Alan Skrainka

Investment pro specializing in commentary on the economy and financial markets.

[Alan Skrainka @askrainka]

Monthly Commentary | July 2, 2026 https://t.co/ufl3oOG3PX
Monthly Market Summary
Second Quarter 2026: The Reward Arrived on Schedule
Three months ago, the S&P 500 had just finished its worst quarter since 2022, and investors’ nerves were badly shaken. But the mood on Wall Street changes very quickly. The S&P 500 returned approximately 15.2 percent in the second quarter, its best quarterly result since the second quarter of 2020, recovering the first quarter’s 4.4 percent loss several times over. The index now stands up 10.1 percent for the year, and the Dow Jones Industrial Average set a record close on the quarter’s final day. June itself was quiet — the S&P 500 slipped 1.0 percent — but beneath the surface the rally kept broadening, which is exactly what a durable advance looks like. Investors who stayed invested through the March lows captured all of it. Those who sold did not, and no forecast would have told them when to get back in. Click the link to read more.

[Alan Skrainka @askrainka]

How to Use AI to Make Money — and How People Lose It https://t.co/es6oYaCkeV
More and more people are managing their money with a chatbot open in one window and a brokerage account in the other. A growing share of Americans now say they trust AI enough to give them financial advice, and many are already acting on it. At this spring’s Future Proof conference in Miami Beach, one startup’s pitch caught the mood: “Make Claude manage your money.” A 39-year-old entrepreneur and his 76-year-old mother used a chatbot to move into Broadcom in February and were up more than 30% by June.

Stories like that are intoxicating — and they are often how people talk right before they lose a lot of money. AI can be a valuable resource for your finances, and it is improving every day. But it is a solid tool for some money questions and a genuinely dangerous one for others, and most people can’t tell the difference. The problem is rarely the technology; it’s that people are using it for the wrong job.

[Alan Skrainka @askrainka]

Fund Family Analysis: Fidelity https://t.co/kzCQfzjmNe
Five point eight trillion dollars in assets under management. Privately held by the founding family for nearly eighty years. A research infrastructure that spans active equity, fixed income, index, and quantitative strategies across global markets. The question is whether family ownership in the third generation sustains the research‑driven culture that built the firm—or whether generational transition introduces the complacency that typically accompanies inherited enterprise.

[Alan Skrainka @askrainka]

This Small Cap Fund has Outperformed 93% of its peers over the past 10 years https://t.co/8xtGoLBkXP
Executive Summary

Outperformed 93% of its U.S. Small Cap Core peers over the trailing decade — and ranks #1 of 239 funds in our Manager Selection System.

A rules-based, quantitative process scores every stock in the benchmark on durable traits — quality, valuation, profitability, momentum — holding several hundred names in the fund while not straying too far from the index.

Run by one of the world’s largest, lowest-cost, client-aligned managers, with an expense ratio a small fraction of the category median — neutralizing the fee drag that defeats most active funds.

Top-tier returns came from disciplined construction, not added risk — the steadier path within an inherently volatile category.

[Alan Skrainka @askrainka]

How to Survive a Stock Market Melt-up https://t.co/WLxLbx2f4C
A melt-up is a powerful, fast advance in which the stock market keeps setting records and investors who hung back can no longer stand to miss out. Money rushes in, momentum builds on itself, the headlines turn euphoric, and the people who were cautious a year ago start to feel foolish. That is the market we are in today.

[Alan Skrainka @askrainka]

Why Interest Rates Are Rising https://t.co/BMgQ51GBsX
Right now, rates are rising almost everywhere in the world. The yield on the 10-year U.S. Treasury — the most watched interest rate on the planet — sits around 4.56%, the highest in a year. In Japan, the 30-year government bond yield recently hit about 4.2%, the highest since that bond was first sold back in 1999. Across the seven biggest rich economies, the average cost for a government to borrow for 10 years is pushing toward 4%, up from roughly 3.2% just a few months ago.

[Alan Skrainka @askrainka]

Tech CEOs Acting Badly https://t.co/vtDveyOHw8
Last Sunday, the former chief executive of Google stood in front of the University of Arizona’s graduating class and tried to tell them the future would be wonderful. They booed him. Not once — repeatedly. When Eric Schmidt drew a parallel between artificial intelligence and the arrival of the personal computer, the stadium turned on him. He paused, and said something more honest than most of his peers have managed in three years of breathless AI promotion:
“I know what many of you are feeling about that. I can hear you… there is a fear in your generation that the future has already been written, that the machines are coming, that the jobs are evaporating… and I understand that fear.”
He does not, in fact, appear to understand it — because he kept going, telling graduates the transformation ahead would be, in his words, “larger, faster and more consequential than what came before.” That promise — bigger, faster, more disruptive than anything that came before — was exactly what the graduates did not want to hear, and the boos rose to meet it.

