In this Episode of the Secure Your Retirement Podcast, Radon and Murs discuss the stock market outlook 2026 and what investors should be paying attention to as headlines around inflation, geopolitical tension, tariffs, and government uncertainty continue to drive market volatility. With markets coming off multiple strong years of performance, they break down what’s really happening beneath the surface — and how to think about market risks and market opportunities without letting emotions derail your long-term plan for Retirement.

Listen in to learn about how inflation and the stock market are connected, why proper diversification goes beyond simply owning multiple funds, and how a thoughtful retirement investing strategy — built around the three-bucket strategy — can help you stay confident no matter what 2026 brings. If you’re focused on retirement income planning, protecting gains after a strong run-up, and building a Retirement financial plan that allows you to retire comfortably, this episode delivers timely perspective and practical guidance.

In this episode, find out:

• Why the stock market outlook 2026 is shaped by inflation, global leadership changes, and concentrated tech exposure
• How hidden concentration risk can undermine your diversification strategy — even if you own multiple funds or advisors
• The importance of disciplined portfolio rebalancing after several strong market years
• How the three-bucket strategy supports stability, growth, and income during periods of market volatility
• Why integrating investments with taxation, withdrawals, estate planning, and income creates a stronger retirement financial planning framework.

Tweetable Quotes:

“Diversification isn’t about how many accounts you have — it’s about making sure your investments aren’t all exposed to the same risk.” — Radon Stancil

“There’s always going to be something creating market volatility. The key is having a plan in place before it happens.” — Murs Tariq

Resources:

If you are in or nearing retirement and you want to gain clarity on what questions you should be asking, learn what the biggest retirement myths are, and identify what you can do to achieve peace of mind for your retirement, get started today by requesting our complimentary video course, Four Steps to Secure Your Retirement!

To access the course, simply visit POMWealth.net/podcast.

Here’s the full transcript:

Welcome, everyone, to Secure Your Retirement Podcast. We are today going to talk a little bit about the markets. We try to, every few weeks, really bring things back around to what’s going on in the markets, what are things that we need to be looking at, and where we’re headed. 

People are obviously concerned. You get through a year and then you get into the next year and you’re like, where’s this year going to go? And so, we do have a few different things that we want to bring up because as we came into 2026, if we take about the theme that left 2025, there’s not a lot of difference in the themes between the two. But when you get up every day, you’re probably reading headlines and you’re hearing things like inflation. You’re obviously hearing about 

government shutdowns. You’re hearing about geopolitical issues. You’re hearing about all kinds of controversy with the government, when I’m talking about controversy, one side not getting along with the other side. And all of these different things can really just add to the stress. And you’re saying, well, what is this going to mean to the markets? How are the markets going to be affected? 

And I think that really what this all comes down to is having a plan, having something in place. We talk about it all the time, the three bucket strategy, which we’ll talk about today a little bit again, but having things set up in such a way that you’re not going to get hit. 

if the markets just take a tumble. And that really does kind of come down to this idea of being diversified. And by the way, Merce is going to talk about this. I just want to make sure that this gets in your mind. When we say diversification, sometimes people will say, I want to diversify and have two or three advisors. You could have five advisors and not be diversified at all. Sometimes people say, I don’t want all my eggs in one basket. 

You could have five advisors and have all your eggs in one basket. Let me explain. Let’s just say that you bought the S&P 500. SPY is an ETF that’s the S&P 500. And you own that with all five advisors. You’re in the same buckets. You’re no different. Just having five advisors doesn’t help you diversify. So, if I have one advisor that maybe has one strategy and I have another advisor that has a very different strategy, that could be diversification. 

