Van Eck's Q2 2026 Market Outlook: Time To Bargain Hunt | Jan van Eck

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**Jan van Eck** (0:56)
And frankly, all of these, and you know, I'm not usually bullish on everything. All of these are things that I think should be considered four-year portfolios in the second quarter because I think they're, you know, have reached bottoms or are bottoming.

**Adam Taggart** (1:18)
Welcome to Thoughtful Money. I'm its founder and your host, Adam Taggart. When market uncertainty is high as it is now, I often emphasize that the most useful people to interview are asset managers. It's because they don't have the luxury of merely having an opinion on the road ahead. They have to commit capital to their convictions and be judged upon the results. 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 the past several quarters now, Jan and I will spend the next hour discussing his Q2 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** (2:13)
It's great to be with you again, Adam. For those of you who haven't seen us do this, take this act on the road before, just a quick intro. I sit with the investment team. It's Friday afternoon in New York, so you're not going to see a lot on the spring day with the masters in the background. So you're not going to see a lot of people walking around, but I get a lot of ideas from my investment colleagues. What we've done is pick the most interesting charts to illustrate what we think is maybe missed in the media, but very, very important to your portfolios.
One of the things that strikes me is just that we do this once a quarter, how much changes in a three-month period? I know it probably feels like a three-minute period. Things can change a lot in the markets, but still profound things can change. So this quarterly cadence has become a really fun routine. And Adam, I really appreciate you having me on. This quarter, I have a colleague for the first time. I've invited Jonathan Wang to join. Jonathan is our CTO. He has an academic background in AI before it was cool. And actually engages with researchers, academics, other company participants and clients, because a lot of people are trying to figure out how AI is being used. And I'm going to share some slides about van Eck's usage of tokens in the first section. And he's here to correct me when I misspeak. So let us get to the slides. And for those, again, who haven't heard before, Adam makes these available on his distribution afterwards, so you don't have to take screenshots or anything.

**Adam Taggart** (4:03)
Yep, folks, they'll be available for free on the Thoughtful Money sub stack. You can get that just go to thoughtfulmoney.com/newsletter.

**Jan van Eck** (4:10)
Okay, so here's what we're going to cover really, really quickly today. Believe it or not, more big surprises from the technology known as AI. I always call it the second most important technology after the railroad. We've got, as we talked about three months ago, Adam, the emergence of real value in the private credit space due to some bad headlines and concerns.
Gold, I think, is another thing to look at for your portfolios. And Indian Bitcoin, frankly, all of these, and you know I'm not usually bullish on everything, all of these are things that I think should be considered for your portfolios in the second quarter, because I think they have reached bottoms or are bottoming in corrections in bull markets. So let's talk about our investment philosophy really briefly. One could say, why talk about themes at all? The market is efficient just by the S&P. And the premise of this presentation and a lot of our macro thinking is that's true, but the market is shaped by non-market forces, technology, government policy. And often these forces are more powerful than market participants will model into their future earnings. And it's because of the behavioral weakness of recency bias. We look backwards more easily than we look forward. So anyway, that's the premise. You may disagree with this premise, but that's the premise for thematic investing. So what happened in the first quarter in AI? Some of this is not going to be newsflash to anybody. The demand for tokens, which are kind of the compute units for large language models, has continued to grow at a dramatic pace. We predicted this. People were still surprised by the capital spending that the hyperscalers announced in the first quarter. I'm not going to talk about the incredible destruction happening to software company stocks, but that's really been, that was a shock too in the first quarter. The real insight that I want to focus on is the path to monetization for AI language models. And so that's really the thesis here.