#investing

If you have checked a retirement account recently, it may feel as though something changed abruptly.

That impression is real, although the timeline is slightly deceptive. August 2026 was actually a strong month for American stocks: according to Nasdaq's August market review, the S&P 500 rose 2.7 percent and the Nasdaq-100 gained 4.2 percent, their strongest August performances since 2021.

Even after September's turbulence, the broader picture is not one of a market in collapse. As of September 18, the S&P 500 remained more than 11 percent higher for 2026 and only about 2 percent below the record high it reached in mid-August.

What changed was the atmosphere.

Several forces that had been simmering in the background began reinforcing one another: oil prices climbed, inflation worries returned, Treasury yields rose, the Federal Reserve increased interest rates, and investors became less comfortable paying high prices for future corporate growth.

September 2026 at a glance

S&P 500: still more than 11% higher in 2026, but roughly 2% below its August record
August S&P 500 return: +2.7%
August Nasdaq-100 return: +4.2%
Brent crude: roughly \$100–\$110 per barrel during September's surge
10-year U.S. Treasury yield: around 5%
Federal funds target: 3.75–4.00% after the September 16 rate increase
August CPI inflation: 3.4% year over year
Federal Reserve 2026 PCE inflation projection: 3.7%

Taken together, these numbers tell much of the story: the stock market itself is still relatively strong, but the economic environment surrounding it has become noticeably less forgiving.

Myriad Genetics has something many distressed companies do not:

a real business with established products, recognized clinical franchises, and potentially valuable newer technologies.

That is what makes the investment case interesting.

The problem is that those assets are currently sitting inside a company with shrinking revenue, persistent losses, cash burn, and a business model that has not yet demonstrated a clear path back to sustainable profitability.

In other words, this is not a conventional growth thesis.

It is a recovery thesis.

And recovery theses require a higher burden of proof.

This is a snapshot of that thesis as it stands in September 2026.

It is not a recommendation to buy or sell Myriad Genetics shares.

It is an attempt to define what would have to improve, what could create upside, and what developments would signal that the thesis is breaking rather than recovering.

At a Glance

Company: Myriad Genetics
Ticker: MYGN
Thesis type: Distressed recovery / diagnostics / strategic optionality
Snapshot date: September 2026

Why it may be interesting:
Myriad owns established molecular-diagnostics franchises and newer oncology products with potential long-term value. At a heavily depressed valuation, stabilization of revenue and a credible path toward profitability could create substantial upside.

What the market may be underestimating:
The value of Myriad's stronger Cancer Care Continuum franchise, newer tests such as Precise MRD and Prolaris + AI, intellectual property, and potential strategic value if the company restructures or reallocates capital more effectively.

Ardent Health is not an obvious growth stock.

It operates hospitals, clinics, specialty-care centers, and other healthcare facilities across a collection of mid-sized U.S. markets.

That means the investment case depends less on a single product breakthrough and more on something quieter:

Can Ardent steadily improve the economics of delivering healthcare across its existing network?

The answer is not yet obvious.

In 2026, adjusted admissions have continued growing. Cash generation has been strong. Leverage remains manageable. Management has also expanded its cost-savings program and continued investing in new facilities and specialty-care capacity.

At the same time, raw admissions and surgeries have softened, reimbursement per adjusted admission has come under pressure, and quarterly earnings have been uneven.

This is a snapshot of that thesis as it stands in September 2026.

It is not a recommendation to buy or sell Ardent Health shares.

It is an attempt to define what would need to improve, and what would have to deteriorate, for the investment thesis to become stronger or weaker.

At a Glance

Company: Ardent Health
Ticker: ARDT
Thesis type: Operational improvement / healthcare utilization / prove-it
Snapshot date: September 2026

Why it may be interesting:
Ardent is generating strong operating cash flow, maintaining relatively modest leverage, and growing adjusted admissions even while some underlying patient-volume measures remain soft. If operational improvements translate into more consistent earnings, the current valuation could prove attractive.

Mativ Holdings is not an obvious growth story.

It is a specialty-materials company formed in 2022 through the combination of SWM and Neenah, with businesses spanning filtration, engineered films, adhesives, release liners, healthcare materials, packaging, and other industrial applications.

The interesting part of the investment case is not that sales are suddenly exploding.

They are not.

The more interesting question is whether Mativ is becoming a substantially better business while operating with roughly the same revenue base.

In 2026, margins have improved sharply. Free cash flow has strengthened. Debt has started moving downward. And management appears to be extracting more economic value from a complicated collection of businesses assembled through merger and restructuring.

