Our Biggest Ideas for 2026 and Beyond

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By Michael Salvatore, Editor, TradeSmith Daily

In This Digest:

Reporting live from our Big Ideas conference
The biggest megatrends on the Swan brothers’ radar
Jeff Clark is trading the bargain bins
How Jason Bodner’s “signal cluster” strategy finds the best small caps
Keith’s plans for TradeSmith in 2026
The immense power of machine learning + Predictive Alpha

It’s like Christmas for market junkies…

The TradeSmith team is in Washington, D.C., this week for our Big Ideas retreat.

Every year, we get together to generate new investment ideas for you and your fellow subscribers.

Master options trader Jeff Clark was there this year, along with sentiment and social analytics experts Andy and Landon Swan… pioneering quant Jason Bodner… our CEO Keith Kaplan… as well as the heads of our research and development teams.

By the end of each day, it felt like my brain had just completed an Olympian-level gauntlet.

Cataloging these retreats is no joke. It’s impossible to fit all the great ideas into a single issue. (And frankly, some are so good, we don’t want our competition to hear about them just yet.)

So today, I’ll share some of my favorite new ideas coming to TradeSmith subscribers in 2026… and maybe even sooner.

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Five megatrends are driving the Swans’ outlook right now…

If you don’t already know Andy and Landon Swan, you’re missing out.

They’re the creators of LikeFolio, a data engine that scans the web, especially social media, to gauge customer sentiment about brands. This gives them unique insights into consumers that nobody else has access to – well before they show up in quarterly sales reports.

Based on this data, they’ve identified five market megatrends to watch for the rest of this year, through 2026, and beyond.

I’ll share their notes on them with you… and one of several picks the Swan brothers have in their pocket.

Robotics, drones, and autonomous vehicles – “Advancements in AI, ubiquitous sensors, and a post-pandemic world desperate to automate labor shortages will push the global robotics market past $200 billion by the end of the decade.”

Keep an eye on Richtech Robotics (RR), which develops and manufactures robotic solutions for automation in the service industry. Already, this MegaTrends pick is up 75% in less than a month, and the Swans see it going even higher.
The long-awaited shift to small caps – “Earlier this month, Bank of America reported that its institutional clients have been net buyers of small-cap stocks for six straight weeks, the longest streak since late 2022 when stocks were exiting a bear market.”

One name to watch is Innodata (INOD). It provides the structured data needed to train AI models like ChatGPT. Since the Swans first called out this stock in June, it’s doubled. And they see more gains on the way.
Power infrastructure for AI – The Swans say “Building out legacy power solutions needed to feed hungry AI systems will take decades. We like companies that offer solutions that provide more power, more efficiently, and faster.”

They called out Centrus Energy (LEU), a company that produces a special type of uranium designed for next-generation nuclear reactors.
AI applications that actually matter – The Swans are focusing on stocks that are effectively leveraging AI to grow their bottom lines.

One great pick here is Lemonade (LMND). It’s an insurance company built from the ground up to be AI-native – every policy quote, claim, and fraud check runs through proprietary machine learning models instead of legacy paperwork and adjuster networks.
Space technology – The Swans recommend allocating 2% of a portfolio to this early, volatile, and high-octane theme. One nugget that stood out to me was their idea on satellite broadband.

“This year, Elon Musk’s Starlink passed 6 million users, won regulatory approval in India, launched service in Africa, and is preparing direct-to-phone messaging with AT&T and T-Mobile. This growth directly threatens traditional telecom carriers by offering coverage in places fiber and towers cannot reach.”

And it’s not just Starlink that is disrupting these traditional carriers. Swan favorite AST SpaceMobile (ASTS) is also trying to build a space-based cellular broadband network that will fill gaps in the current network.

If you’re interested in more megatrend ideas from the Swans, make sure to look out for more from them in these pages. And we’ll be keeping an eye on how these megatrends play out.

Jeff Clark, true to his reputation, is hot on the areas investors have left for dead…

Anyone who knows Jeff knows his tendency to break from the crowd.

In his view, the more popular a trend, the greater the need for healthy skepticism.

That’s a hard stance to take in a one-way bull market built on the gargantuan tech trend of AI. But it’s hardly the first time Jeff has made money thinking this way.

We reminisced on one story from the late 1990s tech bubble, when Jeff harrowingly traded the 3Com IPO to the downside on its listing date. That position went from deeply underwater to printing huge returns for his clients in the span of a single trading session. (It’s worth noting that 3Com no longer exists.)

Jeff isn’t ready to take a big swing at AI yet. But he is getting cautious. Here are some paraphrased notes Jeff shared with the group before his talk:

It feels cliché, but this market reminds me of 2007. That’s when I closed my money management firm and started writing newsletters full time – right near the top.

There are a lot of parallels between then and now. Financial stocks were on a tear. The dollar was beaten up and ready to rally. Consumer and public debt was a problem, as was political infighting. Some stocks were screaming to the moon, others couldn’t get off the mat.

Back then I moved to cash, shorted tech and banks, and was buying stocks that can’t get off the mat.

When Jeff says he “shorted,” he doesn’t mean it directly.

