5 Purchases You’ll Wish You Made in 2026 (Millions Will Regret Not Doing This)

Our economy is going through some of the biggest changes we have seen in our lifetime all in 2026. For one, AI is changing the job market as companies are looking to downsize the number of humans they hire and replace them with AI agents. For two, the conflict in the Middle East has led to the biggest oil price shock that we have seen here in decades. And then for three, the Supreme Court canceled the Trump tariffs in 2025. And then immediately after that, President Trump imposed a whole new wave of sweeping tariffs on countries around the globe. This economic craziness has caused the stock market to go wild in 2026 and it's made people scared to invest their money. But do you want to know something else? This economic craziness actually creates some of the best investment opportunities ever because they allow financially savvy investors to come in and buy good investments when they're on sale. In 2008, real estate prices crashed by 50%. That was a great buying opportunity. In 2017, Bitcoin prices fell by 80%. That was a great buying opportunity. In 2020, stocks fell by 34%. That was a great buying opportunity. In 2022, stocks fell by 20%. Bitcoin fell by 60%. That was a great buying opportunity. And in 2026, well, let's break down the five investment opportunities that you want to pay attention to. So let me break this down one by one, and I got to give you the disclosure. I am not a financial advisor. I'm just a random guy on YouTube. Investing has risks. You are never guaranteed to make money when you invest. In fact, you will lose money at some point. So make sure you always do your own due diligence and never blindly trust a random guy on YouTube. I'm going to go over some specific examples, but I'm not telling you what to invest in. My goal is to help you start thinking like an investor. Opportunity number one is what I call the shift. There are a lot of changes happening in our economy right now, and I'm going to lay it out kind of like a domino. Each one of these shifts are going to create a potential movement of money, which could create a potential investment opportunity. So let me break down the shift into five different pieces because it creates a lot of different movements as to where investment opportunities are changing. In the first three months of 2026, it is estimated that about 60,000 tech workers lost their jobs to artificial intelligence. And the people in AI say that this is just the beginning. Anthropic, which is the parent company of Claude, put out a report saying that this could be a great recession for white collar workers. But the part that you have to remember is that so many companies, not just tech, are now investing huge sums of money into AI to figure out how to make the work more productive and to make the work more efficient, which can create an opportunity. I'll talk about where more specifically in just a second, but this brings me to domino number two is energy, because all of this AI usage needs more energy and we don't have enough energy to power all of this AI. And now what we're starting to see happen for the first time is that big tech companies are now entering the energy space. That means companies like Meta and Amazon are now looking to build their own nuclear sites, that way they can produce their own energy to power their own AI and to power their own data centers because these tech companies cannot rely on their traditional energy grid to produce enough energy for them. So now we're starting to see this huge advancement into energy because of this growth in AI. And this ties in well with domino number three, oil and energy, because of what's happening in the Middle East. After the conflict in the Middle East started, oil prices shot up. And we don't know how long this conflict in the Middle East is really going to go globally, but what we know is as long as there's conflict in the Middle East, oil prices go up, which impact energy costs. And that also makes it more difficult for the Federal Reserve Bank, which is the central bank here in the United States, to cut interest rates, because normally the Fed cuts interest rates when you want to stimulate the economy. But cutting interest rates can make inflation worse. Higher oil prices make inflation worse. And so the Federal Reserve Bank doesn't want to cut interest rates when there are worries about inflation because of oil. And so now when we have this oil crisis happening, we have to think about oil prices, which can impact energy costs. But we also have to think about how that's going to impact interest rates, because that's going to have an impact on the economy as well. And the conflict in the Middle East has led to another domino, which is helium. Now, I've been talking about this for a number of weeks, and you're going to start hearing more about this in the coming weeks. But one of the things that happened was that Iran attacked a helium site in Qatar. Why does this matter? Because there's a limited supply of helium in the world, and we need helium to be able to produce semiconductors. What are these semiconductor chips used for? Well, they're used for