This is a snapshot of that thesis as it stands in September 2026.

It is not a recommendation to buy or sell Mativ shares.

It is an attempt to define what would have to keep improving, and what would have to go wrong, for the turnaround thesis to hold together.

At a Glance

Company: Mativ Holdings
Ticker: MATV
Thesis type: Turnaround / margin expansion / deleveraging
Snapshot date: September 2026

Why it may be interesting:
Mativ has shown two consecutive quarters of sharply improving adjusted EBITDA margins despite little overall revenue growth. If stronger operating efficiency continues producing free cash flow and debt reduction, the equity could benefit disproportionately.

Cenovus Energy is not an obscure speculative oil company.

It is a large integrated Canadian energy producer with upstream oil and gas operations, refining assets, and, after its acquisition of MEG Energy, an even larger footprint in the Canadian oil sands.

That makes the investment question more interesting than simply asking whether oil prices will go up.

The more useful question is whether Cenovus is entering a period in which stronger production, lower costs, acquisition synergies, and falling debt can steadily translate into greater value for shareholders.

This is a snapshot of that thesis as it stands in September 2026.

It is not a recommendation to buy or sell Cenovus shares.

It is an attempt to define what would have to go right, and what would have to go wrong, for the current investment thesis to hold up.

At a Glance

Company: Cenovus Energy
Ticker: CVE
Thesis type: Deleveraging / operational improvement
Snapshot date: September 2026

Why it may be interesting:
Cenovus is combining strong oil-sands production, lower operating costs, MEG integration synergies, and rapid debt reduction. If those trends persist, more future cash flow could shift from deleveraging toward shareholder returns.

What the market may be underestimating:
The combined impact of higher production, lower unit costs, acquisition synergies, and a cleaner balance sheet.

What would strengthen the thesis:

• Net debt continues falling

There is a peculiar feature of ordinary working life that becomes harder to ignore once you notice it. You may like your job, respect your coworkers, and work for an employer who treats you well. You may even find the daily work genuinely meaningful. Yet, if your paycheck stopped arriving for a prolonged period, the rest of your life would eventually begin coming apart. Rent or mortgage payments would still arrive, alongside grocery bills, utility notices, insurance premiums, and medical expenses. The complex machinery of daily life keeps running regardless of whether your income does.

This reality introduces an uncomfortable question: how free can work really be when refusing to work ultimately threatens your ability to live? This is not to suggest that traditional employment is inherently exploitative or that every salaried worker is secretly miserable. Plenty of people thrive within organizations, benefiting from the community, stability, purpose, and scale that are difficult to replicate on one’s own. The core issue is not employment itself, but economic dependence. If your entire livelihood relies on continuously exchanging today’s labor for today’s income, then no matter how pleasant the arrangement may be, your baseline survival remains tied to someone else’s willingness to keep paying for your time.

For centuries, people have proposed different ways of escaping that fundamental vulnerability. One approach is political: strengthening collective bargaining power to secure better working conditions. Another is philosophical: practicing frugality and deliberately reducing material needs so that less money is required to live well. A third is the modern financial-independence movement, which encourages earning a high salary, saving aggressively, and investing the surplus into market indexes until compound returns can support your lifestyle.

There is an appealing simplicity to saying that 85% of a portfolio will be invested for the long term while 15% will be reserved for individual ideas.

The difficulty begins approximately five minutes later.

What happens when one of the individual stocks doubles? What happens when several of them fall? Does the investor restore the original percentages in both cases? Can new money refill the speculative account? When does a successful position stop being an experiment? And what prevents a temporary 15% allowance from slowly becoming half the portfolio?

These questions matter because an allocation is not yet a system. An allocation describes how a portfolio looks on one day. A system describes what happens next.

In A Budget for Speculation: Can Stock Picking and Passive Investing Coexist?, I argued that some investors may be better served by giving speculation a limited budget than by pretending they will never feel tempted to speculate. Most of the portfolio performs the sober work of long-term wealth building. A smaller portion provides room for individual ideas, intellectual curiosity and the occasional attempt to be right in a more interesting way.

The behavioral premise was simple: the appetite gets a plate, not the pantry.

This companion article is about building the plate.

First, distinguish the general strategy from the ratchet

Core–satellite investing is a broad family of portfolio designs. The core generally consists of diversified, long-term holdings. The satellites are smaller positions used to pursue active ideas, specialized exposures or other objectives not fully represented in the core.

Americans spend a great deal of money on cars, but we have developed a convenient way of not thinking about the total.

The payment comes from one account. Insurance arrives on another date. Gas disappears twenty or fifty dollars at a time. Tires show up every few years with the impeccable timing of a dental emergency. Registration is somebody else's problem until suddenly it isn't. Then one morning the transmission starts making a sound ordinarily associated with farm machinery.

Each expense seems to be its own small incident.

Wealth, unfortunately for anyone trying to measure the damage, works in the opposite direction. Small amounts of money combine. Savings earn returns. Those returns can earn returns. Time takes a few hundred dollars a month and, given enough years, does something almost indecent with it.

Which raises a question worth asking:

What would Americans be worth if cars simply cost less?

Not if everybody gave up driving. Not if the suburbs were bulldozed tomorrow morning and replaced with bicycle paths and espresso bars. And not if Americans suddenly stopped liking cars.

Just: what would happen if getting around took a smaller bite out of the household budget?

The answer may be considerably larger than the monthly savings suggest.

The almost-$1,000-a-month machine

AAA has been trying to answer a deceptively simple question for more than 70 years: what does a new car actually cost to own?

There is a wonderfully boring argument for how to build wealth in the stock market.

Buy a diversified collection of productive businesses. Keep buying. Reinvest the dividends. Avoid panicking. Wait a very long time.

For most individual investors, broad-market index funds make this remarkably easy.

There is only one problem.

Stock picking is fun.

Not for everybody, certainly. But for a particular kind of investor, researching individual companies scratches an itch that an index fund simply doesn't. There is a puzzle to solve. A judgment to make. A possibility that everyone else has missed something.

Maybe a company is temporarily unpopular. Maybe a promising business is buried beneath ugly quarterly numbers. Maybe the market has underestimated some technological change. Maybe you have found the proverbial $10 bill lying on the sidewalk.

And, hovering somewhere behind all that sober analysis, there is another possibility:

What if this one really takes off?

This creates a peculiar conflict.

The investor may intellectually believe that diversified, long-term investing is the more dependable path to wealth while simultaneously finding individual stocks much more interesting.

The usual solution is straightforward: suppress the second impulse.

But perhaps there is another possibility.

Instead of trying to eliminate the desire to speculate, give it a budget.

Two jobs that investing can accidentally acquire

For years, one of the most common pieces of investing advice has been remarkably simple: buy a broad market index fund and hold it for the long run.

There is a great deal of evidence supporting that advice. Index funds offer low costs, broad diversification, and a way to participate in the growth of the economy without attempting to outsmart the market. For many investors, they remain an excellent choice.

Still, there is a subtle detail that is easy to miss.

Many investors think of a fund tracking the S&P 500 as a basket containing five hundred companies of roughly equal importance. In reality, that is not how most major indexes work.

The largest companies receive the largest weights.

This means that although an index fund may hold hundreds of businesses, its performance can be influenced disproportionately by a much smaller group.

That distinction may not matter much during ordinary times. It becomes more interesting when a particular sector captures the imagination of investors.

In the current market, artificial intelligence has become one of the dominant narratives. Enormous amounts of capital have flowed toward companies seen as leaders or beneficiaries of the AI boom. Some of these firms have reached valuations that would have seemed extraordinary only a decade ago.

Whether this enthusiasm proves fully justified is a question for the future. The technology itself is undeniably impressive. The economic consequences may be equally profound.

A funny thing happened to cybersecurity company Zscaler over the past week.

The company reported earnings that beat analyst expectations. Revenue came in above forecasts. The business itself did not suddenly stop functioning. Customers did not disappear overnight. The company's products did not become obsolete.

And yet the stock promptly lost roughly a third of its value. A few days later, it changed its mind. The stock rebounded dramatically, recovering much of the decline and ending up surprisingly close to where it had started.

Looking at the chart, someone who had been away from the news might assume some major event had occurred. A scandal. A data breach. A failed acquisition. A lawsuit. Instead, much of the drama revolved around guidance.

Management's outlook for future revenue came in slightly below analyst expectations. Not catastrophically below. Not "the business is broken" below. Just below. Billions of dollars in market value evaporated anyway. Then, with relatively little new information entering the picture, billions of dollars came back.

Zscaler’s daily closing price shows the sharp post-earnings selloff and the rebound that followed.

That sequence has been stuck in my head all week.

The Strange Thing Wasn't the Drop

A stock falling after earnings is not unusual. Investors are not buying the past quarter. They are buying expectations about future quarters.