I Ranked The Best And Worst Stocks Of 2025

0:00 Welcome back everyone today on the Joseph Carlson show. As we're nearing the very end of 2025, I thought it would be a good time to take a look back and see what happened to look over the best performing and worst performing stocks of this year. And we're going to do that. We're also going to put it in a tear ranking list. This time a Gen Z tear ranking list from the stocks that were goated, the ones that did the best to the ones that were cooked. We'll be looking at top to bottom, the best performing stocks and the worst performing stocks of 2025, putting them on this list, and seeing what happened this year, what worked, what didn't work, and what we think is going to happen with these companies over the next year. And I've hand selected some of the most popular stocks in the market. So, we'll be going over all of that, as well as we do have some predictions. For example, we have Dan Ives predictions for 2026. We of course have the prediction man himself, Tom Lee, and his predictions for 2026. And then we have my predictions for 2026.

0:54 What is the market going to do next year? I'll tell you my thoughts. Then of course, it also wouldn't be a full episode if we didn't have a fail of the week. This is the story of a random soccer coach that's trying to pull a fast one on Nike, trying to steal one of their brands because Nike forgot to renew it. We'll be going over this incredible case and why this is destined to fail. So, of course, we have a ton to get to in this episode. Lots to go over.

1:15 And just before we jump in, a quick reminder. If you haven't tried out qual.com, now's the time to do it. you can make yourself a better investor for 2026. Qualrram is a fullyfledged stock analysis platform with charts and graphs and KPIs and DCF calculations and so on and so forth. It has all of that stuff and it gets better by the day, but it also unlocks an exclusive Discord community as well as exclusive content and episodes. I frequently do ask me anything, community episodes, as well as deep dives into different companies and my thoughts on different things that I don't put into public episodes. And I know that all of you want the best value. That's why I made Qualum only 10 bucks a month. If you sign up on the monthly plan, you get a 7-day free trial to try it out. If you become convinced that you'll love it, which I think you will, we have a lot of our users on the annual plan, which is only $8 a month when you commit to a year. It's been incredible to see the growth. We've had around 3,000 members join in just the past 2 months. So, thank you to everybody trying it out. And if you haven't, again, I think you're missing out. You can try it out now at qual.com.

2:14 Now, enough of all that. Let's go ahead and jump in. We start things off looking at Google. That's the first one. And this one's such an easy one. This one is goated. The performance of this one is just incredible. I mean, how can you ask for more in a stock than Google? They give investors everything that you want in a stock. This year, year to date, it's up 64.06% not counting dividends. The dividends probably brought it up another 1 to 2%.

2:39 So, it's at like 66%. Incredible performance. Not to mention, Google's a company that entered the year at around 192 and it dipped as low as 140, 160. A lot of investors, including me, were buying it around 170. So, if you got in around these prices, 160 to 170, your gains were even higher. You made 80 90% this year with this single stock. In Google alone, I've made over $90,000 in gains. So, it's been an incredible company, my biggest gainer in my portfolio. And what drove Google's performance? Well, first of all, Google had that question of chatpt and they answered it. They said, "It's not slowing us down. We're growing faster than ever. We're including AI into our search results. We have Gemini that's growing incredibly fast. It's growing in both volume of searches and number of people using it." And they really addressed the concerns of chatbt. Then they also had very fast cloud growth.

3:32 Another big thing for them, YouTube continues to gain market share in television. Whimo has this long story arc of continuing to grow where no one else so far has been able to figure it out. We hear that Tesla's on the verge of it, but they really haven't so far. So, we have multiple great stories going on at the same time. Then also this year, Google was lucky enough to have a ruling where they didn't have to sell Chrome. That was another big catalyst that brought this stock up from the 170s now into the 310s. All of that culminated to an incredible 2025 performance out of Google. And my prediction is we'll have another good performance next year. I think we're going to still keep the multiple. I think we'll have solid earnings growth.

4:12 I think a lot of the stories like YouTube and Whimo continue to play out. Google is really second to none in a lot of the categories that they operate in. Google's goated. Let's go ahead and move on. This time we have Microsoft. Let's go ahead and take a look at how Microsoft's doing. When we bring up Microsoft here, it's at 485, which feels like a lot. Wasn't it just a couple years ago I was talking about Microsoft being at like 220 230. Now it's at almost $500 per share. It went up a lot and then it gave back some of its performance which is completely fine. Uh but we're still up 16% on the year not including dividends. Great performance out of Microsoft. Not quite in the category of a Google up 60 to 70% though for me. Microsoft's going to be in the locked in category. And [snorts] I apologize for the category names. These are I didn't make them. They're Gen Z names. So, we got the locked in category here. Microsoft had a great year.

5:06 Microsoft has shifted their business model before Microsoft was looked at as just a software company. You had things like Excel and Word and all the spreadsheets that people use, all the tools that they use. Then there's Microsoft Teams and that's incredibly popular now. And Microsoft has been creating software for a long period of time. But the way that Satcha and Adella has shifted the company is now being more of a toolbox for AI. So every company wants to use all these AI tools.

5:32 Microsoft is like the toolbox that they draw from and that's really what he's pivoted the company around. Meaning that everything runs now off of Azure. That's the common thread. So this performance out of Microsoft, this 16% gain, which is really good, was largely driven by Microsoft's cloud and Azure growth. That's what's behind this. And I think it's going to continue again into next year. I would not be surprised to see Microsoft up another 10 plus% in 2026.

5:58 So, Microsoft's locked in. We also have Uber. Let's go ahead and take a look at this one. A great year from Uber. I I think a really good year, in fact. Now, it did recently have a pullback. So, Uber's down probably like 20% from where it was. It was up to $96 uh $100. Now, it's down to $81. So, yeah, it's given up 20% of its gains, which is fine. It's still having a great year. And Uber's likely going to continue this trend in the future. Uber's performance this year was largely driven by their expansion in their operating margins. their continued free cash flow growth, revenue growth organically by their network expanding and a combination of that as well as going into the year at a low valuation because of the constant overhang of the threat of AVs. So when you have the threat of AVs always looming in in the distance, you have a stock that continually trades at a low valuation.

6:47 Since it trades at a low valuation, they can do buybacks as well as the stock becomes super attractive. That's the reason why Bill Aman is so bullish on this company. He doesn't believe that AVs like the Tesla robo taxi will be quite as detrimental to Uber as investors are pricing in. So Uber today is in the locked in category right along with Microsoft. It's done a little bit better, but it's not quite up to that Google category. Now next up we have ASML. One of my favorite companies and this one again I think that this one's right up there with Google. I believe this one is goated. This year has been incredible for the ASML shareholder.

7:26 You're not going to meet an unhappy ASML shareholder. Like, they just don't exist right now. The stock is at all-time highs. It's had an incredible year. If you're in the US market with just the ticker ASML, you're up 52%. But even if you bought the European tickers with currency fluctuations, you're still up past 30%. Either way, you can't complain. This stock has been incredible. Of course, this has been backed by the incredible surge into artificial intelligence. The big push into this means that they've been able to sell a lot of lithography machines.

7:55 Now, it looks like they're selling around the same amount or even fewer lithography machines by the year, but they're also getting dramatically more expensive. So, even though they're selling around the same amount of them, the price of them continues to go up on a perunit basis. On top of that, another thing that I look for with ASML that I really like is the install base management. And this is like a subscription service after they sell the device. It's the same type of thing where they sell the hardware upfront.

8:23 They make some money on that, but then you have to service the hardware and keep it going all the time, which is this install base management. And you can see the uptick over the past year. This will continue to go up as ASML machines once sold almost never are dismantled. They are literally in operation for decades and decades. I bought into ASML new in 2025. I'm already up $30,000 or plus 62%. It's a great start to a position to buy into it and be up $30,000 in the same year. Now, next up, we have Salesforce. This one, do we really have to talk about this one? Do we really have to go through it?

8:57 I I suppose we do. Uh let's go ahead and take a look at the performance of Salesforce in 2025. Salesforce is down 19%, more than 19% in 2025. Now, it's had a little bit of a comeback over the past month. It was down even more, like 25%. So, it actually feels like we're winning a bit, only being down 19%, no matter which way you spin this, it's been a terrible year for Salesforce. The market has gone up 10 to 15% while Salesforce has gone down 19%. That's not only underperformance, that is just awful. Salesforce has been cooked in 2025. I'm sorry. I I just have to give it this category that the stock's been cooked. What has been behind the Salesforce sell-off? Well, there's a couple things. One of them is that we can blame the market. We can say that it was only because investors won't pay attention to software companies. They're only focused on AI companies. But I believe that's shifting the blame a little. Salesforce has a couple problems that are specific to Salesforce. One of them is that the revenue growth has decelerated sharply. So anytime revenue growth decelerates, meaning it goes from over the past 5 years growing at 15% to now growing in the past one year at 8%.

10:09 So the revenue growth rate has roughly gone in half over the past couple of years. That means that the stock gets derated. Premium growth makes for premium multiples. Basic growth makes for very basic multiples. So when we have a company that slows down, the multiple comes down. And that's what we've dealt with as Salesforce shareholders. Now you can contrast that with Salesforce growing in their agent force and their operating margins. But at the end of the day, investors want fast growing companies. When they stop growing fast, the stock price goes down.

10:40 I think that there's a good chance software will do well in 2026. I continue to hold Salesforce and in fact, as of right now, I am virtually flat on the company. I'm down $900 on a $65,800 position, but I'm going to stick into Salesforce for a little longer. Now, moving on. Next up, we have Meta. This is another one that I've had on my watch list for some time. Let's go ahead and take a look at Meta. We bring up this one. We look at the annual performance year to date, and we have it up 9.3%.

