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What are the world's biggest investors actually saying right now? And what can we learn from the legends who came before them?
Every episode, we go source-by-source through interviews, reports, and predictions from investors like Cathie Wood, Ray Dalio, and Stanley Druckenmiller—plus deep dives into the timeless lessons from trading legends like Jesse Livermore and Paul Tudor Jones.
No speculation. Just verified quotes, specific predictions, and the strategies behind the world's greatest money minds.
This is Money Men.
Cathie Wood just went on CNBC and predicted a Goldilocks economy. 5% GDP growth, falling inflation, and Bitcoin going to $1,200,000. But remember, this is the same person whose fund crashed 75%. It's the same person who said that Zoom would hit $1,500 when today it's actually just at $74. And it's the same person who Wall Street has been laughing at for three straight years.
Josh Stanton:But here's the thing. She's also the person who called Tesla before She called Bitcoin when banks said it was just a scam, and she built a $60,000,000,000 fund from nothing. So what is she actually saying right now? What are her specific predictions, and should you and I be listening to her? And so what I did is I went through her recent interviews, her monthly updates, and ARC's big ideas 2026 report, and I'm gonna break it all down quote by quote, source by source, and let's see if what she's saying is making much sense for 2026.
Josh Stanton:Okay. So Kathy sat down with Squawk Box for a full interview, 01/16/2026, and she made a prediction that goes against everything that Wall Street is saying right now. Her exact quote was, expect strong deflationary pressures in 2026. Let me break down why this matters. Right now, everyone is worried about inflation.
Josh Stanton:The Fed has kept rates high. Economists are debating whether we need more rate hikes at this point, and the consensus view is that inflation is in fact sticky and won't come down easily. And Kathy is saying the opposite. She's saying deflation is coming, prices going down, they're gonna be going down and not up, And she's not just saying it might happen. She's calling it a goldilocks scenario.
Josh Stanton:You literally use those words, goldilocks scenario. That's basically economic speak for the perfect situation. 5% real GDP growth combined with falling inflation. Say it again. 5% real GDP growth combined with falling inflation.
Josh Stanton:And try to think about what she's claiming here. Really soak it in. She's saying strong economic growth, but prices dropping. That is the holy grail. That all almost never happens, by the way.
Josh Stanton:Usually when growth is strong, prices go up because demand is high. So why does Kathy think we're getting both? Her thesis is that the economy is like a coiled spring, which is the worst she is. It's being compressed by high interest rates for years. It's being compressed by high interest rates for years.
Josh Stanton:Housing sales are down 40% since 2021. Manufacturing has been in what she calls a rolling recession, and companies have been afraid to spend on anything that isn't AI. And all that pent up demand, it's about to explode according to her. So when the Fed finally cuts rates, when confidence returns, all those delayed purchases happen at once. And that's where she's saying the growth is gonna be coming from.
Josh Stanton:But here's the deflationary part. Technology is making everything cheaper. AI is essentially making workers more productive every single day. Robotics is reducing manufacturing costs. There's a lot of growth in that area as well happening this year.
Josh Stanton:We all know about that. These aren't inflationary forces, they're deflationary. So you get growth from unleashed demand and falling prices from technology, which is Goldilocks. Right? Now, here's what's interesting.
Josh Stanton:Just one week before Kathy's interview, Ray Dalio went on The David Rubenstein Show and said the complete opposite. His exact quote was, my grandchildren and great grandchildren not born yet are going to be paying off this debt in devalued dollars. He's predicting inflation from money printing. Kathy's predicting deflation from technology. And they can't both be right.
Josh Stanton:We know that. But they're they're both essentially putting their money where their mouth is. So is she right? I think that's the trillion dollar question right there. But at least you understand and I understand what she's betting on.
Josh Stanton:So then that brings us to her her own show, which is called In The Know, which is from 01/09/2026, January 9. She does a essentially a video update. She calls it In the Know where she breaks down her thinking. And so the January episode had some specific calls that I think are worth examining. She pointed to three forces pushing deflation.
Josh Stanton:The first one is cheap energy. So as oil prices could drop significantly, she believes, especially with developments in Venezuela. So if Venezuelan oil comes back to the global market, which is what we're predicting, that's going to be a lot more supply. And more supply means lower prices. Lower energy prices flow through to absolutely everything.
