2026 Outlook with Liz Thomas: Part One

Sean Walters: Hello everyone, I’m Sean Walters, and welcome to The Exceptional Advisor Podcast, brought to you by the Investments & Wealth Institute, the premier professional association for the wealth management community. We are relaunching the podcast with a sharper focus: monthly conversations on the issues that help good advisors become great advisors. There are a lot of big names, powerful guests we could invite to this podcast, but we really want to focus on professionals who help you better serve clients, run better teams, and make better decisions for your clients. Each month I’ll sit down with leading thinkers and practitioners to unpack what matters, what’s next, and what you can do with it. To be clear, I’m not an advisor — I run an association of and for advisors. I’ve been working within the financial planning and wealth management professions for almost 30 years, so I’ve kind of been in the catbird seat, running conferences and programs and certifications, and I’ve really learned a lot about the advice profession: what matters to advisors, and how to provide content that’s of value to them. I’m really excited that our first guest is Liz Thomas, Head of Investment Strategy at SoFi. Liz is an investment strategist who’s kind of a fan favorite for the Investments & Wealth Institute membership. She also hosts a podcast called The Important Part — if you enjoy this podcast, it’s more because of Liz and not so much because of Sean, so you might want to check that one out. Her job is to translate what’s happening in the economy and markets into clear, actionable insights, and she’s been doing that across a variety of roles: BNY Mellon, BMO, Baird. She presented at our New York Strategy conference in November of 2025 — “Watch Your Tail Risk” — and once again, because she also presented the year before in Chicago, it was the highest-rated general session on the program. Liz, that’s no small feat. You were up against Emma Seppälä from Yale, Chris Geczy from Wharton, Dan Ariely from Duke — who might win a Nobel Prize someday. So I’m really thrilled to have you join us, because you’ve been great at translating the macro into actionable ideas for advisors. Let’s start with something about how you got started in the business. Who was the most influential person early in your career, someone who made you feel like you were on the right path?

Liz Thomas: Yeah, well, first of all, thank you for having me. I’m flattered to be here, especially for the relaunch episode — so excited to be the one to kick it off. And I don’t think there are any Nobel Prizes in my future, but I guess never say never. Whatever that person is doing, a Nobel Prize is something to really be admired. So, early in my career — my foray into real investments and into the investment strategy realm happened when I was in my late 20s. I’ve been in the industry now for, this will be my 22nd year, which is a terrifying number to admit, because I still think of myself as young. Early in my career, I had an opportunity that, frankly, I was surprised to get. At the time, I was working at a regional bank in Milwaukee called M&I — Marshall & Ilsley — which was later bought by BMO, so eventually it turned into BMO. I’d been in the trust operations department, working in investments but operationally, and I wanted something else. I’d been looking for a while, and the HR gal I’d been working with said, “Hey, why don’t you apply for this role? Our chief market strategist in the investments division needs an analyst. He’s interviewed like 100 people, he doesn’t like any of them, and I don’t even really know what he’s looking for anymore. So why don’t you give it a shot?” I looked at the job description and thought, this is way beyond my experience, this is way over my skis. So I resisted, and she pushed, and she pushed. Finally, I went and talked to him. I think I was the last person he interviewed. He gave me a shot — we had good chemistry. He was in his late 60s when he hired me, so he was in the twilight of his career, and he wanted somebody to mentor. I very specifically remember him saying he wanted somebody young enough that they didn’t have any bad habits yet. I was certainly in that camp — I was young and I was green, and he gave me my first shot. And he taught me so much. I only worked with him directly for two years, but I learned more in that two-year period than in any two-year period for the rest of my career. He showed me what an option there was in the financial services industry — a job for somebody who wanted to communicate but also be analytical, and to be able to marry those two things. He was the one who gave all the client presentations. He was the one who was on CNBC. And I was the one building the presentations, or sending talking points to the producers at CNBC. I just remember thinking, wow, how cool is that job? Someday maybe somebody will give me a job like this. I didn’t think it would happen until I was in my 50s or much beyond where I was when I actually got the shot. But that was really a turning point. He also convinced me to register for the CFA program and go through that. We still talk today — he’s long retired, but we still talk, and he means a lot to me. He means a lot to my career. He really did change the trajectory of my life.