You could be with one advisor, like let’s just say you were with just us, peace of mind, wealth management, and we would have you extremely diversified, meaning you’re going to have some assets that are not talking to the other assets if they were to have a problem. So, I’m sorry, Murs, I just wanted to do a bigger setup there because I wanted everybody to have their heads clear. So, can you hit this topic of diversification and why it’s so important? Yeah, sure. I think it’s very important right now, especially given if you look at the last… 

Three years, we’ve had 2023, 24, 25, even if you think about all the headlines that we’ve kind of lived through in these last three years. But the markets have been really productive, double-digit market returns for those three years. And a lot of that has been led by a handful of sectors, particularly in the technology space. And so, what naturally happens over time is that if we’re not paying attention, our diversification or our belief that we are… 

diversified starts to get skewed because some of those winners keep on winning and now our exposure in those particular sections of the market or even in individual stock positions like the big names that we hear about all the time, Amazon, Microsoft, NVIDIA, Apple, Google, all those ones,  

our exposure to them gets even bigger. And so, if we’re not paying attention to our diversification, if we’re not paying attention to having consistent rebalancing in our portfolios, our risk can quickly get out of line and we don’t realize it. So, a lot of people think they’re diversified because they have a bunch of different tickers in their portfolio. And until you look under the hood of those tickers, tickers being an ETF or a mutual fund, until you look under the hood of those portfolios, you may have one ticker that’s ABC. 

And the other one is X, Y, Z. And you’re like, oh, I’m diversified. But if you don’t. 

Pay attention to how those are constructed. It could be that both of those own the exact same holdings, right? You could have an S&P 500 fund and then you could have a growth fund and there’s a lot of overlap in those holdings. And you think, well, I’ve got two separate funds. I feel diversified when in fact, you’re actually not. You’re actually getting more and more concentrated towards a particular section of the market. And that happens whether you like it or not, whether you want it or intentionally are doing it or not, just because of how the markets have been moving in certain sections, doing better. 

the other, and we want to participate in those better sections, but we’re not keeping it in check over time through regular rebalancing and diversification types of analysis, we could get things out of whack. And so, I think that’s really important to pay attention to, especially as we sit here in early 2026 and the issues that could be ahead of us. 

you know, we want to make sure that we’re balanced so that if one section of the market was to fall apart, we’re not overexposed in any particular section. So, I think that’s where, you know, being very intentional about portfolio construction matters and having that plan in place and not just diversification of different stocks, but also diversification of different types of strategies. So, let’s talk right in a little bit about like how this kind of… 

ties into retirement planning and the buckets that we do talk about and how do we handle diversification. 

Yeah, I mean, we explain it quite often. We talk about the three-bucket strategy, bucket number one being cash, bucket number two being really there for income and safety, then bucket number three really kind of being around this idea of, hey, let’s grow the money. And I want to talk a little bit about that growth bucket because one of the things that happens that we, the reason why we’re talking about some of these topics is where we are right now in the market. 

is there has been a big run-up in the market. Not a big run-up, but over the last few years, we’ve had quite a few ups in the market. And our growth bucket has done really, really well. And so, some of the clients are like, well, hey, wait a minute. We’ve got this good run-up here on the markets. What are some things we need to be concerned about? Or should we be concerned? Well, there are some things that are kind of the theme as we are here in 2026 that are going to, as I’ve already said, probably going to still be there. Geopolitical policy changes. 

earnings potentials of problems there, maybe some technology cooling off with AI, whether or not that incurs or not. But I think one of the topics that we really want to watch is this topic around inflation. Inflation is one of those things that we’ve had to deal with here for the last couple of years. And it feels like maybe, wait a minute, interest rates are coming down. Does that mean inflation is under control? 

And that’s the big looming thing. We don’t know yet. We don’t know if inflation is under control. But why is it such a big deal? Well, if we have inflation, that increases costs. That could hurt earnings on companies. 

Also, can hurt consumers. How does it hurt consumers? Even if you think, hey, I could just cut back here or there. Well, if it hits common things like groceries, our basic travel, maybe insurance costs, health care, those kinds of things, then that hits us in our wallet. What does that do? That prevents us from maybe saving as much money as we were saving before. And so, I think that as we think about 2026, we just really want to kind of be aware of what’s happening with inflation. 

I know that we are very aware with what’s happening with inflation, and we’ve got the portfolios designed in such a way that can be nimble if we start to have problems in this inflationary scenario here. So, I think that as we think through, I guess if you wanted to say it, where we are right now, Merce, I think as we’ve thought these things through. 

Let’s just kind of maybe sum it up here and maybe some of the different things from a global perspective as to what we might need to be looking at there, not just in the U.S. Right, yeah. 