building the AI and data centers. They're used for building cars. They're used for building refrigerators. They're used for building iPhones. And there's a limited supply of helium in the world. Well, Qatar is the world's leading supplier of helium. And this helium site that was destroyed produced approximately a third of the world's helium. Well, we need this helium to be able to produce these semiconductor chips. And well, companies really only have a few months of stockpile of this helium. And if helium stockpiles start to run short and we cannot find enough helium, that could create a more difficult problem to produce these semiconductor chips. So it's something you want to pay attention to, which brings me to the fifth domino, which I'm going to call national security. And I'm calling it national security because obviously there's a lot of concerns of things happening geopolitically, but also because the tariffs that we have in place are there for a measure of national security. That's what the Trump administration says. Now, the reason why you want to pay attention to this is because due to these tariffs, we need certain metals that we are going to have to figure out how to get more of because things like copper are in need to produce EVs. It's in need to produce a lot of the technology that we have, but we're going to have to figure out how to get more of it. And we also have to think about cybersecurity because now as we enter this age of AI, cybersecurity is going to become exponentially more important. So these are what are called the shifts, but how can this create an actual potential investment opportunity? I'm going to go over specific examples, but I also want to remind you, this is one of the things that we cover every single day in Market Briefs. Market Briefs is my free daily newsletter for investors where every day my team is working to break down what's happening at things like the economy, housing, stocks, crypto, and global markets into a fun, witty, and easy to read newsletter. It's read by hundreds of thousands of investors every single morning. And when you sign up for Market Briefs for free, you're also going to get a free investing masterclass to help you in your investing journey. That way, you can be able to identify investment opportunities before they hit the crowd. So if you want to start reading Market Briefs for free, all you have to do is sign up, and I have the link for you down in the description below. If you want to get exposure to the AI space as a long-term investor, because yes, there's going to be volatility. Yes, we could see a market crash. Yes, we could see a recession. Yes, we could see the AI bubble burst. But as a long-term investor, if you wanted to invest in the space, there are many ETFs that can give you exposure to the space. Here are just a couple examples. Again, my goal is not to tell you what to invest in, but rather to help you think like an investor. BOTZ is an ETF that's going to give you exposure to the robotics and the AI space. And then another one is Robobo, which is also going to give you exposure to the robotics and the AI technology space. If you wanted to invest in the AI technology into the nuclear space, well, there are ETFs that give you exposure to that as well. For example, NUKZ, nukes. This is an ETF that's going to give you exposure to the nuclear renaissance ETF that's giving you exposure to nuclear energy. Or you can look at something like NLR. This is giving you exposure to uranium miners and nuclear utilities. If you believe the conflict in the Middle East is going to continue to keep oil prices high, there are ETFs like XLE, which will give you exposure to the energy and oil space that will benefit as long as oil prices are high. Now, when it comes to helium, there aren't any specific ETFs that I know of that are going to give you exposure to this helium space, although you can invest in semiconductor ETFs like SOXX that will give you exposure to the semiconductor industry. But if you want to direct exposure to helium, there aren't ETFs to do that. I'm going to give you a couple of stock, individual stock examples. Just understand that when you invest your money into an individual stock, it is more risky than investing your money into an ETF. One example is LIN. This is a major gas producer and they are a major helium producer as well. And then APD, again, a major producer of helium globally. The idea being if companies need more helium outside of Qatar, well, then they're going to look for alternative helium suppliers. And then if you wanted to invest in national security for the tariffs or for things like cybersecurity, here are a couple of examples. COPX is an ETF that can give you exposure to copper because if we need more copper and there's a limited supply of copper in the United States, that could drive up the prices of copper, which can benefit COPX. And then CIBR is an ETF that will give you exposure to those cybersecurity companies that are working to protect you against cybersecurity hacks. So now that we've finished talking about where the shift is happening, let's start by talking about the pain because the reality is anytime you see pain in an