Sean Walters: It’s such a great story — there are so many stories like that. That’s why I love the work I do in professional associations. You mentioned the two factors that tend to drive people through a career: the community, the mentors, the people — but also the knowledge and skills, which you earn in great part through the CFA program and through associations and the like. So I appreciate you telling that story. And now you’re in the hot seat with all of my difficult questions.

What’s the 2026 Base Case for Growth, Inflation, and Rates?

Sean Walters: It’s really been an interesting past week — I was reading your blog and watching your most recent podcast. So let’s start broad, with the base case. Give us your base case in three bullets: growth, inflation, rates. And maybe, what’s the one swing factor that could change the picture?

Liz Thomas: Yeah, so — I’m trying to figure out how I want to frame this, because I don’t think we can take each of those independently; they all affect each other. I’ll start with the latest Fed statement, which we got in December. It included — as it does each quarter — the summary of economic projections from the Fed: what they think growth is going to look like in the year to come, what they think inflation will look like, where they think the Fed funds rate will be, all of those details. And what was interesting was that the median Fed funds rate was expected to be lower than it is right now — so, expecting one cut in 2026 — except growth was expected to be higher, inflation was expected to maybe go up a little or just stay steady, and unemployment was expected to stay steady. So how do we explain, if growth is stronger, why they would cut rates? There are some inconsistencies even in those expectations. I say that because I think we focus so much on what the Fed says, as if they’ve got some special insight into how the year is going to play out. Yes, they have sophisticated models, and yes, they have people working on this every day of the year, and perhaps they have more data and more views into it than the lay person. But the reality is, they have to react to the data just like any of us do. So when we look at the base case for growth: so far this year it has been positive, if not more positive than anybody even expected. The expectation was for really strong growth in the fourth quarter — I believe the last Atlanta Fed GDPNow forecast was above 5% for the fourth quarter — and in 2026, growth expectations are strong, so I think that can stay intact. On inflation, there’s a difference between inflation expectations and the inflation readings. Inflation expectations are more of a longer-term view — you look at things like the five-year or 10-year inflation expectation, and that’s what the Fed watches as well. What they want — and frankly what all of us should want — is for those expectations to stay anchored, to stay under wraps. The shorter-term movements, an immediate inflation read or a much shorter-term expectation like three months or a year, are expected to be more volatile, of course. But as long as those long-term expectations stay contained, inflation is in a decent place. I want to make a big asterisk on that, because inflation “in a decent place” still means it’s positive, and it has gone up since 2020. It hit its peak in 2022, but it didn’t deflate — nothing deflated, prices didn’t come down, they just stopped growing as fast as they were. So consumers are still under stress because of that; they’re just not under as much month-over-month stress as they were. We’re not in this state anymore where we’re upset about beef prices this month and egg prices next month and used-car prices the month after — that whack-a-mole scenario. So inflation is under control, but still a question mark for policymakers, still a question mark for investors, and still a point of contention and an element of stress for consumers. I don’t want to send the message that inflation is solved — it’s not. But do I see it suddenly inflating to a material extent in 2026? Not unless we have some more geopolitical tension that really drives resource prices that much higher. So the inflation picture, I think, is okay. The real topic for the Fed, and probably for investors, in ’26 will continue to be the labor market, because that’s the one that’s sort of on the precipice. It’s on this teeter-totter — it’s been really, really tight, then we got it to a balanced position, and now it’s like, all right, we just need to keep it balanced, because it’s right on the edge of tipping over into concerning. And it appears so far this year that we’re keeping it in balance. But that deserves a big asterisk too, because, as we know, the government shutdown in the fall affected many of those economic readings, so we don’t necessarily have good data for all of October — or we didn’t have it until much later, and the market had already reacted to certain expectations. So the labor market will play a big role this year. I would expect it probably weakens a little bit. But the bigger risk is that we’re so used to such a low unemployment rate that anything above four and a half percent, people get really concerned. In reality, four and a half percent is a normal, if not historically low, unemployment rate. I don’t think it really becomes a concern until it gets to five.