[Alan Skrainka @askrainka]

Could We Be Living Through Our Own Roaring 20s? https://t.co/b3zNrcaP8P
Great economic forces flow like a tide over societies only half conscious of what is befalling them. An American watching the world from a porch in 1920 would have struggled to recognize the country by 1929. The horse was vanishing. The radio had arrived. The car had moved from luxury to necessity. The movie theater had become the social center of town. Electric light had reached two-thirds of homes. Whole occupations - blacksmith, ice-cutter, saloon keeper, carriage maker, telephone switchboard operator - were quietly disappearing while new ones nobody had heard of in 1919 employed millions.
The 1920s were not a slow drift. They were a tide. Could we be living through our own roaring 20s?

[Alan Skrainka @askrainka]

Where Could the Dow Jones Industrial Average Be in 30 Years? https://t.co/9J71Mi5ku2
Many people have strong opinions about the stock market. In sharing those views, they often cite the president’s actions, economic forecasts, or the Federal Reserve’s next moves. But in reality, such predictions tend to have little practical value—because in the short term, markets are unpredictable and just about anything can happen.
How can you plan for your financial future when stock market returns are so uncertain? If your goal is to set assumptions about how your wealth might grow, the best place to start is by looking at the past. Relying on historical experience is a sounder approach than trying to predict the future.

[Alan Skrainka @askrainka]

The Pendulum Swings Back https://t.co/Y0BDyKUFax
April 2026: The Strongest Month in Nearly Six Years
Throughout a difficult first quarter, our message was steady: stay the course. Setbacks are the price long-term investors pay for the returns equities have delivered over decades. April delivered the proof. The S&P 500 delivered a total return of 10.5 percent — its strongest single-month return since November 2020 — and recovered nearly all of the first quarter’s loss. Investors who held their diversified portfolios through the volatility were rewarded. Those who sold near the March lows were not. The Iran conflict, the tariff regime, and the questions surrounding the AI investment cycle have not been fully resolved, and they may not be for some time. That is the nature of equity investing. Markets do not wait for clarity to recover, and the best months arrive without an invitation. April was such a month.

[Alan Skrainka @askrainka]

https://t.co/tGvs5CaQql
The investment landscape is about to experience an unprecedented wave of initial public offerings. Three companies alone—SpaceX, OpenAI, and Anthropic—represent over $2.9 trillion in combined private market valuation. These are not speculative private equity bets. These are market-defining platforms that will reshape the public equity universe when they list.
This guide is not investment advice. It is financial education. The purpose is to help individual investors understand how IPOs work, what allocation processes actually look like, what history teaches us about IPO performance, and how to think clearly about valuation in the face of extraordinary hype. We’ll also discuss how investors who aren’t invited to participate in the IPOs can still share in the growth of these companies.

[Alan Skrainka @askrainka]

https://t.co/ntkKEOtv7m
What the Market Sees That You Don't
Why stocks keep making new highs while the headlines look dire.
The S&P 500 closed at another new all-time high this week. If you only read the headlines, you might reasonably wonder how that is possible. The Middle East is at a boil. The Iran conflict dominates every newscast. The prevailing narrative is that Iran is winning, that it controls the Strait of Hormuz, that oil is on its way to $150, and that the global economy is one tanker away from recession.
And yet stocks keep climbing.
This disconnect confuses a lot of investors, and it shouldn’t. It is not a contradiction. It is a reminder of something the market has been telling us for a hundred years: the stock market is not a record of the present. It is a weighing machine for the future.

[Alan Skrainka @askrainka]

Experts Are Having Another Tough Year https://t.co/G5VkeozGOl
This has been a rough stretch for the market strategists who told investors to turn defensive. The risks were not imaginary. Tariffs were real. The Iran shock was real. Oil did spike and volatility did rise. What went wrong was timing. Too much of Wall Street cut targets and embraced defensive trades after markets had already absorbed most of the fear, and then the market turned before those revised narratives could catch up.

[Alan Skrainka @askrainka]

https://t.co/atbKW8l28T
Most investors know they should diversify. Most understand the case for long-term investing. But knowing what to do and knowing how to build a portfolio that actually does it are two different problems.

That gap is what the https://t.co/x9bK91CYCp model portfolios are designed to close.

Over much of the past four decades, I have assisted advisors and individual investors build and manage investment portfolios, evaluated hundreds of mutual funds and ETFs, and developed a manager selection process that separates genuine skill from luck. The model portfolios I am introducing today are the practical application of everything I have learned. They are built on the same principles I outlined in Principle-Based Investing: diversify because the future is uncertain, keep costs low, focus on what you can control, and give yourself enough time for compounding to do its work.