economy, poop happens. What is poop? Panic leads to overselling, leads to opportunity, leads to profit. We've seen this happen time and time again throughout history. When the 2000.com bubble bursted, poop happened. People panicked. They oversold internet stocks, which created an opportunity to buy internet stocks at a 75% discount, which created the opportunity to profit for the investors that were patient. During the 2008 crash, when real estate prices went down by 50 to 90%, depending on where you lived, people panicked and they oversold, which created an opportunity for the financially smart investors to come in and buy real estate for pennies on the dollar, which created the opportunity to profit where the people that were financially savvy and patient. When the 2020 crash happened, markets fell by 30 some percent. It created panic, which led to overselling of stocks, which created opportunity for the financially savvy to come in and buy, and it created the ability to profit for the investors that were patient. So let's talk about that pain. 2026 has been an extremely volatile year for the stock market because of the tariffs, because of AI, and because of the conflict in the Middle East. We saw the NASDAQ go into correction territory, meaning fall by at least 10% off its highs. We saw Bitcoin get hit extremely hard. We've seen gold prices go up and down. And so the thing that I want you to understand here is if you are a long-term investor and you are investing into the future of the economy, if you believe the American economy is going to be stronger than it is today in 10 years, 15 years, 20 years down the road, then anytime you see market downturns, that creates a great buying opportunity because now you can just buy a piece of the American economy when it's on sale. The key is you have to know your strategy. And so this is what I call passive investing. Some people call it dollar cost averaging. The idea is you're going to buy a piece of the broad economy and you're going to buy it regularly, you're going to buy it automatically, and you're going to buy it no matter what. I call it A, B, B. Always be buying. Set up a system where every week, every two weeks, or every month, you're going to buy a piece of the broad market, and then you don't touch it. In fact, the only time you should touch it is when markets go down. You don't sell. You use that as an opportunity to buy even more. So if you believe in the future of the American economy, if you believe that the American economy is going to be stronger in 10, 15, 20 years, use downturns to buy even more. How do you buy a piece of the American economy? Well, let's go through some examples. If you just wanted to buy a piece of the American stock market, VTI is going to give you exposure to the total stock market, a couple thousand some stocks in the United States stock market. You're going to own some of all of them with VTI. If you wanted to get a little bit more niche, you can buy a piece of the S&P 500. That is a group of the 500 largest companies in the stock market. SPY is going to give you exposure to the 500 largest companies in the stock market. Now, the nice thing about this is if McDonald's, which is a part of the S&P 500, starts to struggle, they start serving bad hamburgers and now they're on the verge of bankruptcy, you don't have to worry about anything because the fund will kick McDonald's out and they'll replace it with a new company who is now one of the 500 largest companies in the stock market. If you wanted to get more niche and you wanted to invest in more of the tech side of things, QQQ gives you exposure to something called the NASDAQ 100. This is a group of the 100 largest companies in the stock market that are not financial. Now, these 100 largest companies in the stock market that are not financial are primarily tech companies. Now, if you want to get exposure to that tech space, you can just do that through QQQ. This is the broadest way to get exposure to the tech, AI, and all just technology space. Just understand that this is going to be a lot more volatile, meaning when markets go down, this is going to go down even more. When markets go up, this can go up even more. But we know there's a lot of money going into technology and when markets crash, that can create a great buying opportunity here. And I'm going to give you one more for those of you that are like me and you like cash flow investing. SCHD, I'm personally invested in SCHD, is an ETF that gives you broad exposure to companies in the United States that are strong but also grow their dividends. Now, the nice thing about investing for dividends is that when stock prices go down, not only can you accumulate more of those stocks when they're on sale, but you can buy more dividends when they're on sale. Because for every share of a stock that you purchase, you're buying one dividend. And so if a stock price falls and it's still a good company, well now you can buy more of that same stock and produce more income, all because your dollar bought you more of those stocks. And then if that stock goes up, well now not only do you see the appreciation, but now you're still getting the dividends. So SCHD is a way