3 Indicators Advisors Should Watch in 2026

Sean Walters: That’s great — a great overview. I think the labor question is one of the bigger swing factors. A lot of my peers — I’m a CEO, I run a company of 46 people — we’re just kind of holding tight. We’re not shedding positions, we’re not adding positions, and a lot of my peers are doing a similar thing. So that’s probably a good lead-in to the dashboard for ’26. What do you think advisors should be looking at — maybe three indicators in ’26? What would you pick to watch if you were an advisor?

Liz Thomas: Yields. Can I choose yields for all three? Yields would be in the number-one spot. I mentioned earlier this obsession we have with the Fed — we obsess over the Fed funds rate. I understand why, because the announcements do move markets, and the Fed is important, and the Fed funds rate is important. But it doesn’t have as much power as everybody suggests. The Fed funds rate does not track mortgage rates. I hear this time and again — “Well, if the Fed would just lower rates, mortgage rates will come down.” Mortgage rates track the 10-year Treasury yield. In fact, the last few times, and even in 2024, when the Fed cut rates, the 10-year Treasury yield rose. So the Fed funds rate coming down does not directly bring the mortgage rate down. I think that needs to be thrown out the window — watch yields instead. The other thing is this idea of the Fed cutting rates somehow helping the labor market. Lowering the Fed funds rate does not create jobs; there’s no direct effect there. You could take it a few steps further — what does it do in the economy? It allows companies to have more liquidity, maybe it allows them to issue more debt, it makes their debt less costly, so they have more capital left over and don’t have to fire people. But that’s a second-, third-order effect. I don’t want to rely on three or four steps after a Fed funds rate cut to feel assured that companies are going to hire again. That’s not really how it works. And in fact, cutting cycles are typically when unemployment rises, not falls. So some of these ideas that are out there as theories — or as suggestions of why we should watch the Fed — I think you watch yields instead. And what we’ve seen over even just this year, partly because of geopolitical risk and other things going on in the economy, with Japan’s yields rising quite a bit too: we’ve seen ten-year yields rise, we’ve seen a steepening in the yield curve. That sometimes can signal good things; it can signal that growth is strong, the economy is moving forward and expanding. In this case, I don’t think that’s what it signals. I think it’s signaling less confidence in fiscal spending, less confidence in the fiscal situation, and even just this nationalism around the globe, because other countries are having a hard time setting expectations for what the U.S. is going to do. I’m not saying it’s anybody’s fault, and I’m not saying anybody is all that angry or doing anything wrong. It’s just that this continued geopolitical volatility and headline flow has made it really difficult for our trading partners and other countries to set expectations for the year on how things might look between them and the United States. Pulling that all in has affected Treasury yields — it’s affected bond yields around the globe, frankly, but it’s affected Treasury yields. So that’s one of the first things, if not all three of the things, we should watch this year. I already mentioned the labor market. Here’s a fun little tidbit: you can watch the headline stuff, like the unemployment rate or jobs added — all the stuff that makes news every month — but you also need to watch construction employment, because construction employment leads the broader labor market, and it leads it by a while. Let’s call it nine to 15 months or so; there’s no specific time frame. Right now it’s sort of at a plateau — there’s nothing necessarily concerning, but it has certainly stopped rising. If construction employment starts to roll over and turn down, that typically leads a broader rollover and downturn in the labor market. So that’s another thing to watch in 2026. And then the last thing — much more market-related, to equities, because that’s frankly what we talk about so much — is where the earnings growth is coming from. I don’t think it will surprise anybody if tech continues to be the leader in earnings growth, but where is the other earnings growth coming from? Right now the expectation is that materials will be the second-best earnings producer in the S&P 500. I think it would be great if that ended up being the case, and it would also be great if something like industrials or energy or consumer discretionary or financials ended up in the number-three spot. So that’s something to watch too, because it will help confirm this broadening-out we’ve already seen in the market, where other sectors are coming in and shining. They’re not going to be able to bring returns up as much as tech, just because there are smaller weights in the index, but earnings coming in strong for some of those cyclical sectors that are now coming to the forefront would be a great confirmation factor for the year.

