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First and foremost, all of us at Cabot hope you’re having a great holiday week and wish you and yours a healthy and prosperous new year. Our offices will be closed Monday, but your next issue of Top Ten Trader will be published Tuesday (January 2) after the close.

AI dominated the media and the stock market in 2023, but what revolutionary new tech product will take the reins in 2024? Allow me to make a case for flying cars.

We are smack dab in the heart of earnings season for this portfolio. With the market sputtering along without much conviction, individual stocks are taking center stage, and earnings are a major part of that.

Quarterly and annual earnings will be reported this week from AbbVie Inc. (ABBV), Alexandria Real Estate Equities (ARE), American Tower Corporation (AMT), Marathon Petroleum Corporation (MPC), and Qualcomm Inc. (QCOM). The reports could be a hugely important factor in determining the near-term direction of these stocks.

There’s no telling what 2024 has in store, but these are my three market predictions for the year ahead.

I’m not a proponent of Bitcoin or cryptocurrency, but an intriguing signal had me convinced it’d outperform Microsoft in the year ahead.

After a dominant run in 2023, are any of the Magnificent Seven stocks still worth buying today? For most of them, the technicals say “yes.”

Our Cabot Cannabis Investor portfolio is up 35% this year. That’s more than 10 times the 3% gain for the S&P 500.

The broader cannabis sector has done well too, but not quite as well as our Cabot Cannabis Investor portfolio of the 12 best names in the space.

The New Cannabis Ventures Global Cannabis Stock Index and the ETFMG Alternative Harvest exchange traded fund (MJ) are up 14.5%. We’re up more than twice as much.

Our Cannabis Plus Insider Portfolio is up 39.3% since I launched it on March 29 last year. Here we have outperformed the market by threefold. The 39.3% advance compares to gains of 12.7% for the Russell 2000 index, and 22.3% for the S&P 500 over the same time. The smid-cap Russell 2000 is a more appropriate comp than large-cap names in the S&P 500. This portfolio invests in cannabis related companies that have the right kind of insider buying, and do not touch the plant.

2023 was the exclamation point on a decade of outperformance by growth stocks, but investors would do well to keep these six things in mind before writing off value investing altogether.

Gold has been moving in fits and starts for the last several years, but evidence is building that this may finally be the year that bulls take control.

Happy 2024! Here’s hoping the new year can pick up right where the old one left off. There are plenty of reasons to think this year will be good for stocks – the Fed cutting interest rates instead of hiking them, inflation cooling, recession fears fading, etc. But there’s no doubt a few sectors (tech?) are a bit overcooked at the moment, at least in the short term. So we kick off the new year by doing a bit of bargain shopping, starting with the most bargain-basement sector out there: cannabis. We haven’t had much luck trying to buy into strength with cannabis. So today, we instead buy after the sector has been knocked back again, adding the largest holding from Michael Brush’s Cabot Cannabis Investor portfolio.

The new year is starting with big momentum. The S&P 500 had a torrid late-year rally where it soared about 16% between late October and the end of the year. Stocks closed out the year with nine straight up weeks, the longest streak since 2004.

After false starts in 2022 and 2023, is 2024 finally the year that gold bulls retake control?

The final numbers are in. And they’re impressive.

After a bear market in 2022, the market indexes came back sharply in 2023. That’s not unusual. Prior to last year, there had been nine years of negative S&P 500 returns since 1980. Seven of those down years were followed by up years, and four of those seven up years posted returns of 20% or higher. The market doesn’t usually stay beaten down for long.

In this week’s video, Mike Cintolo talks about the market’s under-the-surface improvement that he’s seeing; no indicators have changed, which will need to happen for him to extend his line in a big way, but there’s no question most stuff has seen improvement and more stocks are beginning to act properly. Mike did a little buying this week and is hoping to add more should the market be able to build on the recent action.

The Magnificent Seven stocks had a phenomenal run in 2023 that pushed the S&P and Nasdaq back near all-time highs. What does 2024 have in store?

WHAT TO DO NOW: Remain bullish, but take action where needed. The market (and especially growth stocks) have taken a beating in the first two days of the year—there are reasons to believe this is partly due to seasonal shenanigans, so we’re not overreacting, but we’re also not holding and hoping. In the Model Portfolio, we’ll sell half of DraftKings (DKNG), which is our weakest stock, and place Duolingo (DUOL) on Hold, leaving us with around 25% in cash. We do see some potential buys setting up, but we’ll hold the cash for now and see if growth stocks (and the market) can find support.

In this week’s video, Mike Cintolo talks about the market’s under-the-surface improvement that he’s seeing; no indicators have changed, which will need to happen for him to extend his line in a big way, but there’s no question most stuff has seen improvement and more stocks are beginning to act properly. Mike did a little buying this week and is hoping to add more should the market be able to build on the recent action.

This week Chris and Brad talk about the latest Chinese GDP numbers and whether it’s safe to invest in China, Tesla’s earnings release, and what they’re seeing with Regional banks now that they’re reporting. After that, they break down FAANG stocks, their popular ascent as market shorthand, and whether Microsoft is “sexy” enough to sit at the cool kids’ table.

The New Year has gotten off to a poor start, with just about everything selling off and with growth-oriented names taking the worst of it. As of this morning, the S&P 500 is down about 1%, the Nasdaq is off nearly 3%, broader indexes are off 2%-plus and growth-y funds are off 4% to 7%! Even interest rates are reversing their recent trend, with the 10-year Treasury yield up around 0.11% this week (though they have made a nice reversal lower so far today).