Josh Stanton:We all know this today. Transportation, manufacturing, heating. We know it's deflationary. She's making a specific geopolitical bet right here. She thinks the situation in Venezuela is going to change in a way that increases oil supply.
Josh Stanton:And that's that right there, that's actually not the consensus. Most analysts aren't talking about Venezuela as a major major factor, but Kathy is. Second, easing shelter costs. So housing inflation has essentially been the sticky part of the CPI as of late. It's why the Fed has kept rates high.
Josh Stanton:Shelter costs make up a huge portion of the inflation index, which we all know about. Kathy's argument is that shelter inflation is lagging, actually. The actual rental market has already cooled down. New leases are being signed at lower prices right now, but because of how the government measures shelter inflation, it takes twelve to eighteen months to show up in the data. And she's saying that the data will in fact catch up soon.
Josh Stanton:And when it does, headline inflation will drop fast. The Fed will be forced to acknowledge that inflation is in fact beaten. And then the third thing is China. China's economy is struggling. They're in a deflationary spiral, and they're exporting that deflation to the world right now.
Josh Stanton:How? So by cutting prices on exports to move goods, Chinese manufacturers are accepting lower margins just to keep factories running, and that means cheaper goods flowing into The US. That's deflationary for American consumers. So, Kathy, she's connecting the dots across energy housing and international trade, and they're all pointing to one conclusion in her mind, which is that prices are coming down and not going up. And so that brings us to the next thing, which is the Big Ideas 2026 report, which we just mentioned before.
Josh Stanton:So every year we know that ARC publishes their flagship research report, which is called Big Ideas, and it's where they lay out the boldest predictions with specific numbers. So the 2026 edition has some wild calls. First of all, Bitcoin, 1,200,000.0 by 2030. They're projecting Bitcoin goes roughly 15 x from current prices over the next four years. Her exact reasoning from the report is that Bitcoin's fixed supply and mathematically governed issuance makes it structurally more scarce than gold.
Josh Stanton:That's what she said. And let me unpack that just a little bit. So gold is scarce. We know that. But new gold gets mined every year.
Josh Stanton:The supply slowly increases. Bitcoin is different to that. There will only ever be 21,000,000 Bitcoin. No governments around the world can print more. No miner can create more.
Josh Stanton:The code is fixed. And she calls Bitcoin the ultimate diversifier for portfolios. Her argument is that it has low correlation to both stocks and bonds. It's a hedge against inflation because governments can't debase it, and it's potentially a hedge against deflation because it's a store of value outside of the traditional financial system. And so the math in ARC's model by which is by 2030, roughly 20,500,000.0 Bitcoin will be in circulation.
Josh Stanton:If institutional adoption continues, if Bitcoin captures even a fraction of gold's market cap, if it becomes a standard portfolio application, you get to 1,000,000 plus Bitcoin. It's a big if statement, that's for sure, but that's essentially what her model is showing. And, of course, she's not alone here. We have Michael Saylor who just posted more orange on X while Bitcoin was crashing below $76,000. His company is underwater on their holdings.
Josh Stanton:And so what is his response? Buy more. He told Forbes he'd buy all the Bitcoin even if it crashed to $1. That's either conviction or possibly delusion as well. But it's the same direction that Kathy's pointing.
Josh Stanton:Alright. So now over to Tesla, which Kathy is very much known for. ARK's price target is $2,600 per share. That's roughly six x from the current prices. But what's what most people miss when they hear that number, which is that 90% of that valuation actually comes from one thing, and most people overlook this.
Josh Stanton:It's coming from the valuation of robotaxis. So ARC posted on their on their x account, they said Tesla is likely to launch a full scale robotaxi robotaxi network in 2025 or 2026, probably 2026. Right? We're in 2026 now. Their model shows robotaxis generating 63% of Tesla's revenue by 2029 and eighty six percent of Tesla's profits.
Josh Stanton:The margins are insane, by the way, compared to selling cars. There's no driver to pay. The car just runs twenty four seven, picking up passengers, collecting fares. It is insane. Kathy's argument for why Tesla wins at robotaxis is this.
Josh Stanton:She says Tesla has the most valuable AI training dataset in the world, billions of miles of real world driving data. This data is worth more than the factories. This is a real competitive advantage if you really think about it. Every Tesla on the road is collecting data. Every mile driven makes the neural network even smarter.