Sean Walters: Well, you may have answered my third question, which was: what’s the most underappreciated risk to markets in 2026? Unless you think there’s something else that’s underappreciated that could affect the markets. You mentioned geopolitical earlier — that seems clear.

Liz Thomas: Yeah, that’s not underappreciated, though — I think that’s very appreciated. Markets are knee-jerky about it and will continue to be. Probably the most underappreciated risk is that we actually overheat again, or start to overheat again, and the Fed has to shift approach. We’ve been waiting for rate cuts. I think this is a very outside probability — I don’t think it’s very likely to happen, and it’s certainly not likely in the next few months; if anything, it would be second half. But let’s say things go much better than expected. As investors, we’re not used to saying that — we’re used to trying to figure out where all the risks are, where all the bodies are hidden. We’re not used to saying, well, what if it all works out better than I thought? So what if it does? What if growth comes in stronger, and earnings come in stronger, and the consumer continues to demand more goods and services, and inflation picks up again, and the labor market is pretty stable, and the Fed has to basically say, “You know what, we cannot justify another rate cut — we can’t even justify one”? That narrative shifting could play a major role in markets later this year. But I think even the risk of that has come down over the last month, because now we’ve priced out a rate cut until July. The market isn’t even expecting a full rate cut until the July Fed meeting.

How Should Advisors Manage Stock Market Concentration Risk?

Sean Walters: Yeah — I won’t even get into the new Fed chair and how that might affect the environment you just laid out. So let’s shift to where advisors are living every day: concentration, mega themes, managing client expectations. There’s been this AI concentration, and managing the FOMO risk. Markets have been dominated by a handful of mega themes and mega names. What’s your playbook for reducing that concentration risk? You talked about what’s behind tech, what the next equity is — but what are your thoughts on what advisors should be looking for in trying to manage that concentration risk?

