Stocks & Markets Podcast:  TheStreet Pro's analysts look to 2026

Note: This article is based on TheStreet’s Stock & Markets Podcast. Hosted by Chris Versace, veteran Wall Street investor and lead portfolio manager for TheStreet Pro, the weekly podcasts are available early to members of TheStreet Pro investing club.

Wow, that was quite a year, wasn’t it?

In 2025, we saw Doland Trump return to the White House, unleashing tariffs that tore into the economy while AI stocks became the central driver for the S&P 500 and the Nasdaq.

It was a crazy 12 months, no doubt, and so five of TheStreet Pro's best analysts came together on the Dec. 18 edition of the Stocks & Markets Podcast to review the year’s big events and share their thoughts on what to expect in 2026.

Jason Meshnick, TheStreet Pro’s managing editor, took the helm this time, while Chris Versace, the podcast’s regular host and lead manager for TheStreet Pro Portfolio, joined Helene Meisler, Stephen Guilfoyle, James "Rev Shark" DePorre, and Louis Llanes to discuss what was and what’s to come.

“What I've been writing about recently is that the market had a shift, I believe, last summer,” Meisler said, noting that it started when the so-called Magnificent Seven stocks—a group of big-name stocks that includes Amazon (AMZN), Meta Platforms (META), and Tesla (TSLA)—started to diverge. “

“They stopped moving as a group, and that was, to me, the biggest change in the market,” she added. “And a lot of stocks peaked in July and August, not just the mags, all stocks. And they started heading down, and a lot of them finished that correction somewhere around late November.” 

 Meisler said she believes the mega-cap stocks will continue to diverge. 

Analyst cites market resilience

“So, in the short term, I think we're going to get oversold as we get closer to Christmas, and we are going to get some kind of a rally into the new year,” she said. “We don't have a pile of stocks that look like bases. We have a pile of stocks that look like oversold rallies.”

The panelists discussed what surprised them most in 2025, with Versace citing the level of GDP throughout the year, “despite the impact of tariffs, despite the bifurcated consumer.”

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“We lost more jobs in October, but you still look at the overall vector velocity of what these data points are telling us for GDP,” he said. “Very surprised because it sure doesn't feel like a 3% economy. That's probably the biggest surprise to me.”

“Other than the New York Mets missing the playoffs after having the best record in baseball in June, what surprised me in 2025 was the length of the government shutdown,” Guilfoyle said.

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“How long the Fed dragged on with their quantitative tightening program, because that was a mistake. How long it took Jerome Powell and his cronies at the (Federal Open Markets Committee) to realize what they were looking at.”

“I was really surprised that given the stretched valuations, the tariff uncertainty, interest rate uncertainty, geopolitical events, it's amazing and how resilient the market has been,” Llanes said. “The mega caps really outperforming technically rhymes with cycles that I remember in my career. The trend is your friend until it bends at the end, they say.”

Llanes added that “discipline keeps you in the market.” 

Sectors to watch in 2026

“Have a process and work your process,” Meshnick said. “And if your process isn't working, figure out a different process.”

DePorre said he thought the most surprising thing in the past year was the great concentration in the mega Caps, “and how that has caused the indices to distort what was really going on with the market.”

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“There was a lot of poor action that was hidden behind the indexes,” he said. “And there were areas where there were great themes and things like quantum computers and rockets."

"But that was fairly narrow, and the whole market was basically focused on those mega caps the whole time, and stock picking was not as effective as it should have been.”

The analysts discussed the stocks and sectors that are likely to surprise to the upside in 2026.

“Consumer adoption of AI that is really going to drive greater demand for digital infrastructure,” Versace said, “that is data centers, that is chips, that is servers.”

“From a business sense, I think the real place to be is going to be nuclear power,” Guilfoyle said. “From a stock market point of view, I'm thinking as AI becomes more democratized, as the AI trade broadens away from infrastructure and towards the industries that may benefit, I think I like the financials.”

Llanes said he analyzed sectors based on Trend, Overbought/Oversold, Relative Performance, and Quality (TOQR) patterns.

"Financials had a score 7.8 out of ten in my criteria,” he said. “And real estate has a slightly better 8.2 out of ten.”

“One group that I think will do well in 2026 is biotechnology,” DePorre said. “Biotech has been under a lot of pressure because of FDA (Food & Drug Administration). You've had all that craziness going on there for a while. It's underperformed for years."

"It's been a terrible, terrible group for a long time. And this finally started coming alive in the last few months.”

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