Van Eck's Q1 2026 Market Outlook: Risk On, Baby! | Jan van Eck

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**Jan van Eck** (0:45)
Number one, we have a lot of clarity around interest rates and the Federal Reserve that came out of a talk that Scott Besson gave. The fear out there is that we are selecting a new Fed chair, as we do every four years, in May of 2026, and that Donald Trump is exerting too much control over the Fed. I will talk about that. Secondly, the AI bubble, we're in a bubble, we're in a bubble, we're in a bubble. We heard that so much at the end of last year. I hope to show you that the bubble has popped and it's time to reload your AI allocations. Private credit also had a very tough end of 2025
A famous Wall Street CEO said there was a cockroach in the private credit markets. I think that those fears are overdone, but well-priced and again, an opportunity.

**Adam Taggart** (1:51)
Welcome to Thoughtful Money. I'm its founder and your host, Adam Taggart. Today, we've got the great fortune of having the return appearance of one of the most respected capital allocators in the business, Jan van Eck. Jan is CEO of van Eck, an asset management firm with over 100 billion in assets under management, invested across its wide family of ETFs and funds, spending equity, bond, commodity, digital, and regional asset classes. As we've done over the past several quarters now, Jan and I will spend the next hour discussing his Q1 macro and market outlooks, as well as where he sees the biggest opportunities for investors right now. Jan, thanks so much for joining us today.

**Jan van Eck** (2:32)
Great to see you. Happy New Year. Thanks.

**Adam Taggart** (2:34)
Happy New Year to you as well. You look great. I understand you were just in the sun up until yesterday. I hope you had a fantastic winter holiday with your family.

**Jan van Eck** (2:43)
It was restful. Thank you.

**Adam Taggart** (2:45)
All right. Good. Well, Jan, look, we've done this drill enough recently that the audience is probably just saying, Adam, stop talking. You just let him get to his slides. I guess let's go straight to them. But I guess before you pull them up, if you had to just highlight a central theme or maybe even a central word or phrase for 2026, what comes to mind?

**Jan van Eck** (3:09)
Yeah, visibility, I guess, which means risk on. I mean, that's the title. So maybe I should just say risk on.

**Adam Taggart** (3:15)
All right.

**Jan van Eck** (3:16)
If you want one phrase.

**Adam Taggart** (3:18)
Okay. Well, that's very optimistic and exciting. So I think folks are going to be really interested to hear where you see the opportunities in a risk on year.

**Jan van Eck** (3:27)
Yeah. All right. Well, before I get into it, just if you haven't heard this quarterly outlook before, as Adam mentioned, I am CEO, but I also sit on Van Eck's Investment Committee. What we try to do in this quarterly outlooks, I see a lot of charts in my 52 investment colleagues at Van Eck, see a lot of charts every day. What I try to do is in this quarterly outlook, emphasize what might be missing if you're just tuning into a lot of the financial noise that comes out of the markets.
I try to pick charts hopefully that maybe you haven't seen before or a little bit more interesting and relevant. That's the hope.

**Adam Taggart** (4:14)
You always do a great job with that, Jan. I'm sure it's going to be no different this time.

**Jan van Eck** (4:18)
Thank you. So starting it off, just besides the fact that we try to make these charts interesting, our perspective is very much that the financial markets sit within a world that is changing very quickly because of political events or economic changes or technology. And so we think those forces can pull the market in ways that you might not fully appreciate if you just stare at market prices themselves. So that's our perspective. It's also, if you want to say there's an inefficiency that we try to take advantage of, it's having a longer time perspective. So that time perspective means actually changes can happen very quickly, but sometimes you can feel more conviction about something that's going to happen in 2030 or 2035 Then what everyone else is trying to do, which is say what's going to happen in 2026 So you can decide at the end of this whether the experiment is worth it. So from the perspective of 2020-2035, there are these big magnets I call pulling at the financial markets. One is this huge fiscal deficit that we had. It was worst ever in peacetime. How do we stand relative to that? Again, to my theme of the day, we have greater visibility and better situation in fiscal situation. So we'll get into that. Artificial intelligence, the token demand that's out there, we spent a lot of time talking about last quarter, continues to be extremely strong as reflected in the MAG7 earnings. India is still growing. I won't spend a lot of time on that. And we had a lot of financial innovation last year. What does that mean coming into today? And the themes that I'm going to talk about today. Number one, we have a lot of clarity around interest rates and the Federal Reserve that came out of a talk that Scott Besson gave. The fear out there is that we are selecting a new Fed chair, as we do every four years, in May of 2026, and that Donald Trump is exerting too much control over the Fed. I will talk about that. Secondly, the AI bubble. We're in a bubble. We're in a bubble. We're in a bubble. We heard that so much at the end of last year. I hope to show you that the bubble has popped, and it's time to reload your AI allocations. Private credit also had a very tough end of 2025