Liz Thomas: Yeah, so — here’s the good news. I put this in my 2026 outlook, because the way I framed the outlook this year was: all right, what are the big concerns that almost every investor has about this market? We’re worried about valuations being too high. We’re worried about capex spending getting ahead of itself. And we’re worried about concentration — all this reliance on the big tech names, and even just the Mag Seven names. In the outlook, I talk about the “Big 11,” which is the Mag Seven plus some of the hyperscalers — things like Oracle, Broadcom, AMD, and Palantir is in there too. Basically all these names that have been in the headlines as the ones driving the market. We’ve been worried about this concentration, and I tried to debunk those concerns, if possible: should we really be this concerned? And if it is a bubble — maybe it is, I don’t know, I’m not going to be the one to define that — if it is, is it really ready to pop, or do we have some more time before that happens? What we concluded is that perhaps it is a bubble, perhaps it’s getting a little unhinged, but it’s not time yet. It’s not irrational enough yet, it’s not exuberant enough yet, it’s not extreme enough yet. And on the concentration risk in particular — again, this chart is in the outlook — the total return in the tech sector plus the Mag Seven since 2022 has been 185%. That’s a huge number. The rest of the S&P, the return over that same period, has only been about 34%. It pales in comparison. But 34% in any other period, I’d be like, that’s pretty good, I’m okay with that. Then you look at what’s driving it: have earnings actually backed that up? And they have. The earnings growth in that same subset — the tech sector plus the Mag Seven — has been 106.5% over that period. That’s a big number for earnings. In the rest of the S&P, it’s only been about 17%. So prices have followed the fundamentals. I think that’s something to keep in mind. Yes, concentration can make the market fragile, because we’re so dependent on those names. But the fragility also lies in how durable those names are. If we do an exhaustive comparison to the dot-com bubble, these names are not nearly as fragile as those were, because those didn’t really have earnings yet, they didn’t really have a concrete use case, and they certainly didn’t have the user base that already existed before any of this AI came to be — in companies like Amazon and Google and Apple. The existing user base is what you need. I’ll call it “foot traffic” — it’s not actual foot traffic, but the people that already exist, the customers that already exist. So the fundamentals of this move are there to back it up, and I think that should be comforting. That said, what’s been happening in the market since that November low in 2025 is that the concentration risk is diminishing, because Mag Seven tech has not been the leader. In fact, the leading sectors coming out of that November low were health care, materials, and industrials — and even through the end of the year, financials did well. So the fact that these other sectors are coming in and continuing to do well, and things like the equal-weight S&P outperforming the market-cap-weighted S&P, or the value index outperforming the growth index — and even hitting a new high before the growth index in the last month or two — those are good signs, and they do reduce that concentration risk. So as investors, what do you do about it? Number one, make sure you have exposure to other things. Some of the more specific things I call out in my outlook are sectors like materials, health care, and staples — I think those are good spots to be. I also think you can look at companies that have a lot of free cash flow and are fundamentally healthy that way. There’s actually an ETF you can buy called COWZ — the ticker is COWZ, for “cash cows,” C-O-W-Z — companies that are generating good free cash flow. And I think gold still has a good spot in portfolios. I can’t believe I’m saying that, but it has outperformed the S&P for the last two years, and I don’t think the demand is going anywhere, so it has a spot. I think emerging markets, particularly China, have a chance this year too. So looking out to other places in the portfolio, to make sure you’ve got exposure, is the way to do it.

2026 Bond Market Outlook: Rising Yields and the Japan Effect

Sean Walters: You had a great blog two weeks ago talking about exactly what you just discussed. The one this week had to do with bonds, so I want to follow up and talk a little more about what you see going on in the bond markets. You mentioned yields earlier — talk a little more about your outlook for the bond markets in 2026.

Liz Thomas: I think the bond markets are going to be really interesting in 2026, and I don’t think we pay enough attention to them. For a while there was this prevailing wisdom that, well, the bond market is broken, it’s manipulated, it’s not sending signals like it used to — because for a long time the theory had been that the bond market was smarter than the stock market, or that the bond market knows stuff before the stock market does. It certainly has been affected by monetary policy, it’s been affected by fiscal policy, and it continues to be. But I don’t think the bond market is broken. I don’t think it suddenly doesn’t mean anything if yields move in certain directions. I think there’s going to continue to be volatility in the bond market. I think the curve continues to steepen in the United States, so the long end continues to rise. Whether that means the short end stays anchored or comes down a little, I don’t think it really matters — but the important thing is that the long end likely continues to rise, and not for the reasons we want it to. I think it rises because of some of the fiscal concerns people have, the nationalism that’s going on, currency volatility, just lower demand for Treasuries, lower demand for dollars — because yields are rising around the globe. Japan is a perfect example of that. Japanese yields on Tuesday of this week — I’m not sure when this podcast will drop, but on Tuesday of this week, which would have been the 20th — the 30-year Japanese bond yield rose 27 basis points in one day. That is the largest move ever recorded in the history of time. We literally witnessed history on Tuesday: a 27-basis-point move. That’s in a bond market for a country that’s very developed — this is not an emerging-market bond market, this is not a market that doesn’t have a lot of liquidity so big swings can be explained. Absolutely not. This is a large and established country, a large and established bond market. So a move like that — not just the 27 basis points, it was a seven-standard-deviation move — that is humongous. And then the next day it came back down 15 basis points, and everybody probably thought, oh, thank goodness, we erased some of that move. But the volatility is still big: up 27, then down 15 in a matter of 48 hours. It’s huge. So there are clearly things going on in Japan that are going to reverberate around the globe. And because those yields have risen so much in Japan — for a long time we relied on Japan as a buyer of Treasuries, and Japan is the largest foreign holder of Treasuries — their yields are now knocking on the Treasury yield level. If you’re a Japanese investor, why would you go through the trouble of investing in U.S. Treasuries, with the currency volatility — because you have to convert yen to dollars to do it — when you can get a similar yield without even bothering with that currency piece? So the demand for Treasuries is expected to come down. In fact, it already has come down, and that’s part of the reason. Not to mention all the things going on with Europe and threats of tariffs in Europe. Europe is a smaller holder by country compared to Japan, but if you add all the European countries up together, it’s still a significant holder of Treasuries. So those are things I think are going to affect the bond market a lot in 2026. I think we’ll have to pay much closer attention to global bond yields than we have for a long time.