There’s a lot going on in the world today in the U.S. and then also outside of the U.S. And there’s a lot of policies that are being thrown around. You know, the tariff talks that happened last year that jarred the markets back in April of 2025. Those are still underway and we’re still seeing the repercussions of that. You know, the so global change, I think, is really important this year. I think it’s going to lead. We want to be watching, you know, what types of. 

growth goes in certain directions. International investments were actually very productive last year. In most cases, they’re not all that great. But last year, in 2025, they were one of the outperformers. That’s not to say go put all your money in international funds. Still, diversification does matter. 

But, you know, we’re going through a lot of global change right now. We’re seeing a lot of leadership turnover across many countries. And when leadership changes, policies change. And more leaders are prioritizing their domestic interests first. We’re getting into this battle with countries around tariffs and who should be paying what and everything like that. 

countries and leadership are really turning their focus internally to not be reliant on other countries as heavily as everyone is right now. So that’s going to affect trade relationships, regulation, supply chains, all these different things that could impact our economy, which then eventually kind of comes into the stock market. The stock market, there’s a lot of guessing that ends up happening, a lot of speculation around where things are going to head. And so, there’s things to be paying attention to there. 

Growth may just be a little bit more fragmented or uneven in certain sections of the world. 

And so we just have to, again, it really comes back to having a plan in place to be able to weather whatever comes our way, whether it’s geopolitical issues like we are dealing with right now, or we’ve got changes in politics, we’ve got changes in leadership, we’ve got things going on inside the U.S. that are creating battles in all essence between the two sides. And then we’ve got a lot of friction between the U.S. and other countries out there. 

It’s just one of those things where there’s always going to be something like this that’s going on. This year just happens to be more focused on the political environment and the changes that are trying to be made and pushed down the line. But there’s always going to be something that creates volatility. So having a plan in place for dealing with the domestic, the international, the inflationary issues, the overconcentration to certain positions within the stock market. 

All of that’s always going to matter. So, what we believe really, and we talk about it all the time, is a financial plan that involves… 

More than just investments, it involves how our investments interact with our livelihood, with our income generation, with our withdrawal strategy, our taxation, our estate. Everything is very, very connected. And that’s the way that we should be approaching it. And we should be monitoring it every single year as well. So, if you’ve been listening to us, you know we do that through a handful of different types of meetings that we curate for our clients. And I think the more we talk about it, the more we pay attention to it. 

that when these issues and items come our way, it’s a lot easier to reason through them because we’re not as surprised. And we know that we’ve got a plan in place to address the things that could be coming our way. 

Yeah, so let’s sum this up. Maybe just to remind you, what have we talked about? We’ve talked about this idea of being careful not to have a concentration of risk. And what that means is that we need to have some assets that, yes, are there in the growth bucket. We need to have some other assets, though, that are stable, not tied to the stock market, to give us stability, to make sure that it reduces risk. And even in my growth bucket, I want multiple different types of investments within the growth bucket. If you take our growth bucket, it’s not just one. 

type of a thing. We have our core strategy. We have a tactical strategy that’s really designed to deal with volatility in the markets. And then we have our private investments or alternative investments that, again, are not really tied to the stock market, which really does help the portfolio do two things. Make good money if the markets are doing well and things are going well and help protect against significant losses on the downside. So, I think that’s just really, really important. 

We’ve talked about inflation. If you have a good portfolio design, you can be able to deal with the inflation. All of these things are designed to hit every one of those topics. So, it really does kind of keep you in that mindset that you don’t have to worry. So, if you’re listening to this and you’re thinking, man, I don’t have a plan in place. I don’t feel that comfortable right now. I have a lot of anxiety. Then we would encourage you to reach out to us to have a conversation. 

And so that way you can get peace of mind and have peace of mind and not worry about all these different moving parts. If you are listening and you’re a client, then we’re reminding you, you have the three buckets in place. You have the portfolio in place. So, when you’re turning on the news, if you hear those things, you don’t have to be that concerned because you know you already have a plan in place. And that’s our message. So, if you are listening to this and you do have questions and you do want to have a conversation, 

then just go to our website, pomwealth.net, go to the contact us page, and we would be more than happy to have a conversation. We hope this has at least been a little bit insightful to you about where things are right now in the markets. We hope you have a great week. We’ll talk to you again.