These are not theoretical exercises. Each portfolio is tracked in YCharts with real holdings, real allocations, and real performance data updated quarterly. They are designed so that any self-directed investor can replicate them in a brokerage account using widely available mutual funds and ETFs.

Why Model Portfolios Matter

A model portfolio solves the implementation problem. It translates investment principles into a specific, actionable set of holdings with defined allocations. It removes the paralysis that comes from staring at thousands of available funds and wondering where to start.

But not all model portfolios are created equal. Many are marketing tools designed to gather assets. Others are backward-looking constructions that look impressive on paper but were never meant to be followed in real time. The portfolios I have built are different in three respects.

[Alan Skrainka @askrainka]

This is Not the 1970s https://t.co/nMoDyIPAMi
Oil prices are rising, and if you drive a car or heat a home, you feel it. There is nothing abstract about $4 gasoline. It is a tax on everyday life, and it falls hardest on the people who can least afford it. That deserves to be said plainly.

But as an investor, you need to separate what you feel at the pump from what is likely to happen to the economy. And on that question, the data tells a very different story than the one playing out in the headlines.

Two structural shifts have fundamentally changed the relationship between oil prices and economic damage. Both of them work in our favor.

[Alan Skrainka @askrainka]

Rules-Based Investing in Practice https://t.co/V6n07deXN7
Most investors build the core of their portfolio around a broad U.S. equity index fund. That is a reasonable starting point. Low cost, broadly diversified, fully invested at all times — the index fund advantage is well established, and for many investors a total market index fund is all they will ever need.

But what if you could keep everything that makes an index fund effective — the low cost, the diversification, the discipline — and add a modest, evidence-based tilt toward the parts of the market that academic research says should deliver higher returns over time? Not a dramatic shift. Not a speculative bet. Just a systematic adjustment, applied across nearly two thousand stocks, grounded in the same factor research that has driven institutional portfolio construction for decades.

[Alan Skrainka @askrainka]

https://t.co/93rT9YnV7O
Over the past four decades, index funds have earned their reputation. They are low cost, broadly diversified, and fully invested at all times. That combination—what I call the index fund advantage—has allowed broad index funds to outperform the majority of actively managed funds after costs over virtually every long-term period measured. For most investors, a portfolio built around index funds remains a sound foundation.
But index funds are not the only way to capture that advantage. A newer generation of investment strategies applies the same principles—low cost, broad diversification, fully invested—while making deliberate, research-backed adjustments to the mix. These strategies go by several names: rules-based investing, systematic investing, or factor investing. The labels differ, but the idea is the same. Instead of relying on a manager’s individual judgment or a market-cap-weighted formula, these strategies follow transparent, predetermined rules grounded in decades of academic research. They target specific, measurable characteristics of stocks—called factors—that have historically been associated with higher returns over time.
This is not traditional stock selection repackaged in academic language. It is a disciplined middle path between passive indexing and traditional active management. And for investors willing to think in decades rather than quarters, it is worth understanding.

[Alan Skrainka @askrainka]

https://t.co/gPwBqVVdAd

The preceding four parts of this series have tried to establish what we know about AI with some confidence and what remains genuinely uncertain. This final section translates that analysis into a portfolio framework — one grounded not in predictions about which AI companies will win, but in the same investment principles that have guided sound long-term investing through every previous disruption.

[Alan Skrainka @askrainka]

Three Wars, Three Recoveries
On February 28, the United States and Israel launched strikes against Iran. In the three weeks since, the Strait of Hormuz has been effectively closed, disrupting roughly twenty percent of global seaborne oil trade. Brent crude has surged past $126 a barrel. The Dow has fallen below 46,300. Headlines are doing what headlines do during wars: competing to describe the worst-case scenario.
Your instinct right now is to do something. To sell. To move to cash. To protect what you have built.
I want to show you why that instinct, however understandable, has been wrong every single time.
https://t.co/GY7Nm78yPv

[Alan Skrainka @askrainka]

https://t.co/S6XItSp3mV

This report covers lessons from the last big disruption. The dot-com bubble of 1995–2000 is the most instructive event in modern investing history for anyone trying to navigate the AI transition. Not because AI is the Internet. It isn’t — there are important differences which we will address. But because the investor behavior that drove losses in 2000 and 2001 was not caused by ignorance of technology. It was caused by ignoring the principles that have always guided sound long-term investing. Those same principles are being tested again today.

The lessons here are not about which companies won or lost. They are about the errors investors made that were entirely preventable — and that are being repeated, in updated form, as this is written.