Sean Walters: And the factors that caused the Japan bonds to shoot up like that — do you see those happening again? Are those replicable factors, or were they this “dump America day,” or whatever that was, that kind of sparked it?

Liz Thomas: Well, you know what’s interesting — and I think this is maybe the disconcerting thing, I put it in the column — there wasn’t a catalyst. It just started happening. There was nothing that occurred, no data that came out, no headline that crossed. It just started happening. And the reason that’s disconcerting is that, as an investor, how are you supposed to know where to set expectations? If this just happened sort of inexplicably on a random Tuesday, then how do I know when the next one’s coming? You almost have to protect yourself more, because who knows when that next big swing could happen. And as we know, selling begets selling, because positioning starts to get really out of whack. So when there’s a move that large, what happened on Tuesday was you saw a bunch of hedge funds starting to need to cover their positions, because the move was so big they had to protect — and then that just exacerbates the move even more. I think the most unnerving part was that there wasn’t a good explanation. We can explain it by saying Japanese investors are worried about an increase in spending and a cut in taxes, because the math of that fiscally doesn’t make good sense — okay, that would suggest a systematic reduction in demand for Japanese bonds, not a one-day move of 27 basis points. So I think the big concern is that now we know it’s possible, and that we can’t predict it at all. It’s not just that we can’t predict exogenous shocks — of course we can’t predict those — this was a move in the markets that really didn’t have a direct cause. So that was concerning. And then, later in the day — it unfortunately happened at the same time as the World Economic Forum was kicking off in Davos, and there were some things said earlier that week about increased tariffs, possibly on Europe — that’s when the “sell America” trade really picked up steam. So the U.S. bond market sold off as well. Yes, it had something to do with Japan, but it also had something to do with those European comments, because if you add both of those together, they both still likely result in less demand for U.S. Treasuries.

How to Keep Anxious Clients Calm in a Volatile Election Year

Sean Walters: Well, it’s a perfect segue into our final topic, which advisors usually start with: client behavior. One of my favorite quotes from the behavioral finance side is, “It’s not irrational behavior, it’s normal behavior.” So let’s start with that. What’s your best advice to an advisor whose clients feel anxious and want to make big changes right now? There’s a lot going on in the world, and there are a lot of advisors listening — regardless of which week it is in 2026, or 2025, or 2027, there’s likely to be big things going on in the world that make their clients jittery. What would be your advice to those advisors?

