what’s right for you based on where you are in your portfolio and where you see opportunity.

If you can go down the street and you see an amazing real estate deal, go and invest in that.
If you see an amazing deal in the stock market because you can handle your emotions in the stock market, that creates an opportunity there.
If you want to invest in some speculative assets because you’re younger, you have that opportunity, great, look at those.
If somebody comes to you with a great business idea that you think can be the next Amazon, that could be an opportunity as well.

Every investment has risk. Certain investments have less risk than others.

Investing in the S&P 500 is less risky than investing in your cousin Bunty’s new business idea.

If your cousin Bundy’s business idea takes off and it becomes a billion-dollar company, that investment will pay you many, many, many times over what the S&P 500 would pay you.

The S&P 500 is going to give you slow, steady growth over the long run.

We’re going to see recessions, we’re going to see market crashes, but over the long run, you can expect it to go up.

You have to understand how much risk you are willing to take on and what type of wealth you want to see. If you say, “I want to fly in private jets, and I want to own an island,” you’re going to have to take on more risk.

If you say, “I just want to be financially free,” well, now you have to measure how much risk you need in order to get to those returns.

Nothing is guaranteed. But what we do know is that the investors who invest for the long term have the potential for the most wealth.

This is the mistake that so many people make, which is that they think in the short term.

We start to look into where the best gains have been in the last 6 months. Just breathe. The gold market has been booming, and silver prices have been booming.

Should I only own gold?
Should I only own silver?

We get emotional, and we forget, well, gold goes up, and it goes down too.

There’s a good chance that gold can go up for a long period of time, but that doesn’t guarantee it’s always going to go up.

That doesn’t guarantee we’re not going to see a gold crash, that doesn’t guarantee we’re not going to see a silver crash, that doesn’t guarantee we’re not going to see a stock market crash.

We’ve seen them happen in the past; they will happen in the future. And the investors that really build wealth are not the ones that are chasing opportunities.

It’s finding the opportunities. When you see a downturn in a good asset, buy more of it.

Then diversification is not owning three different types of stocks. Diversification, real diversification, is owning different types of assets, stocks, real estate, gold, and so, me crypto.

That’s real diversification. That way, now you can benefit when different asset cycles are happening, because I have no idea what’s going to happen in the next 12 months.

And when you understand that, now you can start to capitalize in different pieces of the economy, because every year you’re going to see opportunities in different asset classes.

Why limit yourself to one? Find where the opportunity is and invest the rest, and be a long-term investor.

Own it all, why not? You don’t have to diversify and own everything today, because if you have $10,000 and you put some into stocks, nd some into gold, some into crypto, and some into real estate, well, now you’re completely diversified, and it’s very hard to see any real gains.

Start with one, get good at that, be knowledgeable, then move on to the second, then the third.

This is what smart investing is all about, not chasing. There’s a lot of emotion on the internet.

Stay calm, find opportunities, and wait for opportunities too.

You don’t have to chase, because a lot of times people want to just… let’s take a step back.

People love buying when markets are hitting new record highs. That’s when people come out. And you can see this if you take a look at stock brokerage accounts, crypto brokerage accounts.

Do you want to know when most of their accounts are beinand when g made, when people are putting money into their accounts, and when new investors are joining?

It’s not when markets are cheap, it’s when markets are breaking new record highs, and the news keeps talking about how people are getting rich.

When they’re breaking record highs, everybody wants to get in.

They’re opening accounts,s and now they start chasing, because they hear about how their broke cousin is getting rich by putting the money into this random stock or crypto or whatever.

Then when markets go down, they own, and they correct, they panic, and they sell. Buy high, sell low is not a strategy for wealth. Understanding the psychology of investing now allows you to build wealth.

But you don’t need to chase. Understand that there are different times for different assets.

When you start to accumulate a little bit of different types of assets, you can benefit through the different economic cycles, because cycles will happen. They cycle again.

Real estate will go down, stocks will go down, and crypto will go down.

Real estate will go up, gold will go up, and crypto will go up.

These things happen, and you want to understand where the money is moving.

That way, you can identify those opportunities and get in before then. That’s what your research is all about.