for you to get exposure to broad companies that are working to not only grow their stock value, but also grow their dividends. Again, the key here with these types of broad basket funds is ABB, meaning always being buying. And then when you see markets go down, buy. And when you see markets go down even more, buy more. Of course, I can't tell you what to do because I'm just a random guy on YouTube, but based off of history, we know that this strategy works. Number three is gold. And I I've been investing in gold for a long time, but when I invest in gold, I don't call it an investment. For me, it's just a way of saving money in an alternative way. My theory is that if I have $10,000 of cash and $10,000 worth of physical gold today, and I bury them both in my backyard, in 10 years, the gold will have more buying power than the cash. My theory. And because of that, I own a little bit of gold. It's about 2% of my total investment portfolio. I don't look at gold prices. I don't care what's going on with gold markets. I understand that gold prices have been crazy in the last few years. I don't look at it as an investment. The reason why I don't consider gold an investment is because gold is not working to produce any value. It's not used in the economy. You don't hear about companies needing gold to produce their products. Sure, you use gold in jewelry, use it in some electronics, use it in some dentistry, but really gold is there just to be a store of value. Now, why do people buy gold? They buy gold when they're worried about the dollar. They buy gold when they're worried about a recession. They buy gold when they're worried about a war. They buy gold when they're worried about something bad happening. And so we've seen gold prices explode after the pandemic because of all the money printing, worries about inflation, and concerns about geopolitics. When there's no concerns about money printing, when there's no concerns about geopolitics, gold prices generally fall. How do we know? Just take a look at gold prices throughout history. When the 2008 crash happened, the money printer was turned on, quantitative easing was happening, gold prices boomed between 2008 and 2012. But then in 2012, when people realized that hyperinflation is not coming, the dollar is going to be okay, gold prices crashed in 2012 and they stayed down all the way until 2020. What happened in 2020? That was when the pandemic hit, the money printer was turned back on, and gold prices boomed again. So if you're going to be buying gold, understand that gold normally does not grow faster than stocks. Recently, it has. That's not normal. But if you're buying gold as a hedge, you're buying gold as a protection, you're buying gold as a long-term investor, and you understand that gold prices go up and down, well, then you can own a piece of it. Just understand the reasoning behind buying gold as an inflation hedge, as insurance, as doomsday scenario protection. That's the real value for gold. Number four is investing in real estate. And when I say real estate, I don't mean going out and just buying a house for you to live in. I'm talking about buying rental properties. I'm talking about you buying real estate to rent out to somebody else. It doesn't have to be a single-family home or an apartment complex. It could be storage units, it could be retail, it could be mixed use. But what I'm talking about with real estate is owning real estate. The reason why real estate is valuable is because our economy is going through a big shift because of AI. It is going to change many companies. It's going to change the way that we operate. But the one thing that people will always need is a place to sleep at night. And that's where real estate can be a very good investment opportunity, especially residential real estate. And yes, I know real estate prices have gone up a lot, but real estate prices have chilled out since the boom that we saw between 2020 and 2022, 2023. And now you're starting to see better real estate investment opportunities again. Sure, they're not everywhere, but there are good real estate opportunities out there. The nice thing about real estate is number one, you can generate cash flow. Again, like I said early in this video, I like investing for cash flow. I like investing my money into something and then it pays me every month, every quarter, every year that it deposits cash into my account because I don't like the idea of having to sell my investments to get paid. I like the idea of just owning the investment and getting paid without having to sell. That way I can just work to stack the assets. Reason number two is that real estate is a hard asset. It's something that you can see, feel and touch. When you buy real estate, you know exactly what you're buying. You see the bricks, you see the land, you see the windows. When you buy a stock of Amazon, you get a piece of paper that says you own some of the Amazon stock. But if you walked into an Amazon factory, no one's going to know who you are unless you're Jeff Bezos. Then reason number three, the real estate is extremely powerful is for tax benefits. As a licensed attorney who is not your attorney, I can tell you that real