The big news is that gold is now up over 50% year to date to over $4,000 per ounce due to a lack of confidence in central banks as well as international turmoil. Here are the gold stocks I recommend: AEM, AGI, CDE, CMCL, EGO, IDR, KGC, NGD, OR and SSRM.The Wall Street Journal reported that President Trump’s advisors are advising him to paint a rosy outlook for economic growth in 2026. The WSJ reported that Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told Trump he believes the employment numbers will start to tick up once tax policies from his “big beautiful” bill are fully implemented. Trump’s economic advisors also apparently assured him that economic indicators would show improvements in the upcoming months. Naturally, the fact that the U.S. economy has lost private payrolls for three of the past four months is taking a toll. Furthermore, the fear of federal job layoffs as the government shutdown persists is expected to weigh on consumer spending.Despite the federal government shutdown, the U.S. remains an oasis in the world, with better demographics than Asia and Northern Europe, higher key interest rates, and stronger GDP growth. Despite warning signs from ADP private payroll data, the Conference Board’s consumer confidence index, plus a dramatic declaration in the ISM non-manufacturing, service index, U.S. GDP growth is resurgent with all the onshoring that the Trump Administration is pushing for the automotive, pharmaceutical and semiconductor industries. We remain in an environment where bad news is considered good news because weak economic news just ensures more key Fed interest rate cuts.The U.S. stock market is standing out as a more certain investment due to double-digit earnings growth, the strongest earnings surprises in the past four decades in the second quarter, positive seasonality, and benefiting from strong inflows, especially from foreign investors. The technology leadership is increasingly about “betting on a billionaire.” Whether you pick Tim Cook, Jensen Huang, Mark Zuckerberg, etc., is up to you. I have placed my biggest bet on Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, but a new billionaire influencing the stock market is OpenAI’s Sam Altman, who recently announced a “strategic partnership” with AMD that sent its stock soaring. I have been very clear that I think Nvidia is the AI leader, but perhaps Sam Altman is worried about the availability of Nvidia GPUs, so it appears that OpenAI also had to make a deal with AMD. Nvidia GPUs remain superior to AMD’s semiconductors, but clearly, the explosive growth in AI is now lifting all boats. Amazon and other big technology companies have filed permits to build 54 new data centers in Virginia. Amazon had 177 data centers built or under construction at the end of 2024. The new data centers that filed permits would raise Amazon to 205 data centers, which is a 15.8% annual increase. Virginia has been the epicenter of the data center boom on the East Coast, with 385 data centers built or permitted, but Chattanooga, Tennessee, is also growing fast due to cheaper electricity and fast fiber optic internet connections. For all of the U.S., there were 1,240 data centers built or permitted at the end of 2024.