Jacob Phelps

Fourth Turning Investing: The 2026 Paradigm Shifts You Can't Ignore • Why what's worked for the last 40 years doesn't anymore • 3 shifts shaping markets and how to position your portfolio • The reinforcing cycle stressing the fiat system more than ever before Watch now - link in replies ↓

Silver & Gold up 2% to start the week.

Every child you add makes a many more connections for the entire family. The graph of love is not a bunch of arrows pointing only to mom. They will all have a long childhood of playing together. (n(n-1)/2 more connections to be exact)

Now Live ✅ Strong Wealth 2026 Investor Newsletter available free on our website. • Bitcoin bear market predictions • Global paradigm shift shaping markets right now • How we're positioning clients to benefit We removed some proprietary information exclusive to our clients. Link in replies (it will pop up when our site loads).

My takeaway from the premature death of James van der Beek is that the American healthcare system is terrible. His wife apparently was using GoFundMe to assist with treatment. He was auctioning off acting memorabilia for the same thing. I have no idea what he did with his acting $$, but he doesn’t strike me as the sort of guy who just wasted it on nonsense. If he can’t even get treatment for early cancer without running into financial trouble - we’ve got a real problem. And this isn’t news. Middle class families are being wrecked by Obamacare. No one can get a catastrophic plan anymore with low premiums - because they have to subsidize too many dysfunctional lifestyles and even illegal aliens.

The biggest threat to the wealth management model isn’t AI. It’s clients doing the math. The next wave is coming Not automation of advice Fee awareness Why pay an uncapped 1% of your net worth every year… For advice that has nothing to do with how much your portfolio grew? Your CPA doesn’t charge 1% of your income Your attorney doesn’t charge 1% of your house But in wealth management? The bigger your account gets The bigger their raise Automatic Forever And here’s the part that stings: Most of the real value in financial planning isn’t managing money It’s tax strategy Cash flow design Deferred comp elections Equity comp timing Retirement distribution sequencing None of which scale with your portfolio size Yet the fee does Index funds killed stock pickers Hourly and flat fee planners are coming for the 1% crowd This won’t flip overnight It never does It’s gradual Then all at once Incentives don’t lie

In academic finance, there's this concept called "anomaly" as in investors *seem* to be able to consistently earn higher (beta adjusted) returns than the market by going long certain ex ante systematically predictable characteristics. Thousands of such anomalies have been found over the last 40 years. Most of them you could conceive of a plausible rational explanation. Momentum for example you are compensated for bearing the occasional crash risk. Value you are bearing potentially business cycle risk or simply harvesting a behavioral bias of investors overpaying for glitter/growth. "Quality" (or low vol) is the one factor that has never really made sense to me and has always felt like a true "anomaly" to me. Secretly, I keep wondering if it's simply an artefact of the last 15 years of low interest rate reaching for yield environment and AAPL at low teen multiple grew to be a richly priced perfect company. Costco/Walmart became 50x PE. All bc investors were starved of yields from bonds and just bought these stocks instead and bid them up way beyond what could be rationally justified.