It's Not Time To Sell...Yet | Milton Berg

**Milton Berg** (0:01)
To individual investment recommend, stay long, no reason to get out yet. The market has made a new high a couple of days ago. You may hear people at Adam Taggart's show telling you to get out, there's going to be a crash ahead. But what we're telling our clients is there'll be a crash, the market is going to go down 50 percent. The first has to go down 7 percent or 8 percent before it gets down 50 percent.

**Adam Taggart** (0:19)
Sure.

**Milton Berg** (0:20)
Clients following this program can sit through 7 or 8 percent decline, as long as they know there's a model that's going to get them out before it's down 50 percent. That's exactly what they're trying to do.

**Adam Taggart** (0:37)
Welcome to Thoughtful Money. I'm its founder and your host, Adam Taggart. Today we've got the good fortune to speak with Milton Berg, founder and chief executive officer of MB Advisors, a premier global macro research and consulting company offering investment advice to the world's largest asset managers. Now Milton's just made his proprietary buy-sell model available to retail investors for the first time, and he'll walk us through it today. Milton, thanks so much for joining us. Hey, it's a pleasure to see you, Milton.
I think we've had you on once before, at least on the Thoughtful Money channel, but great to have you back on, especially early in 2026 Happy New Year. I hope you had a wonderful holiday with your family. We're off to an interesting start already here in 2026 Why don't we just get to the meat of it right out of the gate here? We'll go through whatever charts you want to go through in a second, but at a high level, if you had to pick a word or a theme to define what you expect 2026 to be like in the financial markets, what would it be?

**Milton Berg** (1:40)
Unusual.

**Adam Taggart** (1:41)
Okay. Unusual.

**Milton Berg** (1:43)
Unusual market, right. Not a regular market.

**Adam Taggart** (1:45)
All right. And what are the main reasons why you picked that word?

**Milton Berg** (1:48)
Well, basically, you're seeing a culmination of years of speculation, say, gold and silver, platinum, palladium goes up some 185% over the last few years. And the public is seemingly an institution as well as saying, hey, there's inflation, let's get on the bandwagon, get on gold now. Weinberg showed me they were at the end of a long-term move, rather the beginning of a move. So with gold and silver, probably going to reverse. With Bitcoin already in the bear market, with the stock market, according to some measures, as overvalued as ever been in history, although we don't use overvaluation at work, but the reality is an overvalued market is more likely to have some hiccups of bear markets than a market that's fairly valued or undervalued. Some markets worldwide and the debt situation. So I'd say it'd be unusual. I'm not saying the market is going to go down necessarily. When markets are in the current situation, usually you see more volatility than usual, you see more corrections than usual, and sometimes you see major bear markets in that situation. Not what we're projecting, but I just say it'd be unusual and different.

**Adam Taggart** (2:56)
Okay, so we had some great years in the markets for investors during COVID, right, because just so much liquidity was getting shoved into the system. Folks then got surprised in 2022, but then we went right back to pretty quiescent markets that just like to go up. Sounds like you're saying 2026 is probably not likely to be nearly as quiescent. It might not be 2022 bad, but it's probably not going to be just the easy ride that we've had the past couple years.

**Milton Berg** (3:28)
It really depends on what takes place during the year. Inflation is still high. There is chances of recession, so it's really difficult to predict at this time exactly what will happen. That's why we use the term unusual. I'd rather not make a projection, but once we're getting to the data, my data is giving us many clear indication as to both what stocks and bonds could do, as well as what gold could do. So once we get to the data, it won't be just an opinion.

**Adam Taggart** (3:53)
All right, well, far be it for me to stand between the viewers of this channel and the data. So why don't we get to your slides, Milton, and I'll just let you drive. You take us anywhere you like.

**Milton Berg** (4:02)
Well, first, I want to start with, we have two types of clients. We have institutional clients who are somewhat more trading-oriented, they're able to leverage, they're able to go to sectors, they're able to go short one sector, long another sector. And now we just started a new project where we have retail, what we call the individual investors, and the individuals are more interested in the long term. So let me start with the institutional side a little bit. For the institutions, we're actually recommended to go short on December 11th, actually December 12th, December 11th at the close. On December 11th, we got a very rare cell short signal based on the VXN. VXN is the VIX, but it's a VIX using the NASDAQ 100 rather than the SAP 500 So we get, I don't give away the secret source here, but basically we look at a short-term ratio to a longer-term short-term ratio to see some sort of a major shift in VXN relative to its short-term trading pattern. And this gave us cell on December 11th. Now, through yesterday's close, the SAP has only gained 0.91%, 21 days past that signal. So everyone was so excited about the great five-day, six-day return we had earlier in the year. The reality was this short sale on December 11th is still very, very valid. Even though the market's up 0.91%, for example, in 2021, when we got the signal, on day 21, the market was up 0.94%, and the total decline from the date of the sell signal was 21.41%.