Waiting for a CRASH? Why Gold, Silver, & Bitcoin Are UP and Why Safety is KEY

I'm Ronda Legy with ETF Guide. Great to see all of you. I hope your 2026 is going well so far. And I want to give you a quick update in this particular episode. We're going to take a look at some top performing ETFs, some areas with momentum.

Take a look at the industry sectors and also some bigger picture macroeconomic big investment themes that are happening not just this year but are what I would consider multi-year themes that are a continuation of some of the things that began in previous years. Now if we take a look at the poll, this was one of the questions I asked you, our audience at ETF Guide TV at the beginning of the year, or maybe it was at very tail end of last year. I asked you which ETF categories you think are going to be the strongest performers for 2026 and you overwhelmingly agreed, most of you, that it was going to be technology.

Over 50% said that and then behind it cryptocurrencies, other, and then real estate. We're going to take a look to see how accurate you've been so far. I'm going to give you an update on that in terms of industry sectors and performance and see if technology has been the place to be.

Some nice comments from Mike. He's enjoying our episodes and weekly shows as well as updates. And he said, "I recently got some gold and silver to balance my crypto positions. It seems that when metals are up, crypto is down and vice versa." Well, I took a chart and this is over the past two years, Mike, of cryptocurrency as measured by Bitcoin.

Now, this is not a basket of cryptos. Probably been more accurate if I'd have done a basket of cryptos versus a basket of precious metals, which is GLTR. GLTR is an ETF that tracks gold, silver, platinum, and palladium. It's a 4-in-1 ETF. And if you want just exposure to precious metals in one ticker, GLTR is what that does. And as you could see here related to Bitcoin via IBIT from Eyesshares, they've both been in the same upward trend.

Now obviously it's not going to be a one-to-one correlation but you could see the trajectory in terms of upward performance over the past two years has been in the same direction with the advantage in terms of performance to the upside in favor of precious metals up 164% versus 120% for Bitcoin. Strong performance across the board for both. And if we just look at this particular two-year period, they seem to be pretty correlated to me.

In terms of other feedback, Jim correcting me, it was Rip Van Winkle who fell asleep for 20 years, not Ruple Stillskin. And thank you for making that clarification and correction. You're exactly correct. I keep referring to Rumple Stillskin when I should be referring to Rumple Ruple. So, thank you. I will not make this mistake again. If I do, Jim will be there to correct me.

And we got Tony from New York. Navididia. Yeah, Tony. Navididia with an emphasis on Nah. I'm from Chicago. That's my accent coming out. So, it is Nvidia. How you like that? At least I got the ticker symbol correct.

The three cornerstones of an architecturally sound investment portfolio. What are they? Well, the ledgy framework for building a architecturally sound robust investment portfolio is three containers. Your core, your noncore, and your safety bucket. Previously referred to as your margin of safety. Each of these buckets operates differently and the types of investments you own in each of these buckets is different from the other.

So for example, investments that you'd own in your core portfolio or core container would not be the same as the non-core or the safety. And again, this applies across the board. You don't want to have any overlap of the types of assets because you want each of these ETF containers or portfolio containers to do something different than the other.

And so this is the framework that I encourage all of our viewers to adopt in their own portfolios. I think that it's robust, it's smart, it also protects you and allows you to make money in any kind of climate. I'm going to ask our viewers a question about these containers. We're going to test the intellect of our audience to see how well you know which investments are fitting or suitable for these containers. We're going to just focus on one container. So stay tuned for that.

Now in terms of a broader big picture performance for 2026, we could see here that the runaway winner thus far has been Bitcoin IBIT which is up over 9% and having a great run. I remind you that last year Bitcoin was an underperformer. We're seeing a little bit of a reversion. Now we're seeing outperformance to the upside for Bitcoin relative to US stocks which S&P 500 has gained about 1 and a half percent.