11:08 So, it's not quite doing as well as the S&P 500, but it's still doing okay. Nobody can be too disappointed with this performance, especially if you were able to buy it during the dip, but Meta has given up some gains. Now, I would classify this as the chill category. Meta's performance has not been shocking this year in either direction. And the reason the stock is not going up faster is simply because Mark Zuckerberg is focusing more on capex, more on the big AI prize rather than immediate profits.

11:36 Investors want the profits. They want to focus on operating margins and free cash flow margin. Mark Zuckerberg wants to chase his dreams. Sometimes those go into conflict. Now, another one that has had a chill 2025 is S&P Global. If we take a look at this one, it belongs firmly next to Meta there. It's up 7% on the year. It hasn't been bad. It's never a problem when you're still making money on a stock, but it has trailed the market by a little and it just seems to be floundering around this year.

12:02 Underneath this, the fundamentals have been great and there are catalysts for the future. So hopefully this one will do a little bit better in 2026. Now, after S&P Global, we have Chipotle. This one is at minus 38% year-to date. Now, I own other restaurants like Texas Roadhouse. They're not doing great, but they're not doing this bad at all. Not even close. Chipotle. It's It's either falling off or it's getting cooked. I I think I'm going to put this one in the cooked category. Chipotle hasn't just fallen off. I mean, it's really been crushed this year. People are complaining that their burritos are too small. They're too expensive. They're inconsistent. They have so many different quality complaints. Now, I've given the solution to Chipotle for some time. A very simple solution. They cost like $5 on Amazon, which is a food scale. Simply put the plate on the food scale. then put the portion on. Then you know how much is in your bowl or in your burrito. You know that you're getting a consistent portion. If the company did that, I think it would build back customer trust and loyalty. It's a lot better than the employee deciding at a whim how much food you're going to get each time you visit. So Chipotle should 100% start using food scales through their checkout line. I really think that's the solution. That would solve so many problems for this company, but they're not doing that and the stock is getting crushed. Now, another one in the same category, we have Texas Roadhouse.

13:21 This is a company that I have owned. I made so much in gains on this company. I actually had to sell half my position. It was just becoming such a massive position. I had it as like a $90,000 position. So, I took some gains in Texas Roadhouse earlier this year. I now have $40,000 in gains on it. But Texas Roadhouse remains an excellent company. It has sold off a little this year, down 7%. That's not too bad, especially when you incorporate the dividends. This has really held up against the broader market of restaurants. I'm going to put this one alongside the chill category here. It hasn't been too devastating.

13:54 Nobody's really getting hurt in Texas Roadhouse. It's down 7% on the year. It's not doing quite as well as S&P Global and Meta, but it's still hanging in there. Now, next up, we have Amazon. This is another one that I'm going to put in the mediocre category here. A chill year for Amazon in 2025. Now, an interesting note on Amazon and companies like this. Even though the year-to- date performance of Amazon is only 5% depending on when you bought the company or when you added your shares of buying the company, you could be up a lot more than the 5% year-to- date. For example, when I go to the year-to-ate performance of my Amazon shares, I am up 10.3% on the year. So, I've roughly doubled the actual performance of the stock because when I bought the company, it was during the dip. Remember the whole tariff sell-off and me saying, "I'm not worried about it. I'm going to continue buying."

14:42 That's how you get double the performance of the stock itself. You buy during the most opportune times. That's how I'm up 10% just this year on a 5% year and up and up $47,000 on this company overall. But Amazon's year in 2025 has been mediocre. I think we could have a great 2026 if we see operating margins moving upwards, capex leveling off, we see more automation and robotics, we see a lot of AWS acceleration. Those type of things could really put a positive shift to this story. bring it up 10, 20, 30% next year. Now, next is one that I used to own, but I sold it because, well, I thought I had a good thesis for selling Apple. I sold the company because it was simply at a very high valuation, higher than most companies, and the growth had basically leveled off. So, it was a slow growing, highly valued company, and yet it's still up 12% year-to date. Apple's done great. It's still continuing to go forward and upwards. The MO is so incredibly strong for this company.

15:39 Everybody uses the iPhone and they're not going to stop using it. Uh it doesn't matter really what comes out next. People are going to still use the iPhone until that changes. Apple stock will continue to go upwards because Apple benefits when people spend more time on the iPhone. People are spending like 10 hours a day on the iPhone. So that's causing the stock to continue to gain momentum, gain share. Uh they continue to sell more devices. Their ecosystem continues to grow. So this one has been a great performance. So I would consider it in the locked in category right there with Uber and Microsoft.

