Gas Prices Going Up in 2026: What the $4 Pump Means for Your Portfolio

**SPEAKER_1** (0:01)
This is InvestTalk from KPP Financial, helping investors make sense of the markets one day at a time. Here's your host, Justin Klein.

**Justin Klein** (0:17)
Good afternoon, fellow investors, and welcome back to another week of InvestTalk. This is our Monday, July 27th, 2026 edition.
Lots to unpack as we move into another week, another summer week. I hope everyone had a good summer weekend. I know I did. Spent a lot of time at the beach, enjoyed the sun, the heat. It's a little hot, but luckily I have air conditioning, so I was able to cool down a little bit. Hopefully, everyone out there was able to stay cool as well.
But on this show, we're trying to stay hot. We're trying to stay hot on the tail of opportunity, as well as capitalize, avoid the heat stroke, avoid the risk, avoid the pitfalls that many investors make continuously. Because the emotions drive their decisions, and they don't focus on doing the research, having the principles that make good investment decisions consistently instilled into them. That's what our job is, to have this instilled into you, so that you're no longer kind of flying by a seat of your pants. You have a clear direction. So I'm Justin Klein. My objective today is to help you become a better investor. I'm going to answer your financial investment questions. I'm going to give you actual data, perspective, all that. You've heard it. Now, in just a bit, we're going to talk about today's market performance and run down the show topics. But first, let's tackle this caller question now.

**SPEAKER_3** (1:47)
Yeah. Hey, guys, would you please evaluate ticker TCAF, T. Rowe Price Capital Appreciation Fund, as a potential core holding? Thank you.

**Justin Klein** (2:03)
Looking at the T. Rowe Price Capital Appreciation Equity ETF, TCAF, the expense ratio is up 31 basis points, kind of high for an ETF, but overall fund expense, not that high. Kind of fund is this? Well, it leans on the growthier side of the market, but it's definitely a blend. Still heavily technology, 100 names here, 100 names. So I don't know if they're just looking at the S&P and picking 100 names. I wonder what their qualification is here. 93% is US equities, 5% in, about 5.5% in non-US equity. So it's mainly a US equity fund.
From a sector perspective, I'm looking at it based on the S&P. About the same technology weighting, less industrials, or 10 for the S&P, six for this one. A little more communication services, a little less financials from 12 to 10 No basic materials, so zero, where the S&P is two. The real difference here is it has more health care, not exactly the place I love to be long-term, and a lot more industrials, which tend to have lower long-term returns. So to me, this looks a lot like the S&P. Yes, there's a lot more concentrate, only 100 names, but it's still well diversified, except for that it's closet indexing, except for taking away some of the sectors that you'd rather be in, like you want more weighting, and like industrials, like materials, even the energy, it's below the S&P, which is hard to do, one from three to two. And you're putting in health care, which usually is not a very good hedge against inflation, neither are utilities, they tend to have a lot of debt, kind of be bond proxies, et cetera.
So it's an okay fun, but you're paying up for something that, frankly, I don't see any excitement for. It's three year quartile ranking is 66%, which means that two thirds of funds in this category did better than it. I see zero reason. It's not a bad fund, but if you're going to, you got large cap blend exposure, you might as well just go buy the S&P, you'll get a better allocation. Now, we had a great show on Friday, we were looking to this story. The Fed's impossible position, war inflation versus rate cuts. They discussed how the Federal Reserve faces a nightmare scenario where energy is driving inflation.
That could force rate hikes even into a slowing economy. Guess what? That is coming up here on Wednesday. The Federal Reserve meeting starts tomorrow, they get their decision on Wednesday, or we get their decision on Wednesday. And right now, there's a two-thirds chance they won't raise rates, but a third, which is a lot higher than it used to be, that they could raise rates. So, a very interesting meeting we have set up here. Here are some surprises. We'll talk about that and more on Friday. And we also answer a list of questions on Chemico, Chemico, Chemico, CCJ. If you happen to miss it, go check it out. Best way to get every InvestTalk podcast is to find it wherever you get your podcast. We have a lot of ground to cover over the next 45 minutes or so. Time for many. We'll get to all of it. Gas is now above $4 a gallon nationally, well above $505 a gallon here in California. I think we're pushing on $6 the last time I looked, especially if you're getting premium.