Shorting stocks means borrowing money to sell stocks to another investor… aiming to buy back the stock and pay back the loan at a profit.

Jeff’s preferred technique to trade the short side also happens to be our favorite trading strategy at TradeSmith: selling put options.

When you sell put options, you generate upfront income. In exchange, you make a promise to the market that you’ll buy a stock you’d already love to own at a much cheaper price.

Getting paid to own great stocks on the cheap is one of the best win-win deals you could ask for on Wall Street.

And since you’re getting paid whether stocks fall or not, you can still benefit from a hot bull market until it turns.

Right now, Jeff’s targeting those stocks that “can’t get off the mat.” Those are the defensive stocks like Albertsons (ACI) trading at 8x earnings, General Motors (GM) at 11x earnings, Hormel Foods (HRL) at 7x earnings, and Target (TGT ) at 12x earnings.

Another strategy he showcased is targeting quality stocks ahead of earnings. By selling inflated put option premiums ahead of earnings reports, Jeff can benefit from a quick mean-reversion trade and generate abnormally large income at the same time.

But that’s just the beginning of what Jeff has planned.

Anyone familiar with his work knows about his live trading blog, Delta Direct.

I can’t give too much away right now. But with the power of TradeSmith’s technology, we’re discussing a major upgrade that will Jeff’s subscribers touching base with Jeff, live and in person, every day the market is open.

Jason Bodner’s seeing a big opportunity in “signal clusters”…

Jason Bodner is TradeSmith’s resident expert on institutional order flow. He built a system to detect large institutional stock purchases in high-quality stocks – what regular readers know as the Quantum Edge system.

The system has three key components.

The Quantum Edge score, which rates stocks from 0-100 by factoring in a mix of fundamental metrics like revenue and profit margin growth… along with technical momentum and Big Money buying.
The Big Money buy signals – anomalies in order volume plotted daily on stock charts.
The Big Money Index – a tally of net Big Money buys and sells that proves a useful leading indicator for the market.

Talking with Jason, we came upon an idea for those buy signals which I’m super excited about.

Every so often, an unknown stock will see a massive cluster of Big Money buys in a short period of time. One great example is in data center and energy company Iris Energy (IREN):

See that run from late June to early July?

Virtually every day for several weeks, Big Money was piling into this unknown stock for around $12 per share.

And in recent months, after the dust settled from all that buying pressure, the stock has run more than 430% to nearly $64.

I’m working with Jason on a way to quantify these clusters of Big Money buys as a unique signal. By combining this signal with strong tech themes, we think we can identify massive small-cap stock winners well before the crowd.

Keep your ear to the ground on this one – it’s one of my favorite ideas from this week.

Keith Kaplan gave the team a peek at the next year in TradeSmith…

I’ll be frank. I can say very little here. This was the most far-out part of the week’s presentations.

(Platinum subscribers actually got a heads up on this even before some folks in our company. Check out Keith’s most recent Platinum Masterclass for the details.)

All I’ll say is that TradeSmith is looking to launch a new analysis platform next year. One that specializes in a trading style readers of this letter will be quite familiar with.

We’re also going to expand our fundamental concept of each stock having its own behavior. That started with the Volatility Quotient, which tracks each stock’s historical volatility. But there’s a lot more to each stock than volatility, and we’re looking to capture that data to form tradable insights.

Aside from that, we’re looking to vastly expand the use of our machine learning algorithms – building on the upcoming launch of the AI Super Portfolio.

But I won’t get too far ahead of myself here…

Especially when there’s so much to love about this strategy…

The AI Super Portfolio, if this is the first you’re hearing of it, is our newest and possibly greatest-ever trading strategy.

We’ve applied a unique machine learning algorithm to our greatest AI-powered stock forecasting tool, Predictive Alpha Prime.

This new algorithm taps high-accuracy Prime projections to form a rotating five-position portfolio…

Backtested over a recent five-year period – the AI Super Portfolio would have returned an average annual gain of 374% a year. And that included one pandemic, the tariff tantrum, swings in interest rates, and two wars.

No leverage, no options, no futures, nothing funny. Just a group of five stock positions, traded on their AI-based hold times and rebalanced every six months.

TradeSmith has spent the last three years building toward this kind of system. We’re proud of what we’ve achieved.

And we’d like you to test-drive it, starting right now.

From now until Wednesday, Oct. 15, you can use the Predictive Alpha Prime forecasting tool to your heart’s content.

Choose any stock you like, and we’ll show you the AI-optimized hold time for the next one to 21 days and where our AI algorithm thinks it’ll go.

All you need to do first is sign up to attend our free Super AI Trading Event on Oct. 15.

That’s like saying all you need to do to drive a Ferrari for free is to sign up to take a ride in a fighter jet.

Have fun with the Ferrari from now until Wednesday.

But don’t miss out on what’s coming next.

You may be tired of hearing this, but we’re not tired of saying it. This is TradeSmith’s biggest breakthrough yet. This strategy crushes everything else we’ve built so far, and with a simplicity that anyone can take advantage of.

Our Biggest Ideas for 2026 and Beyond