16:10 Still a bit below the echelons of Google and ASML, but Apple has definitely outperformed my expectations. Next up, we have Palanteer, which obviously just looking at the numbers here by any relative scale, this thing is goated. Like it's been an insane year in 2025 for Palunteer. Now you can complain. You can say that it's not deserved or the stock is comically overvalued, but say whatever you want. The numbers are the numbers. It's up 148% as we speak year-to date. And surprisingly, it's been able to support a price to sales of over 100, something that I've never seen before. Palunteer basically has a market cap. And now again, it has a market cap about the same size of a Netflix, but yet it does in the trailing 12 months $4 billion of revenue. Netflix is doing next to 40 billion. So you see a company here that's able to support these incredible incredible ratios, incredible market cap size because of some of the fundamentals behind the company. First of all, the revenue is growing very fast, 47%. Like I said earlier, premium revenue growth equals premium multiples.

17:17 Palenter investors are betting that this continues because if this reverts, if it slows down or decelerates, the multiple will come down dramatically. Now this again is very impressive how fast they've been able to grow. But I am concerned if the revenue does slow down because I think we'll see a big derating in this company if it does. So while this company has been goated, I feel like going into 2026, it's much higher risk than an ASML or Google. I think you're really playing a dangerous game investing in Palunteer in 2026 at these valuations. This is one that I really haven't paid too much attention to over the past year. FICO has been in a big battle against Equifax and uh the other credit unions, but if we look at FICO's performance, it doesn't seem like it's done them any favors. It's at 17 $1,800 per share and the stock is down 11% this year. Now, it's not terrible, especially including the fact that over the past 5 years, it had a massive surge. So, we're coming off of some great years, giving up a little bit of gains. To any long-term investor, this doesn't strike any red flags, but we're looking at 2025 here. And to be fair, this hasn't been a great 2025 for FICO. I'm going to put this in the I'll put it in the falling off category. And I like that we're using that tier, that category. Just doesn't feel right to have an empty tier. So, FICO's falling off a little bit. Uh, in terms of 2026, I'm bullish on FICO. I am. I remain bullish on it. I think it's an incredible company. It's still deeply embedded. As investors, when we say a product is deeply embedded, it means that it's worked its way into the business process of different users or businesses or its customers to the point where it's very difficult to take it out of that process. And the deeper embedded a product is, the bigger its mode is, the more likely it is going to be around in the next 10 years. So FICO is so deeply embedded in our credit rating system that it's almost like a utility.

19:11 like it's impossible to uproot at this point. It is the brand name for mortgage ratings. So, when you go to get a loan, you're going to get a FICO credit report pulled every single time. It's that embedded in the system. It's not going away. And that gives them immense pricing power. We have Booking Holdings. This is one of the companies that I used to own. I actually took gains out of it and sold it this year. I made around $15,000 in gains and I put that money in Mastercard. Now, I don't want to go over the whole thesis of why I traded out of Booking Holdings into Mastercard, but I just want to leave the takeaway that Booking Holdings is still a company that I'm incredibly bullish on. I think investors could buy it here and do really well over the next 5 years, and I've been saying that the entire time.

19:51 This company's up 9% 10% year to date. I'm going to put this in the category, it's somewhere between locked in and chill. I think it's a little bit closer to a chill year for booking holdings. Right. Right there, right below the S&P 500. Not bad. Nobody's complaining, but it it could have gone better. What drives Booking's performance? The fact that it trades at a decent valuation and the fact that it has incredible economics. It is a super profitable company, incredibly high margins. Their gross margins are are again, they're just amazing. So, the company prints free cash flow. What are the concerns with this company? One of the concerns are that Google is entering into its space offering more AI search tools.

20:33 That's something that Booking Holdings is going to have to reckon with over the next five years. Next up, we have All right, we have uh Duelingo. Duelingo. We have to go over this one. Not a fun one for me to talk about because it's my biggest loser of the year. My biggest loser in my portfolio. I'm down $12,000 on this company. All right. It's not a big amount in comparison to the entire portfolio. And I intentionally position this as a small position, but this one has definitely not gone the way that I wanted. Uh it's it's been a company I should consider it the fail of the week.

21:05 This should be like my personal fail of the week with this one. What went wrong with this company? So the valuation collapsed for this company. Uh investors simply sold out of it. They exited all their shares. They wanted nothing to do with this company. It went from as high as around $540 down to around $180. So a massive selloff from the peak to where we are now. Now again, why does that happen? And this is a repeated theme. Premium revenue growth equals premium ratios, premium valuation. When that revenue growth is expected to slow down, so does the ratios and so does the valuation that compresses. That's what we saw with Dualingo. The management went on an earnings call and they said, "Hey, we're focusing more on the product and teaching and really getting people bought into this big opportunity over just bookings." And bookings are when we convert free customers to the paid customers. So, we're not going to try to use all our monetization tools and convert customers. We're going to try to just make our product a lot better and a lot more loved by consumers. Well, Wall Street looked at that and they said, "Yeah, that means that your revenue growth is going to slow down and we're going to sell the stock." So, that was not wellreceived by Wall Street. And that's where we are with this company.