Bonds, US bonds narrowly up. You've got global real estate ahead by almost 4% and then commodities have been strong performers up almost 4%. So that's your big picture view and again I think this goes back to when you look at the performance the outperformers it's really the debasement trade real assets assets not denominated in US dollars. We're going to talk about that in a second hold your horses in terms of S&P 500 industry sector performance.

We got 11 industry groups all nine out of 11 are up and we got two down and you'll notice that the laggered XL LC that's been a hot performer over the past several years. That's been like one of the best performing industry groups. This year, not so much. You take a look at the changing dynamics of the sector performance and the rotation to energy, materials, industrials. These are the areas thus far in 2026 that are outperforming.

We're going to show share with you a couple of other ETF ideas and strategies for those in a second. In terms of January, this is sort of a historical reference point. If January is good, then you can see from this chart as far as historically speaking, the final 11 months of the year tend to be up 87% of the time. That's if we have a positive January.

So, this is called the January barometer. And I would not say this is, you know, something I would necessarily trade off, but it's a good historical reference point. And certainly if prices confirm the historical reference point, I think that makes a strong argument for maintaining equities. Now, in terms of another indicator, this is the presidential cycle indicator.

Currently, we're in the second year of the US presidential cycle, midyear term. And you'll notice historically, it's been pretty much a flat year relative to the other years within the cycle. Again, I would put more emphasis on prices versus seasonal patterns, presidential cycle patterns, and all these other patterns, which to me are just noise. They're interesting references as far as history, but we know that prices ultimately determine the winners and the losers.

And so that's why we place a higher emphasis, at least I do, on immediate price performance and price trends and action, right? That's what we should be paying attention to. And that's one of the reasons we also do this weekly update. Now, in terms of year-to-date performance, this is since the beginning of the year through the market close of January 16th.

The charts cut off a little bit there, but this shows you the upward trajectory. Getting back to the the basement trade of silver, silver miners, gold, and gold miners. You've also got copper. The performance trend, the bullish trend is up. All of these ETFs are performing strongly. Put them on your radar.

And certainly if you're looking for bullish upward performance, you're getting in here from SLVR, Goldbug, GBug, and then of course COP. We've got other ETFs in the leveraged area, 2X, 3X, we got Nugget, Jnug, both great performers, delivered huge numbers last year, and they continue to add on to that. Both of these areas focus on gold miners.

Jay Nug of course focus on the smaller or what they call junior gold miners smaller caps erx energy nailed homebuilders there's a been a lot of stuff happening in that sector talk about people being able to take money out of their 401k retirement plans to make a firsttime home purchase so that's been helping to lift that area and then DUSL is focused on industrials and all of these ETFs performing strongly and delivering some pretty impressive results thus far.

Now, why is the debasement trade real assets non-denominated non US dollar denominated trades? Why are they doing so well? And I think this is something that has been started in previous years and it continues though and it's going to get stronger and I think it's going to become a more important theme as runaway national debt here in the US continues to increase and become a real problem.

And there's been a lot of folks talking about this and it's a slowmoving train wreck, but it is a train wreck. And eventually that train is going to land in a place we don't really want to know. We're right now at about 38.5 trillion. We'll be over 40 trillion this year. We're going to eventually be 50 trillion. It's a problem. Especially when interest rates, the cost just of servicing the debt, we're not going to have enough money to even cover that. We're running deficits on that.

But there's also been a lot of talk about tariff revenue. Of course, tariffs back in the news again. Supreme Court still not making a decision on whether it'll allow the president to continue with tariffs or not. And this time tariffs being used to finagle greenland away from Denmark. It was originally used tariffs as a way to increase revenue for the US government.

Now, it's being used as a strategy to add more territories. But the question is from a mathematical perspective, is there enough tariff revenue coming in to pay for the 1.8 $1.9 trillion in annual budget deficits? And this is the hard math, folks. Don't listen to any politicians that tell you that tariff rev...