I read some where & also confirmed by my advisor. Typically the 2nd year of any presidential election has much higher probability of being a bad year. Furthermore, one YouTuber went on to say March through October. Not sure how accurate this is. For my husband who is retiring any minute now. We had rolled 5/8th of his 401k into rollover IRA in late December 2025 & early January 2026. He doesn’t have time to recover if the market has any corrections. So it is seating in cash & ready to be: 1). Redeployment into the market in any dip opportunities. 2). Disbursement for monthly expenses How would you handled it if 2026 is your retirement year?

Most index funds are not made to deal with the bear market. We are told to buy and hold when the market goes down and correct itself. Yes - we can diversify - but most of the industries are correlated (even oil and gas and real estate). This means when the overall market goes down, we all go down together. So after years (17+) of studying the market, I conclude - The best to deal with the bear market is learning how to use inverse index funds. For example - most people buy QQQ NADSAQ 100 long. But you can also buy inverse QQQ NASDAQ 100, which is an ETF that will go up when NASDAQ 100 goes down. By combining the ability to choose from long NASDAQ 100 (bull), inverse NASDAQ 100 (bear), and hold cash, this will give you more flexibility to deal with the market downturn This is especially important because the market is at a high. SPY and QQQ return are hitting 20% per year (which we know the average is 10%). So we are in the middle or near the top of a bull cycle. So the bear cycle is coming. So the secret is: long, inverse, cash. However, rotating between long and inverse can be time consuming. It requires you to have years of experience (and perhaps a machine learning model) It also can be an emotional journey for newbies. That's why we create a fund to address this problem. So I take on the emotional stress instead of you ;) wink wink.​ (One investor asked me why did I go bald? That's why. I used all my hair to developed the machine learning algorithm)​ It is our "best" answer to the bear market to date. However, SEC limits only investors with $2.7 million in net asset can invest in this fund. So if you are the qualified few that meet the net asset requirement, you can watch the presentation here to learn more:​ https://branchpointfunds.com/ Cheers, Eric

The Gold/Silver Ratio Is Measurably Above its Historic Average (1980-2025) Silver has lagged gold over the past decade. Flash forward to today, and several years of deficits in silver have led to extreme market tightness, and silver has been outperforming strongly, up ~27% thus far in Q3 and 61.39%% YTD as of 9/30/2025, reaching 15-year highs and approaching its all-time high (~$49), made back in 2011. Despite this recent catch-up performance with respect to gold, the gold-to-silver ratio at 83x still sits above its historic average of ~67x (see Figure)

Hear me out. In the Alien universe, Weyland-Yutani is not just a company. It is basically a civilization-scale operating system: Space travel. Colonization. Defence contracts. Advanced robotics. Synthetic humans. Questionable ethics. Aggressive shareholder value creation. Now look at SpaceX. Reusable rockets. Starlink global communications. Government and defence contracts. Mars colonization narrative. Private infrastructure that nation-states increasingly depend on. A founder with main-character energy. I’m not saying Elon Musk is building Weyland-Yutani. I’m just saying that if, in 80 years, your grandchildren are working on a Mars mining colony under a corporate HR policy called “Frontier Productivity Optimization,” we probably should have seen the signs. The serious investing question underneath the joke is this: Are we entering an era where the most important companies are not just businesses, but infrastructure-layer civilizations? The last century rewarded ownership of energy, railroads, banks, telecom, and industrial giants. The next century may reward ownership of: - Space infrastructure - AI platforms - Compute - Robotics - Energy storage - Defence technology - Bioengineering - Global communications networks In other words, the companies that don’t just sell products - they control the rails everyone else has to use. So maybe the future investing question is not: “Which company has the best quarterly earnings?” Maybe it is: “Which companies are becoming impossible for governments, militaries, industries, and citizens to function without?” That is where the Weyland-Yutani analogy gets interesting. Because in a corporate-feudal future, you probably want to be one of three things: 1. An owner 2. A highly valuable operator 3. Nowhere near the xenomorph containment lab Personally, I’m aiming for 1 and 2. Curious what people think: Is SpaceX just an incredible company, or are we watching the early formation of a future corporate superpower?