22:16 Now, the fundamentals on the numbers look very strong. You can see the charts here on Qualrum. They're beautiful. They're all up and to the right, every single one of them. In any case, Dualingo has been cooked this year. It's been a bad one for the portfolio. I remain bullish on the company. I still hold my shares and I'm very optimistic about 2026, but it's definitely not one that I'm going to make a top position. I want Dualingo to grow into that position over time. I'm not going to keep shoveling money into this more speculative company. Now, next up, we have a fun one here. We have Tesla. And this is one that actually I think it's in the locked in category. Let's go ahead and take a look at it. But I think it belongs there. Tesla's stock performance has actually been good in 2025. If we look at the company, it's at $466 per share. The market cap's at an amazing $1.5 trillion.

23:08 Just an incredible size. Again, that's over three times the size of a Netflix. It's up 23% year to date. So, it's climbed in 2025. It's done really well. It's beat the index. It's done this notably while the fundamentals have not done quite as well. We look at the revenue and you can see that it's basically flat over the past couple of years. The amount that they've delivered over time continues to go down. So Tesla's a story of a company where the fundamentals are basically flat, but the stock price is going up. And this is where I have a problem with the investment. I'm concerned about Tesla being too reliant on future predictions, things that we don't really know how it's going to play out exactly, but Tesla investors are already pricing in that it's going to happen. specifically that robo taxi is going to be highly successful and scale dramatically. We've already heard a lot of timelines. We're supposed to have robo taxis all over the place already. That hasn't happened. And there's even bigger predictions in the future. On top of that, Tesla's also predicting a huge autonomous humanoid robot army. And that's something that Tesla is not working on alone. You have the likes of Amazon working on humanoid robots. And Amazon has a lot of lowerhanging fruit to do with it, specifically in their warehouses and their delivery drivers. So I believe that Tesla it has a good story but I think that Amazon's is a better story and it's priced with a lot less priced in. I continue to believe that Amazon is the better riskadjusted investment. Now next up we have GE. This is a company that Chris Hone popularized. That amazing investor has held this as a top position and it's done incredibly well.

24:42 It's now up to $312 per share up 85% year-to date. What an incredible performance by this. And this is followed by other years, in fact, five years of incredible performance, up 484%. GE has been goated. The company has been just incredibly, incredibly strong for a number of years, including 2025. I have no reason to believe it will slow down in 2026, and it's one that I think is worth looking at. What has driven this incredible performance by GE? Well, the fact that they spun off all of their lower quality businesses and GE has been left with this very technologically advanced dominant business of making jet engines that are so difficult to make very few companies will ever invest the capital to do so. The barriers to entry are very high. There's like ASML a very similar relationship of once they sell them they are the only ones that maintain them and it's that type of business. Now, after GE, we have PayPal.

25:37 And this is one I haven't checked on PayPal that frequent, but when I look at this company every time, it's never doing that well. PayPal is just a perpetual underperformer. And I think there's a couple reasons why this happens. In 2025, year to date, this company's down 31%. So, it's just been crushed this year. The company's been cooked once again. If we look at it, even going past 5 years, it's down 74%. And it seems like there's really no momentum in the stock whatsoever. No matter what PayPal management says, no matter what they do, no matter how many partnerships they make, this is a stock that never seems to go up. And I think that's for a specific reason. The transactions per account are trending downwards. This is an important KPI. Now, they have right here another one that's active accounts, which is flat. So, when your customer base is basically flat and the amount of customers you have that are using the company, again, which is flat, they're using it less and less, you're not going to have a good business. Just simply put, these two KPIs are driving the company. Unless PayPal can dramatically grow the transactions per account or the amount of users using the account, this stock isn't going anywhere. I'm not bullish on PayPal. If it were me, I would buy different companies, which I have like Mastercard, Visa, even more vertically integrated ones like Toast or For or ones that are more specific, maybe Square. Those companies have a better, more direct business model to grow than a PayPal. Now, next we have Netflix. Let's go ahead and take a look at this one. Netflix is going through a bit of drama with the whole Warner Brothers Discovery bidding war. They're fighting it out with Paramount and the Ellison family. So, it's the story between a super rich company against a super rich family trying to buy iconic assets. Now, everyone knows that I'm bullish on Netflix and the whole idea of them buying Warner Bros. I think is very attractive because you basically get a whole well of IP, great things that they can draw upon, they can create good content out of without any declining cable businesses. And I think that's a very good situation to be in. Now, Netflix at one point this year was up around 20 to 30%. So they were locked in doing their thing, very focused. And as soon as it became apparent that they were interested in bidding upon the Warner Brothers Discovery Assets, down went the stock. Lots of investors said, "This is too complex. I don't want any part of it. This is going to be dead money for the next year or so." So they just exit out of the stock and roll their money into a different position.

