The irrational, fresh-faced optimism of the New Year is set to collide headlong with the material reality of quotidian existence that we've blithely forgotten about in the intervening weeks. Only after a few jarring setbacks will we remember, all over again, that we are powerless against the pressing gravity of circumstance, and that our accomplishments are as little more than etchings on the cold walls of a prison cell, vainly marking time, mired as we are in the subterranean darkness of our own occlusive ignorance.

Now let's allow that gleeful, seasonal ignorance to brighten our eyes for just a few minutes longer—just enough time to scan the horizon for a (1) Forecast, and to look inward at our own (2) Ambitions for the year 2026.

Last year was "bullish" and "long-vol." The reason for that forecast was Trump. The reason, of course, is always Trump, because everything is about Trump. Partly, this is because Trump is indeed a true bullet-dodger, son of Destiny—but partly it's because people fixate on Trump (whether with adulation or hatred), and this makes him actually powerful.

So what does Trump, and Trump-fixation, mean for the market in 2026? Well, the one thought (reminder?) that we'd like to lead with is that Trump really doesn't seem to care about the stock market in this, his second term. And you might respond that well, obviously he cares, because he made much theater of it back in March and April—but we would parry with the argument that this had essentially nothing to do with "the stock market" per se, but rather it was merely a means of selling his tariff plan and rewarding the faithful by telling them when to buy (after which he would walk back much of the plan, and plaster over the hole that he kicked in the wall).

And you'd have to agree that this is more consistent with his behavior: Rewarding the faithful, punishing the disloyal. Or, perhaps more accurately, appearing to do both (it seems ridiculous that The Donald actually cares about the adoring fans who bought his crypto scam-coins).

In this context, it seems unlikely that Trump really cares much what stocks do, outside of their narrative utility. Stock indices simply aren't the yardstick this time around. His focus is sincerely directed elsewhere. If the stock market can be touted, that's lovely; but if not, no sweat.

We believed this at the beginning of last year, too, but we thought that promises of unlocked potential and the fruits of de-regulation would provide buoyancy (hence the bullish outlook). Since, at this juncture, those tantalizing fruits have evaded our collective reach, the assurance of "good-for-business" policy seems to have mostly fallen flat.

This seems bearish. Though, sadly, we have a hard time extracting a particular view on volatility from the circumstances. At the moment, we anticipate a higher mode (VIX at 14 seems silly), but we don't think it makes sense to be "long vol" for a big event. Even "war" doesn't really move the needle when it comes to vol.

So there you go. Our plan is: Stocks flat to down, with some bright spots (robots) and some dark spots (e.g., SaaS). Dollar bid, inflation still not really picking up "despite" Fed cuts. Unemployment up. Foreign cash flows sold. Gold, silver, flat to down. Feel free to let us know if we're wrong (we know some of you people know things).

We're going to start the year with some cleaning. We don't much enjoy cleaning, but it's the sort of thing that needs to get done. There's code that runs too slow. There's code that spits out nonsensical logs. There's code that runs on machines that we thought didn't exist anymore, but somehow (?), the code is still running. Within a few weeks, we'll get tired of cleaning, though, and we'll move on to more exciting things.

Among those is that we want the new SPX Chart to work properly. I.e., we want the "Nearest" button to function. This will get us most of the way to truly "seeing what Robot Jim sees," which is something we've been trying to do for years.

Another thing we want is a new Dashboard. As it stands, the Dashboard page is a bookmarking system for tickers. So, e.g., if we find a ticker that has a surprising relationship on the P-scope or something like that, we'll add it to the list on our Dashboard just so we remember to come back to it. But that's about it. There's a lot more that we could do here, and what we'd like to see on the page is a sort of big-picture view of the market. Of some kind. TBD.

But lastly, and most interesting: We want to hunt down a new SPX signal. We've been talking about this for a month or so—how we want to suss out something new—but we haven't been sure where to look. After a couple weeks of mulling it over, though, we're pretty sure where we'd like to look:

You know how trading signals tend to get abstracted? The whole Goodhart's Law thing, where when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure? Well, what we want to do is to apply this logic to GEX, because we believe (quite strongly) that GEX—now that everyone knows what it means—has had a great deal of its signal abstracted into a higher-order domain. And that domain is (you guessed it) correlations.

This meta-GEX, this GEX-prime (GEX'), is what we really, really want to find in 2026. We don't know what it looks like, but we know it's out there. It has to be.