estate has some of the biggest and best tax breaks that a tax code has to offer, which means that only now can you use real estate to make money, but many real estate investors can pay little to no money in taxes on the real estate income. Why? Because that's what the tax code says. You can use something called a depreciation deduction, which allows you to write off a piece of the value of the property, even if your property is going up in value. So your property is going up in value, you're making cash flow, but you're getting tax write-offs. And then as you get more sophisticated, you can use something called accelerated depreciation to write off even more of your income and potentially even show a loss to the IRS. It's 100% legal. You need a good accountant to do this, but the tax code allows you to take these big write-offs, which could potentially, the keyword potentially, offset your other income. So if you have a business, you have a job, and you're making money and you have to pay taxes on that, you could potentially, keyword potentially, depending on how you do it, because there are ways to do it, the question is how, not if it's possible, there are ways for you to potentially now make money from real estate, pay no taxes on your real estate income, and then lower your taxable income from your job or your business. That's where real estate becomes so powerful. But don't get into the game of buying no money down real estate, into this big game of just financing, financing, financing, and I'll tell you a secret, which really isn't a secret, but no money down real estate has made me a lot of money. Now, for the reason why you think, not because I'm going out and buying real estate no money down, because so many people buy no money down real estate not knowing what they're doing. They get in way over their heads. The bank then forecloses on you, and then they have to sell that property at a huge discount to somebody else like me. And that's why no money down real estate does not work. That's why I don't want you to do no money down real estate. Have money first before you go out and start investing in real estate. That way you can do it the right way and actually build wealth through it instead of creating a whole new stress and headache through real estate. And then number five is going to be a book. Now, I debated really hard on what I wanted to do number five, but because I've talked about a number of different ETFs and a number of different actual investments that you can make to grow your wealth specifically, I wanted to mention this one because in my company, Briefs Finance, we went through a crazy transition over the last year. In 2025, I had what I call the oh crap moment. We were a media company. We were called Briefs Media, and we did essentially two things. We covered the financial news with our Market Briefs newsletter, the articles on our website, and then we did research. We would publish a research report called Market Briefs Pro, which we sell to investors and financial advisors and things like that to understand where money is moving and how it creates investment opportunities. And one of the things that I realized was as a content company, AI is going to change what we do and put us out of business. And so we had to change very fast, very quickly. And so in 2025, we had an all-hands meeting with our company, and I said, we're going to change. We're now going to become Briefs Finance. We're now going to become AI Forward, and we're now going to become a financial technology company that's powered by media. It was a drastic shift. We had immediately hired approximately seven developers and spent so much money building new technologies. We still haven't launched a lot of the new technologies that we've been building. They're going to be launching in the summer of 2026. I'm not here to promote them. I'm here to tell you that things are changing fast in the economy, and this change happens only once in a long time. The shift that we're seeing in our economy is going to change wealth. It is changing jobs, and I'm telling you this as an employer. If you come into our company for a job and you don't understand AI, you're going to have a really tough time getting a job, period. Entry-level workers are going to have a hard time getting a job, period. You have to understand how things are changing, and what's become extremely clear is that what AI does is it has leveled the playing field for knowledge. And now, if you really want to be an A player, you want to have the highest income potential, you want to have the most job security, you want to be the most desired candidate or your business to be most desired, you have to be smart because AI still has limitations. And the people that are going to be smarter because of AI are the people that know how to think, period. A lot of people now are using AI kind of half brain dead. They're asking AI to do everything. They don't fact check the work. They don't check the work. They just do whatever AI says. And I don't want to think anymore. I just want AI to do the thinking for me. AI is great. It is extremely powerful, especially if you know how to use it. And we have spent a lot