28:03 In my case, I've decided to stay put and even double down on Netflix. But in any case, it's up 5 to 6% year to date. And although I'm not predicting any exciting bullish movement next year, I think it's going to be a good year overall. I think that fundamentals will continue to develop. I think that they're likely to end up with Warner Brothers Discovery, even though that's far from guaranteed. Now, finally, we can't forget Nvidia. This has been a year of artificial intelligence. Let's go ahead and take a look at how this one has done. Nvidia is at 187. So, it's gone up this year. It's up actually a lot. 36 35% year-to date.

28:36 Very good year from Nvidia. Not quite as good as it's done in the past five years, uh, but still great. Nobody's, again, no one is complaining about Nvidia. Every investor is happy in this company. This would put Nvidia in the locked in category. It's not the incredible gains that we've had with these goated companies, but Nvidia is right there. In fact, it's close. When I look at what's driven Nvidia this year, it's simply been all the deal making.

28:59 Now a lot of investors will point out a lot of circular financing care meaning that Nvidia is making deals to invest in companies which are making deals to buy Nvidia products and OpenAI is making deals with cloud companies that Nvidia made deals with and so on and so forth. It's this big web of circular financing deals where Nvidia is playing the bank. But behind all of that there is real revenue growth here. This is really growing. Nvidia continues to grow at a rapid pace and until that slows down, they can support the valuation. They can keep growing 10 to 30% per year. So, it's been a great year for some of the most popular stocks overall. Anyone who's invested in 2025 should have made some real gains. I've done so in my portfolio and there's reason to believe that we should next year, but that's where we get into some of the predictions. Now, some of these predictions for 2026 that we're getting into, we can start off, for example, with Dan Ies. He has a prediction specifically on AI and software.

29:56 >> Yeah. Look, I mean to me it's really about this is going to be the year for cyber security meets AI because as all these workloads are moving to the cloud, the use cases are building the palunteers, the mongos, the snowflakes, cyber security is going to be front and center. Now, of course, it all starts with big tech in terms of Nvidia, Microsoft, hyperscalers, but I look at Crowd Strike and I think what Curts and the team are doing, they're at the intersection, and I think they probably have some of the best AI footprint when it comes to cyber security investors way under the radar in terms of this name.

30:28 >> Prediction he gives is to buy CrowdStrike that this one's going to be important in 2026. I actually agree with this. Crowdstrike has always been a company that I've somewhat avoided because I do have overlap with companies like Microsoft and Google that are very big into cyber security, especially Microsoft. But CrowdStrike is a standalone pure play into cyber security. It's an incredibly good company. We have uh some employees that work at Crowdstrike that are here on the Discord and they talk about the culture and just how it's a great company overall. So, it's one that I really like the company itself. My my big hold up with CrowdStrike has been the valuation.

31:03 It's been in the upper end of valuation for a long period of time, but it is one that's worth looking at if it does have a dip. Now, next, of course, we have to go to Tom Lee, who continually makes predictions about the future. In most cases, he's been right so far. Let's see if he's right again in 2026. There's going to be likely a more dovish Fed. >> Um, and that dovish Fed will allow business confidence to recover. So, the ISM, I think, recovers back above 50. So the first argument he makes is the dovish Fed, which means he thinks the Fed is going to be very accommodating to the market. President Trump has noted specifically that the next person that he's replacing Jerome Pal with is going to be somebody that's going to lower interest rates. And then the next thing that he points out is a theme that he's talked about for a while where he believes the new undiscovered tech companies are the banks. He thinks banks are tech companies in disguise.

31:54 Financial services companies are really big beneficiaries of AI and they're big beneficiaries of using blockchain technology. Both will allow them to reduce their employee intensity of their business. And so I think the large tech forward banks are going to start to see margin expansion and trade more like tech stocks in the future. >> And that's why you know the JP Morgans and the Goldman's could actually be the next Mag Seven. the JP Morgans's and the Goldman's could be the next Mag Seven.

32:25 So, this isn't something that he just mentioned once. Again, this has been something he's been talking about for some time. When we look at a bank like JP Morgan, an increasing amount of their actual revenue comes from services like credit cards, specifically Visa. They do a lot of business with them. They pay a lot of fees. And then Visa has become a massive revenue generator for JP Morgan. So, a lot of it isn't even with lending activity. It's with things like digital services and they're doing that more and more where less of the bank proportionally comes from simple bank activities. More and more of it is coming with these high margin digital services. So Tom Lee's making the argument that as the margins go up on these companies, as they become more digitized, as we have AI making fewer employees, we also have a company being treated more like a tech company. I think it's a very valid argument. I think it's a differentiated one. And although companies like JP Morgan have been trading at higher and higher valuations, I do agree with them.