Josh Stanton:Waymo, they don't have this scale. Cruise doesn't have this scale. Nobody does. So what's the accounting argument to this? Data is only valuable if you can turn it into a working product, and Tesla has had this data advantage for years, literally years.
Josh Stanton:Full self driving still isn't approved for unsupervised use. Waymo is actually operating robo taxis in multiple cities right now with completely less data as well. So being data rich and product poor is a real risk, but she's obviously factoring that in with her projections. Now we're gonna move on to AI productivity and her thesis here. So there's this thread that connects all of Kathy's predictions, and she believes that AI is about to unleash a productivity boom unlike anything we've seen in the industrial revolution.
Josh Stanton:And so from ARC's research, non farm productivity growth could accelerate to four to 6% annually. That's what she's predicting. And to put that in context, normal productivity growth is one to 2% per year. She's predicting two to three x the normal rate sustained for years and years to come. Why?
Josh Stanton:Because AI is changing how work gets done. One person with AI tools can now do the work of five people. Lawyers are using AI to draft contracts. Developers are using AI to write code. Analysts are using AI to process data.
Josh Stanton:We just saw the release of Claude Bot, by the way. If you're not on Claude Bot, go check that thing out and it's gonna blow your mind. So this isn't theory. It's already happening right now. The question is how fast does it scale?
Josh Stanton:And Kathy breaks the AI investment opportunity into four specific layers. She says layer one is compute. So that's gonna be chips, NVIDIA, AMD. It's a hardware that runs AI. Layer two is the infrastructure as a service, which is the cloud providers.
Josh Stanton:We're talking AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, the data centers essentially where these AIs run. Then layer three is platform infrastructure software, and that's the tools developers are using right now to build out AI applications. And then layer four is the software as a service, the SaaS model. Right? That's where the applications that end to end users actually integrate interact with, I should say.
Josh Stanton:So what's our take? The real money is in layers three and four, not in layer one. Everyone is piling into NVIDIA, everyone is focused on chips, but where Arc's research shows that platform software companies grew at 31% annually between 2019 and 2024. That's where the value right now is being created. And she's also betting big on what she calls the energy AI nexus.
Josh Stanton:You might have heard her mention this before. And so AI, it essentially what it does, it needs massive amounts of power. Okay? In data centers, they're running ChattypuTee, Claw, Gemini. They consume electricity like small cities do, pretty much.
Josh Stanton:The bottleneck for AI isn't going to be chips or software. It's going to be power. We've heard Elon talk about this as well. And that's why ARC has been buying Oclo, which is a nuclear energy company building small modular reactors. What's her logic behind this?
Josh Stanton:She says nuclear is the only clean energy that provides reliable baseload power at scale. Solar and wind are intermittent. When the sun goes down, when the wind stops, you need something else. Nuclear runs twenty four seven, and this is actually a contrarian and interesting bet that she's making right here. Most of the AI hype is focused on software and chips.
Josh Stanton:Kathy is thinking about energy infrastructure that is needed to run it all. Okay. Now let's address the elephant in the room, which is why should anyone at all listen to Kathy Wood given her recent track record? So ARKK, ARC, her flagship fund, it peaked in February 2021. Since then, it's actually down 75%.
Josh Stanton:Three quarters of the value has been destroyed. Her specific predictions have actually been disasters. Zoom, as I said before, she said $1,500 per share by 2026. It's trading at $74 right now. I mentioned that before.
Josh Stanton:That's a 95% miss, by the way. She's not even close on that. Teladoc, she called it the future of health care. It peaked at nearly $300. Now it's under $20 and 93% collapsed.
Josh Stanton:Roku, she was pounding the table when it was at $500. Now it's around $70. It's down 86 percent. These are not small misses, by the way. These are catastrophic failures.
Josh Stanton:People who followed her advice, who bought what she was buying, they probably lost fortunes. So why does anyone still listen? And it's because she was also spectacularly right before she was spectacularly wrong. That's why. She called Tesla when it was a joke.
Josh Stanton:When short sellers, when they're going crazy, when they were circling around, when every analyst on Wall Street said it was overvalued, she held through the crashes. We now know that. She called Bitcoin early when Jamie Dimon was calling it a fraud when governments were threatening to ban it before any institution would touch it. And she called the entire growth tech trade before it became consensus. We're talking Roku, Square, Teladoc.