Liz Thomas: Well, I’ll start with one of my favorite quotes, from Warren Buffett: the stock market is a mechanism for transferring money from the impatient to the patient. Anybody who’s making moves because they’re impatient about finding something out, or impatient about getting more certain on a topic, is likely to find themselves chasing their own tail a lot. I can say one thing for almost certain: this volatility, the geopolitical risk, is not likely going anywhere anytime soon. The topic of it may change — the topic du jour may change as we move through the year — but the volatility on the geopolitical side is not likely to go anywhere. Add to that that this is a midterm election year. So if you can manage to get your clients to pull up a little bit and look at the bigger picture: 2026 is probably going to be a more volatile year than 2025, and 2024, and 2023. Now, in 2023 we had the regional bank crisis; in 2025 we had Liberation Day. There were big drawdowns in both of those years, and they both happened early in the year — but we ended pretty strong, and everybody felt pretty good by the end of the year. So keep that in mind too: this sort of early-year trepidation, these early-year jitters, are pretty normal for the last handful of years. Also, pulling up and looking at it — let’s take all this, you know, let’s take Venezuela out of it, let’s take Greenland out of it, let’s take Japan out of it, I know that’s impossible — and just focus on the U.S. Midterm elections are in November of this year. In a midterm election year, the average drawdown is 19%. In a regular year, the average drawdown is only like 12 to 14%. So midterm election years are generally bumpier as it is, just taking out all of this other geopolitical noise. So this is something I think is important for investors to keep in mind: this might be a dramatic year, and one that’s hard to sit through at times. In those years, sectors like consumer staples and health care tend to do the best, so that’s also something to keep in mind. And I actually saw a report today about tightening financial conditions — staples tend to do the best in a tightening-financial-condition environment. We talked about this earlier: what’s the most underappreciated risk? Well, what if growth comes in better and financial conditions actually do tighten a bit, because the Fed changes its tune? That’s another tally for staples, another reason to own them. So if you zoom out and think about it from a more rational perspective — okay, some of this volatility is normal, a lot of it is short-lived, the market tends to overreact in the short term, both on the upside and the downside — just because there’s a headline doesn’t mean I need to do anything about it. And frankly, the better option is usually to not do anything about it. That said, I do think investors who are still very exposed to the Mag Seven, or very exposed to tech stocks — meaning they’re overweight the index in tech stocks — it’s time to consider some diversification and make sure there’s exposure to other things in the portfolio. I’ve mentioned many of those sectors, so I won’t beat a dead horse, but considering exposure to other things that may seem really boring, that may feel like they’re not a good or exciting investment — in a year where we expect broadening to continue, I think you’re going to want exposure to some of those places.

Sean Walters: Well, we’ll stay tuned with a lot of the resources you provide us, Liz, and we’ll definitely get you back on the stage again — I enjoy those high ratings as much as you do. This has been a great podcast. I have one more question for you. We’re an organization serving about 30,000 advisors, with 16,000 certificants or candidates in our certification programs — who knows how many of them will tune in. But I want to close these podcasts with: what’s your one word of advice, or the one thing you’d like to say to advisors as we head into 2026, or really at any time?

Liz Thomas: Let’s see, one word of advice. I guess I would say: stay rooted. That’s two words, sorry — so maybe “rooted,” if we have to choose one word. This is an era of transition, for the US and for the globe. It’s an era of transition in monetary policy. It’s an era of transition, and perhaps consternation, in fiscal policy. And politics are playing a role more now than maybe any time in the last decade. The rejiggering of trade, and all the changes that might occur and stick as the rest of this year plays out and into 2027 — I think that’s something we just have to accept as what’s happening. The more you fight it, the worse off you probably are as an investor. So stay rooted in the strategy that you’ve laid out for your clients, and trust your judgment. It’s really easy to second-guess yourself on a daily or weekly basis when dramatic things, dramatic swings, are happening in markets. But more likely than not, the strategy you laid out with a clear head at the end of 2025 is the one you should continue to stick to.

Sean Walters: “Well, that’ll wrap up our issue of The Exceptional Advisor Podcast with Liz Thomas. I want to thank her for joining us again — she’s always terrific in translating what’s going on in the markets for our members. Please follow this podcast so you catch up when new episodes arrive. And please turn to the Investments & Wealth Institute for any of your education and ongoing developmental needs as an advanced advisor trying to serve your clients in a much better way. So thank you again for your time. My name is Sean Walters; we’ll see you next time.”