33:18 There's likely more room to run. And if you buy companies like Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, you're buying incredibly resilient companies, not the fragile ones that existed around 2007. They are much more robust today. Now, in terms of my predictions, we've had three really good years. We have 2022 that was bad. Then we had 2023, which we had plus 24% gains in the S&P 500. uh we have 2024 which we have plus 23% gains. So two consecutive years of 24 to 23% gains and then in 2025 we have 17 18% gains. So we have three really good consecutive years of gains. And in a way this makes it feel like we owe the market a bad year like like it's kind of like a a deficit like we've had three good years so now we have to pay the market back one year.

34:07 And that's very similar to the gamblers's fallacy. The gamblers's fallacy is that if you go to a slot machine and you lose like five times in a row, that the the slot machine kind of owes you a win. Like you feel like you you're owed it more than if you'd only lost one in a row. When in reality, the odds of winning are actually the exact same every single individual time you play. So whether you've lost five in a row or 10 in a row, the next time you play, you have the exact same odds of winning. Well, investors do the exact same thing. Because we've had a couple really good years, investors have basically the inverse of the gamblers's fallacy. They think that we owe the market a bad year. And this is called mean reversion bias. It means that investors become a little bit more cautious and they make predictions that the market's going to go down or not have quite as much quite as much gains next year. So you'll see a lot of people making predictions that the market will return around uh five to like maybe 10% next year, right? Just kind of like it'll go down maybe return about this much next year. And that's typical mean reversion bias. Or a lot of investors will say, you know what, we've had three good years. It's about time we have a bad year. So I think the market's going to go down maybe uh 10% next year. In reality, when we look at how the market behaves over longer time periods, we can look at the past 30 years. The first thing that I'll note is the market rarely returns low singledigit returns.

35:32 That's just not something it does. Right here, I can draw a line through the 10% return. And this is over the past 30 years. And we have 1 2 3 four times overall where the market has returned a positive 0 to 10% return. So, what I learned from this is when the market goes up, it typically goes up over 10%. In fact, out of those 30 years, how many times did the market go up over 10%. It went up 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18. Over half of the years, the market went up over 10%. Only four out of 30 did it go up less than 10% and not be negative. So, if you're looking at the stats, historically, the market is more likely to go into the red or go up above 10%. one of those two things. And overall, the market's more likely to go up above 10%. The odds are in the favor of it doing that. So, I believe next year, my prediction is we have another 10% plus gaining year. I think it'll be like 10 to 20%. That's typically where the market returns. That's how it behaves. And unless we get any type of big event, any type of bare market, like big value contraction, if the economy really goes south, of course, that will cause the market to go down into the red. But unless that happens, if we just keep doing the same things we're doing, the S&P 500 will continue to grow earnings. Companies will trade around their valuation a little bit, but if earnings growth happens, if buybacks happens, if dividends happens, I believe we're going to have another another year where companies can go up 10 to 15%. And my portfolio is positioned for that future. I have many companies like Mastercard, Google, Microsoft, Amazon that all have the ability to grow their earnings in excess of 15%. So, I'm excited for 2026. I look forward to it.

37:22 I'm not concerned about this next year. Now, moving on, we get to the fail of the week. This is the last one of 2025. And in this case, it's the battle between Nike and a soccer coach. Now, typically, I like a good underdog story. I like it when somebody sticks up to a big company, but this is no hero. This soccer coach is not sticking up to a big company. He's trying to pull a fast one on Nike. He's trying to pull a real gotcha here, and it's going to fail.

37:48 spectacularly. Let's go ahead and just look at the story here. Nike has done a lot to relaunch its Colt Classic Total 90s soccer uh line ahead of next year's World Cup. Nike has done a lot of work in preparation for this. They've reimagined their whole World Cup line, their streetear version, a retrostyled cleat, new jerseys and balls, and planned events in cities such as Melbourne and Milan. It let one thing slip. They didn't renew the US trademark rights for their early 2000s brand. So Nike has like a lot of, you know, they have their main brand and they have all these subbrands like Total 90. And this was just a slip up. They didn't renew this brand even though they were actively using the brand. Now someone realized that they forgot to renew this brand. Hugh Barlet, an engineer and youth soccer coach with no affiliation to Nike didn't. A year ago, the 35-year-old from New Orleans, emailed Nike's legal team to say that he had registered the Total 90 trademark. After Nike's registration had lapsed in 2019, Barlet had since developed his own Total 90 clothing and shoe line and suggested the two join up. Now, he emailed Nike to say that they're infringing on his brand. He says, quote, "Given the exciting potential for collaboration, I would like to welcome a call at your earliest convenience to explore how we can best work together." He wrote, "So, this guy really had the guts to take this brand that Nike forgot to renew.

