Best Buying Opportunities in 2026? | Bill Ackman | Stocks | Investment

It's really hard to make a statement on the overall market because it's a bifurcated market. But we're finding a lot of really cheap stocks in a market that's hitting new highs, which is sort of an interesting dynamic. A lot of the attention is on semiconductor memory chips and IPOs that are coming, and a lot of attention has been taken away from companies people think are almost old-fashioned. Meta is an old-fashioned company today. Microsoft is an old-fashioned company today, and therefore they're less interesting. That's not where the excitement is. The result is those stocks are very cheap. So we're finding a lot of cheap stocks and questioning whether there are some overvalued ones, which of course there are.

Could be. The market has kind of two components to it. You have the ownership of stocks, and you have this growing index ownership, which is an incredibly important phenomenon. Today, if you're not in the stock index, your valuation is going to be lower. For example, McDonald's is in the S&P 500. Restaurant Brands, which is Burger King and Tim Hortons and others, is not because it's a Canadian company. It's not in the index, so it has relatively limited index ownership. Arguably it's growing faster, it's a more diversified business. You can make arguments for why it should trade at a higher multiple than McDonald's, but it trades at a very significant discount because it's not in the index. So you have more and more index capital, and that's becoming increasingly important. In addition to stocks actually in the index, there are many investors who follow the index, so a huge amount of capital is in a very stable format. Then there is also a lot of capital invested by so-called pod shops like Millennium and Citadel, which have been taking on increasing amounts of capital with much shorter-term mandates. They are the marginal buyer and seller of many securities, and the result is more volatility because those models have very tight risk limits. If you're going to lose more than a certain amount of money, you're out. That leads to even very big companies' stocks moving dramatically if they miss an earnings expectation, change their guidance, or there's some news event. We've seen a huge amount of volatility, and geopolitics adds to that. Of course, midterm elections will be part of that volatility. I guess if there's a material surprise, like if the Senate were to tip to the left, I think that would be a pretty negative thing for markets.

You know, what's interesting—I turned 60, which I did. 250 years sounds pretty young to me. It's like a quarter of my lifespan. The country is only four times my age, which I find something I didn't think about when I was 10. The country seemed pretty old then, but now it seems like the experiment is very young. That's one notable thing, and I think it's important we're around. What's amazing is that a bunch of relatively young guys back then wrote the Constitution and the Bill of Rights and set up a system with free speech and a republican form of government that has worked, for all our warts, remarkably well over a quarter of a thousand years. It's amazing.