Monster Moves, Long-Term Trends And Wisdom For Your Portfolio

**Justin Nielsen** (0:07)
Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Investing With IBD podcast. It's Justin Nielsen here, your host, and we are coming to you live at 5 p.m. Eastern, as we typically do on a Wednesday. Today is August 26th, 2026, and I am so pleased to have back on the show, Jim Roppel, founder of The Roppel Report, and just an all-around great guy, someone who's been using the IBD methodology, a big follower of Bill O'Neill, the founder of Investor's Business Daily, and he's, yeah, taking it to the next level with some great stuff that he puts out all the time, and you probably will be hard pressed to find a more optimistic guy out there. So with a lot of people struggling right now, so good to have a little dose of optimism and bullishness from you, Jim. Welcome back to the show.

**Jim Roppel** (0:56)
I'm great to be here. Great to be here. All around great guy. I don't hear that in my own house too often.

**Justin Nielsen** (1:04)
Well, that's because they have to live with you on a daily basis, you know. It's got to be difficult. That's right. I get you in short doses, so that's why, hey, you're great to me. So, but we'll definitely talk a little bit more about The Roppel Report and some of the things that you have available there, and places where folks can get that for themselves. But I want to hop right into it, Jim, because we had such a strong second quarter, one for the record books, with some just, you know, forget the 100 percent gainers. I mean, there were multiple 100 percent gainers, 200 percent, 300 percent gainers. And were we spoiled? Is it, you know, once it became a little bit tougher, and we saw a lot of those stocks come down, is it now just a lot of frustration, and people are not seeing the opportunities that there were?
What's been your take in the current market environment?

**Jim Roppel** (2:04)
So I believe that we saw the first leg up of the greatest bull market in history, with the best performing stocks ever in history. Sandisk is just, I can't find any model that comes close in that market cap. And I think it's just the first leg of the greatest bull market ever in history, which is going to spawn, I think, dozens of stocks that are going to perform like Sandisk. It's just the beginning. We're in a brief little hiatus. People are crazy negative. I went to dinner with a guy last night who owns multiple insurance companies, and he's so pessimistic. And then I showed him, you know, the Philly Fed Manufacturing Index at a 36-year high. And I'm sorry, the S&P is at an all-time high. It's within 1% of an all-time high.
I just think people got spoiled, kind of what you alluded to.
If you think back about, I worked in Morgan Stanley. The average broker there kind of pumped out about 9% a year for the customers and CanSlim investors were making 9% a week. So they're spoiled. They're like, you know, look, if you failed to make the rotation into biotech and gold and into crypto, you're struggling. If you're mired up in these stale fiber optic semis, you're really struggling. But if you made the rotation, you could have a phenomenal Q3, Q4. And I also think that AI is going to rear its head again before this year's over. And I believe we've seen the first two innings of a nine inning game in AI. Like, this is going to go on for 15 to 20 years. And it's going to be bigger and better than anything you've ever seen, in my opinion.

**Justin Nielsen** (3:53)
But what people need to realize is that, you know, just like with the internet boom in the 90s, you know, while that ended horribly, folks have to remember that those gains did not come without some corrections and some nasty ones, you know. 30%, 35% corrections along the way, and some of the stocks, you know, went belly up, you know, even before the market top end 2000 So it's not like you can just say, oh, you know, I'm going to pick the leader at the beginning and everything is going to be fine. Sure, maybe you get the Cisco that goes up 75,000% from its IPO until its top in 2000, but there's a lot of stocks that have, well, and even Cisco, I mean, that had some really long bases, full one-year bases that I'm just going to pull Cisco up right now since we're talking about it and go to the monthly chart. And, you know, what a lot of people forget is, you know, there were time periods here where, you know, Cisco, despite that huge move would have periods here, wasn't doing anything, you know, for a long time. But yeah, I think it's a good point that you make there, Jim. Yeah, we could be very early on. Now, there's a lot of people that are also saying, hey, you know, there's a lot of negativity, as you said, that this is overdone, that this is just about spending, you know, people pointing to the circular financing.