39:15 They clearly forgot to do so. He took it. He made his own little shoe line. And then he emails Nike saying that they're infringing on his brand, but he would love to work together. Nike's team is probably over there thinking like, who is this guy? What is this? We don't want to work with you. Some random soccer coach that that now says you own our brand. This has got to be one of the craziest emails that Nike has ever received. But this continues on.

39:40 Obviously, they got in a back and forth. Nike probably didn't enjoy these emails. They they probably weren't loving this. They said instead of a collaboration, the back and forth culminated in Barlet's Total 90 suing Nike for the trademark infringement in November. So Nike showed no interest in collaboration with this guy. So, after this guy confronted Nike with this fake collaborative proposal, which is really a way for him to get this brand, try to extort Nike into buying it back from him, he says, quote, "I have some really good ideas that I think would benefit them way more than me, but it would require us to work together, and that was probably the one that hurt my heart the most." Bartlett said he filed the lawsuit in November, the same day Nike rejected his $2.5 million proposal. So, he got a hold of this brand and he's wanting them to pay him out $2 and a half million dollars. Now, this lawsuit is ongoing. Nike won an initial round, they say, with the federal judge in Eastern District of Louisiana that rejected Barllet's motion to temporarily restrain Nike from selling its total 90 products. So, again, now this soccer coach, 35 years old, that just snagged this brand wants to stop Nike from selling their products. the one the biggest clothing the biggest fashion brand in the world and they're saying Nikey's got to stop selling it. The judge said that Barllet's company hadn't provided evidence that it competes with Nike or the consumers might confuse their products as he had argued. So, I actually looked into this and there's a couple things that this guy has to prove to make his case successful. He has to prove that consumers might mistake the two companies. like you might be intending to purchase Nike's Total 90 brand, but instead you accidentally bought Barlet's Total Nike brand. And obviously that's not the case. Who's going to mistake his random brand for Nike? Nobody's going to do that. The other thing that he has to prove, and this is going to be even more difficult, is that Nike intentionally abandoned the brand. So this is something that protects companies from accidental mishaps and accidental misfilings like this. As long as Nike can prove that they were intending to continue to use the brand, that they hadn't abandoned it, then that means that they really do own the brand, even if they forgot to file it. So, that's more of like a filing concern. It wasn't really intentional for them to abandon the brand. So, Hugh Barlet here has to prove that Nike had abandoned the brand and Nike saying, "We never abandoned this brand." At the crux of this dispute is whether Bartlett can show that Nike abandoned the trademark after it failed to renew its resignation. Nike, which has petitioned to cancel Bartlett's Total 90 registration, said in court filings that it permitted the Total 90 trademark to lapse, but it added that it never gave up plans to use it and retains common law rights. In her ruling, the judge agreed that Nike had continued to use the mark after the lapse, in part by licensing it to video game maker Electronic Arts. So, Nike, of course, wasn't trying to give up the Total 90 brand. They had no intentions of letting this brand lapse. In fact, they were still doing deals under this brand with EA. Someone just forgot to file the paperwork. Now, again, I'm not invested in Nike. I have no reason to defend this company. And I realize the natural inclination from everyone wanting to side with the little guy. We all we all love an underdog story, the small guy against a big bad company like Nike. But I don't feel that way about the story. I don't feel that way at all.

43:04 Nike had a simple accounting mistake, a simple uh general administrative mistake of not renewing a specific license, one that they were fully intending to keep, fully intending to use, one that they were actively working with. This guy exploited it by taking the license and then trying to friendly plug himself into the business and extorting Nike out of millions of dollars. This is reprehensible behavior. These people like Hugh Bartlett do nothing for society. You're doing nothing for society when you do this. You're just trying to exploit a big company, enrich yourself in the process while offering no value to anyone else in between. It is rent-seeking value extractive behavior and it should be shamed. I I think the actions like this, people that try to do trolling and try to take advantage of companies filing mistakes like this should be shamed in a proper society. So I'll call this out in the process. Again, I have no defenses for Nike. There's lots of things I can criticize Nike for, but the focus of this story is Hugh Bartlett's attempt to extract value out of Nike without offering anything to society. My advice for people like this, instead of trying these trolling, rentse seeeking activities, try creating value for people. Create a product that they will want to buy. Don't be a patent troll.

44:24 Don't be a renewal troll looking for when something expires that a business forgot to renew. actually try to create something yourself that you created value for for other people. That's what we should be encouraging, what we should be endorsing, and we should be shaming this type of garbage. So, I'm fully hopeful that Nike wins this and I think that they have every reason to win. In fact, from when I read this, it seems like the judge has caught on as well.

44:46 Uh, this is under common law that Nike was still using this trademark and I don't think Hugh Bartlett here is going to get a dime out of Nike. The only people that win in this situation are the lawyers. Everyone else has wasted time and wasted money in the process and that is why it is the fail of the week. That's all for this episode.