This Market Is Directionless (And That Should Scare You)

**Ed Zitron** (0:00)
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**SPEAKER_2** (0:38)
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**SPEAKER_3** (0:47)
I remember telling my boss, it'll be good for the brand when leads were slow. Yeah, it wasn't.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:55)
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**SPEAKER_4** (1:09)
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**Ed Zitron** (2:00)
Welcome to Prof G Markets. Scott is wrapping up his week in Cannes. So joining me today is our very good friend, the one, the only Robert Armstrong, US financial commentator for the Financial Times.
Rob, thank you for joining me. It's been a while since we've had you on.

**Robert Armstrong** (2:19)
Yeah, and it's been wild times in markets, so it's good where we're back and able to talk. My only question for you is how do I get Scott's job? How do I get the job where you get sent to Cannes?
You know what I mean?

**Ed Zitron** (2:32)
That's my question too.

**Robert Armstrong** (2:33)
Not that I don't like hanging out with you, but like Starlet's and Negroni's or whatever they drink in Cannes. That sounds all right.

**Ed Zitron** (2:41)
I agree. Yeah, he's partying it up at the Spotify party and the Snap party after he made fun of Evan Spiegel on our previous podcast and somehow didn't get an invitation rescinded, but that's how it goes. Yeah, he's partying it up with the influencers. Next year, you and I will make our own trip to Cannes, and we'll pay out of pocket, and that's okay.

**Robert Armstrong** (3:03)
I know, we'll stay in a youth hostel.

**Ed Zitron** (3:07)
I can't wait. Well, I'm very glad to have you on the show. And this is very timely because we are exactly at the halfway mark. This is our official halftime report. So without further ado, I'm going to launch us into our H1 review.
A volatile first half of 2026 is coming to a close. It's been a six-month stretch defined by the AI boom, the war in the Middle East, and an ongoing obsession with one big question, where are interest rates headed next? Still, markets have largely moved higher. The S&P 500 is up 8% year to date. The MSCI World Index minus the US, which tracks international stocks, has gained 13%. So it's actually above the US markets. But there are plenty of unanswered questions hanging over the market, and the next six months could end up being even more consequential than the first. So we're going to tackle some of the biggest debates facing investors right now, and see if we can come to any reasonable conclusions about when things might go from here. So Rob, first off, I want to just quickly review what's happened in 2026 so far. What have been the big moments that either moved markets or surprisingly didn't. I think the first big moment that we saw was the invasion of Venezuela, and the threatening of invading Greenland, which didn't end up happening. But we had that, and that was, I think, less consequential than people might have thought, but that sort of set the tone for the year. I can't really believe that it was this year, but it was. We then saw an acceleration in the AI build out. We saw a memory chip shortage, which we're seeing play out in real-time, a massive surge in memory stock. We saw SaaSpocalypse, which was triggered by a big influx of new AI products from Anthropic, which got everyone very scared about names like Adobe and Salesforce and ServiceNow and all of these sort of legacy software companies. We also started a war with Iran, which led to significantly higher inflation.