March, 2026 Investing Update

I’m starting a new monthly feature for 2026 focusing on investing. Estimating where we are in the business cycle and how this impacts your investments. Updates and portfolio tweaks go to Subscribers on the first Monday of each month.

Year to date, the aggressive “Adrenaline” portfolio is up annualized 10.3%.

The safer “Market-Neutral” portfolio soared an annualized 57.3%.

Both blew out the benchmark S&P 500, which is actually slightly down for the year.

As background, I used to teach MBA investment analysis and corporate strategy, and worked real-world corporate strategy at a pair of multinationals in the US and Japan. I’ve managed assets using classical and Austrian economics business cycle analysis since the early 1990’s.

Macro Thesis as of March, 2026

The economy is humming along with GDP growth of 3.5% (if you strip out last year’s federal shutdown). Productivity growth is singing at 4.9% -- one of the highest since the 1980’s.

Jobs are finally turning up, with official numbers showing about twice as much job creation as the economy needs. Inflation continues falling, now at 2.4% if you believe government numbers and under 1% if you prefer private aggregator Truflation.

Credit metrics are benign -- financial conditions, commercial loans, and credit spreads are quiet. The closest to a rumble is reckless loans in private equity, which are still in the tens of billions -- not structural.

Stocks, on the other hand, are having a sluggish 2026, with the S&P 500 (SPY) slightly negative year-to-date. But this could be digesting the late 2025 jump, when the S&P did annualized 20%.

More important, both model portfolios turned in very solid returns — 10.3% and 57.3% annualized.

With that, specific picks and portfolio changes for this month: