State of The Themes: January 2026
A walkthrough of the themes of the market today, yesterday, and tomorrow.
Hi everyone,
This is a potential new monthly series where I discuss all of the themes across the market, their charts, setups, etc. so you have a pulse on what’s working and what isn’t. I think it’d be helpful, but I would love some feedback!
Right now we have a hot environment with a select few themes working, but outside of those themes it’s been pretty dull.
I get a lot of questions about which themes are running, which are popular, what could be next, etc. so I figured I’d break down a couple different “groups” of themes.
We have a few baskets right now:
Themes that are working right now
Themes that have gone quiet or are temporarily dormant
Potential new, or under appreciated themes that have not been widely discovered yet
You can identify a theme in a few ways.
It requires paying attention to the world beyond just the ticker symbols and earnings announcements. Investors who spend most of their time staring at their screen miss the evolving context that actually move markets. The most powerful trends begin in:
Political-government decisions-orders
Energy constraints
Technological breakthroughs
Scientific publications
Product announcements or events
Regulatory changes
Security or geopolitical conflicts
Consumer behavior trends
Infrastructure bottlenecks
There are plenty of ways a theme can show itself, but the most reliable way is through the little under appreciated nuggets outlined above.
When you have multiple stocks across a group or theme moving higher at the same time, that’s a clear indication that accumulation across a theme is taking place. Even laggards can act well when a theme is strong and oftentimes the stocks with the worst fundamentals actually outperform. We saw this with nuclear, when something like OKLO went up thousands of %, but the highest quality nuclear name in the market CEG only went up a few hundred %.
Before we get into this article, I want to highlight and mention that my 2026 Market Outlook was published last weekend, I’ll link it here. In this article I discuss how I’m thinking about the market and indices heading into the new year, my top individual stock and trade ideas for 2026, the themes I’m focused on and the specific names within them including thematic baskets you can own or trade, macro and micro analysis, key index levels, crypto, sector and industry breakdowns, international stocks, and more. It’s a big piece, but I think it’s well worth the read. I put my all into this outlook to help you prepare for the upcoming year, and I hope you find it useful.
In the 2026 Market Outlook I discuss themes with a macro-year long lens and go much more in depth.
In the remainder of this article I’m going to run through which themes have been hot lately, which haven’t, and which could be next. I’ll walk through the individual stocks within each group, the charts and setups I’m watching, and how I’m thinking about each theme. The goal here is to understand where we are in the market cycle and where opportunities could be developing.
Let’s dive in.