of money on building AI tools, so I understand how it works. But if you don't know how to think and you just want AI to do your work, you're going to struggle. AI cannot make a B-level employee an A-level employee. It could turn an A-level employee into an A-plus level employee. It can turn an A-level business to an A-plus level business, but it's not going to turn your B-level idea to an A-level idea. It's garbage in, garbage out, or good input in, good input out. And this is where, when I say book, I really just mean learn. I mean, it is an amazing opportunity we have in the economy right now. I'm not saying we're not going to see any sort of AI downturn or anything like that, but what I'm saying is our economy is shifting, and you have to be smart. For the last 10 years, I've been on YouTube teaching you that you have to get smart about financial education, period. And I stick with that. You must get smart with financial education, and that's not going to change. But the next layer now is you have to understand how to use AI in this changing economy because it is going to change jobs, it's going to change investments, it's going to change how money moves. And if you don't understand this, you are going to fall behind, and you still have an opportunity today to get ahead. Spend 30 minutes a day learning AI. I don't care if you use ChatGPT, if you use Cloud, if you use Gemini, if you use Perplexity, 30 minutes a day. If you don't know what to do, watch YouTube videos or ask the AI what you should do for 30 minutes every day to become an expert in it. Do that for three weeks. You're going to be a whole new person, and you're going to be able to use this AI to have more job security, to make more money, and to grow whatever it is that you're doing. So learn. Read books. Learn how to think because if you don't know how to think, if you're just going in and you're putting something from here to here in your work, you're putting a round peg into a round hole, and this is what you do every single day, you're going to be automated, you're going to be out of a job, and you're going to be struggling in the next five years. But if you learn what's happening, you're going to be able to accelerate your wealth significantly faster. So what we talked about today is a lot of shifting opportunities that you want to get ahead of in 2026. I started by talking about the shift where money is shifting. I talked about how AI is creating a shift and how that creates investment opportunities and how that shift is also impacting the energy space because now more and more tech companies are getting into the nuclear energy space. And then we talked about the conflict in the Middle East is changing and shifting oil prices and the oil economy. And then we talked about the conflict in the Middle East is also impacting helium and how that's going to impact semiconductors and how that can create investment opportunities. And then we talked about national security because of the tariffs and cybersecurity, how that can all create opportunity here, which, by the way, we've been covering all this in market briefs. If you have not subscribed to market briefs yet, I have the link for you down in the description. Then we talked about investing in the pain, looking for opportunity. If you believe the American economy is going to be bigger 5, 10, 15, 20 years from now, buy more of it when it's on sale. So we talked about ABB always be buying into broad basket funds when you see opportunities. And by opportunity, I mean markets going down. Everybody's running away. That's when you want to be coming in and buying when it's on sale. Then we talked about gold, not as an investment, but as a hedge. And to understand that the way that I look at gold is that it is not an investment, that I don't watch the prices of gold, that I just buy it as a small piece of my portfolio as protection against doomsday. Then real estate, because it provides cash flow. It is a tangible asset, and it provides tax breaks, and it creates the opportunity now for you to create new income without having to go out and create a new job. That real estate provides that opportunity. Again, don't go in, no money down real estate. Have money to do it. You don't have to use real estate, but if you want real diversification outside of just stocks, real estate provides that, and then into your own knowledge, into your own education, because AI is going to change the economy. But somebody who's smart and knows how to use AI can use it to build an even better product, and to make even more money, and to have more job security. If you got value out of this video, the best thank you is a referral, so if you could please share this video with a friend, family member, colleague, or fellow investor, that way we can continue to spread this type of financial education. Thank you. The war in the Middle East has shaken up every part of the economy in the stock market, and now more people are starting to get worried about a potential recession. Why? Because of oil prices. Take a listen. So as traders investors start grappling with this simple but stark math, they will think that oil prices must go to levels that induce a recession.