Josh Stanton:Those were revolutionary companies. The problem wasn't the direction. It was the valuation and the timing. And so her fund was up 152% in 2020. In a single year, by the way, 152% in a single year.
Josh Stanton:And it was during the pandemic. That's not luck. You don't generate those returns by accident. The question is, though, was her was her success skill or just circumstance? That's up to us to decide, right?
Josh Stanton:Was she a genius who identified real trends, or was she just leveraged long on risk assets during the biggest money printing experiment in human history? The honest answer, probably both. She did identify real trends. AI is real, we know that, And we're using it today, and it's becoming a huge part of the economy. Electric vehicles are real.
Josh Stanton:We see them driving around everywhere. Digital payments are real. Telemedicine became real during COVID. We know that. But she also benefited enormously from zero interest rates during that time.
Josh Stanton:When money was free, when the Fed is printing trillions, long duration growth stocks go vertical. We know that now. That's just math. It's not genius. At least I don't think so.
Josh Stanton:So when rates rose, her strategy we saw collapsed. The tide went out and we saw who was swimming naked. And so the most common criticism is that Kathy is a one trick pony. She gets this all the time. She's leveraged long on speculative growth.
Josh Stanton:That's the whole strategy. When rates are low and money is cheap, it works spectacularly. But when rates are high, it fails spectacularly as well. And there's truth here. The correlation between arc and interest rates is almost mechanical.
Josh Stanton:Literally pull up a chart. When ten year yields rise, ARC falls. When yields fall, ARC rises. It's nearly perfect inverse correlation. Go have a look at that in your spare time.
Josh Stanton:And just try to think about what that means. Her fund is basically a bet on interest rates, not just a bet on innovation. So when the Fed pivots and cuts rates, ARK will probably rip higher. We're probably going to see that. Okay?
Josh Stanton:When rates stay elevated, ARK is going to struggle. Just try to keep that in mind. The underlying companies almost become secondary to the macro environment, and that's a hidden risk that many ARK investors do not understand right now. The second criticism is that she's a marketing genius and not an investing genius. She's built a huge following through free research, media appearances, and transparency.
Josh Stanton:She's all over the place all the time. She's attracted retail investors who who essentially bought based on her celebrity and not the fundamentals. And I think many of her investors are looking deep into her fundamentals. But ARK's inflows peaked when her media presence peaked, by the way. When CNBC was talking about her every day when she was on magazine covers, that's not a coincidence.
Josh Stanton:The third criticism is that she has no risk management. Real hedge fund managers size positions carefully. They use stop losses. They cut losers essentially before they become catastrophic. Kathy does the opposite.
Josh Stanton:She adds to positions as they're crashing. Zoom crashed, buy more. Teladoc crashed, buy more. Her response to being wrong is to double down. So in traditional finance and TradFi, you get fired for 75% drawdowns.
Josh Stanton:It's just how it works. Portfolio managers have been terminated for far less. Kathy's a fire because she runs her own firm and her loyal investors, they stuck with her. Finally, the timing criticism, which is being eventually right is not the same as being right. So if you need a 10 time horizon to be vindicated, but your fund drops 75% in one year, you actually failed.
Josh Stanton:Your investors don't care about $20.30. They needed that money for retirement, for their kids' education, for their lives, whatever it is. Telling them just to wait while the portfolio was down 75% is cold comfort to those people. But with all that being said, here's what's interesting. ARK is up about 35% over the past year.
Josh Stanton:It's not enough to recover the 2021, 2022 losses, not even close, but the momentum is shifting. Coinbase has rallied hard from its lows. Bitcoin ETFs are taking in billions for sure, even though we know it's slowing down a lot right now. AR stocks are on fire, and some of her core theses are playing out right now. So if you bought ARK in early twenty twenty three near the lows, you're actually up significantly.
Josh Stanton:You made a lot of money. The people who are still underwater are those who bought at the peak of February 2021, and they actually may never recover from it, possibly. I don't know. That's the brutal reality of this timing, by the way, if you're investing in Cathie Woods Fund. And this is the hardest lesson in investing.
Josh Stanton:You can be right about a trend. You can be right about a company, but if you buy at the wrong price or the wrong time, you still lose money. The people who bought Amazon in 1999 were right about e commerce. They were right about Amazon being is gonna dominate the industry, but they still lost 90% of their investment and had to wait ten years to get back to even. And so the people who bought, say, Cisco in 2000 were right about the Internet.
Josh Stanton:They were right that the network equipment would be essential for it, but Cisco has never recovered from its peak price twenty five years later. Being right about the future is not enough. Valuation matters. Say it again. Valuation matters.
Josh Stanton:Timing matters. Risk management matters. These are all the fundamentals that have to be in play as well. And Kathy was right about Tesla and Bitcoin. I'm not gonna not gonna disagree with that.
Josh Stanton:But the people who bought ARK at $160 in February 2021, what about those people? They're still down 60% or more even after the recent rally. They may never get their money back. There's a chance of that. Alright.
Josh Stanton:So let's shift gears and let's put her current predictions right now in context with what other major investors are saying today. So Ray Dalio, we all know Ray Dalio, he's worried about debt cycles and potential currency crisis. He's being cautious on growth assets. He thinks the risks are in fact elevated. Stanley Druckenmiller, Druck, has been raising cash right now.
Josh Stanton:He's worried about the deficit and long term interest rates. He's not going all in on growth at all. Warren Buffett, we all know this, is sitting on a record cash at Berkshire, $381,000,000,000, more than twice his previous record. So when an investor like Buffett with his track record can't find a single thing worth buying, that tells you something about valuations. The legends out there, they are cautious right now.
Josh Stanton:They're seeing risks. They're preserving capital. Kathy is aggressive. She's betting everything that the consensus is actually wrong, that deflation is coming, that AI changes everything, and that the Fed will in fact pivot. So if you believe Kathy, go all in on growth, crypto and innovation stocks, do it.
Josh Stanton:Ignore the short term volatility and focus on twenty thirty. If you believe the legends, the other legends out there, hold more cash, buy more value stocks, keep more defensive positions, and respect the risks in the system. So who's right? We don't know yet, but we're gonna find out. But at least you understand what the debate is about right now.
Josh Stanton:So what's my take on this? Well, after going through all of Kathy's recent interviews, her monthly updates, and ARC's research reports, I think she correctly identifies big trends but dramatically overestimates how quickly they play out and how high valuations can go. AI is transforming work. We know that. That's real.
Josh Stanton:But the full impact might take ten years, not two. We don't know yet. Okay? Robotaxis are coming. We've seen them out there.
Josh Stanton:Tesla might win, but regulatory approval is uncertain, and Waymo is right now ahead on actual deployment. Bitcoin might become digital gold. There's a chance of that. Institutions, they might allocate, but governments might fight it harder than we expect. We don't know.
Josh Stanton:Her coiled spring thesis. What is that? So, actually, it's it's not crazy. Housing is depressed right now. Manufacturing has been in recession.
Josh Stanton:If rates come back, these sectors will rebound. There is pent up demand. And then her deflation thesis, it's also not crazy. Technology does drive prices down over time. We've seen that all throughout history.
Josh Stanton:AI is making workers more productive. We're seeing that right now with the release of Claude Bot, by the way. The deflationary forces are real, but being directionally right is not enough actually. You also have to be right about the magnitude and the timing as well. And a 75% drawdown is a 75% drawdown at the end of the day.
Josh Stanton:That's not acceptable risk management. Track records do matter. And so the bottom line is this. This is Cathie Wood's current predictions all summarized for you. We've got Goldilocks economy, 5% GDP growth with falling inflation.
Josh Stanton:She thinks Bitcoin's gonna go to 1,200,000.0 by 2030. Tesla to 2,600 on Robotaxi thesis. AI driven productivity boom of four to 6% annually. Deflation from technology, not inflation from money printing. She's either going to be spectacularly right and everyone will call her a visionary again, or she's going be spectacularly wrong and her twenty twenty, twenty twenty one success will be remembered as a bubble artifact.
Josh Stanton:Either way, she's making specific testable predictions right now, and that's more than most talking heads on financial TV are doing. She's putting her money and her reputation on the line. She's doing it very publicly as well. So all the sources are in the show notes. Links to the CNBC interview from January 16, the In The Note episode from January 9, ARK's big big ideas '26 report, and their daily trade disclosures as well.
Josh Stanton:So go do your own research. Form your own opinion. Is Kathy Wood seeing something the rest of us are missing, or is she just holding bags and calling it conviction? Let me know what you think, and I'll see you in the next