The Best Investment for 2026

Reflections on markets, time horizons, and investing where you have control

Happy New Year, and wishing you a healthy, successful, and joy-filled year ahead.

New year resolutions are upon us. We look back on what worked and what didn’t in all facets of our lives. For those of us who spend time thinking about markets and capital allocation, it’s a good time to take inventory on how investments performed.

For those of us who invest in Bitcoin (or view Bitcoin as their savings vehicle), 2025 offered a particularly sharp lesson. Bitcoin underperformed every major asset class.

Most investors and industry participants had sky high expectations at the start of the year after breaking through $100k in Q4 2025. We awaited continued momentum paired with significant institutional and political adoption. But we finished the year down 6% and down 30% from all time highs in October of $126,000. All other major asset classes had a positive 2025.

Will Bitcoin be the best performing asset class in 2026? I don’t know. No one does. That uncertainty is part of investing.

What I can control, though, is where my time, attention, and energy go. And over long enough periods, those inputs matter just as much, if not more, than where capital is allocated.

We usually think of investments as something external and financially driven, deploying capital into assets with the hope of future returns, such as stocks, real estate, Bitcoin, or businesses.

We tend to lose sight of other ways we can invest our time and energy, especially when the returns are not immediately visible on a screen.

So where do I think the best investment is in 2026? For me, it’s an investment in myself.

Investing in yourself can take many forms beyond health. It can mean deliberately building skills that increase your leverage over time. It can also mean investing in your environment, your routines, and the quality of your inputs, what you read, who you spend time with, and how often you allow yourself to be distracted.

All of these compound quietly, often without notice, until one day they don’t.

Over the past one to two years, life has simply gotten busier. Work is demanding, family responsibilities grew, and I found myself making more excuses for missing workouts or not eating as cleanly as I was a few years prior.

For me, that lens has brought one area into particularly sharp focus. One of the challenges with health is that the feedback loop is long. Financial markets can disappoint you over a single year and cause you to check your priors.

Our bodies are more resilient than markets, but they can weaken without proper attention and commitment. Health is an investment over decades.

This is shaping how I am thinking about 2026. If I zoom out far enough, health sits underneath everything else I care about. My family, my work, my ability to go for a hike, think clearly, and enjoy a night out.

This year, I’m treating my health like a serious investment. That means returning to discipline around what I eat. Creating consistency in my workouts and doing things that I said I would for a while.

An example is this winter I finally signed up for a race series in a state park in the Philadelphia area, committed to running the trails every Sunday, building toward a half marathon in February.

This doesn’t replace a focus anywhere else, including work. If anything, it supports it. The more I focus on my health, the better I will be in my personal and professional life.

At its core, every real investment involves delayed gratification. You give up something today in service of a better future. Viewed through that lens, investing time and energy into your own health is one of the most rational decisions you can make.

Markets will do what they do. Bitcoin will go up or down this year. And over a single year outcomes can vary, but over decades, fundamentals assert themselves.

For me, the best investment for 2026 is clear. It’s building a sound life from the inside out, starting with health, and letting everything else compound from there.

What are you focused on for 2026? Let me know in the comments below.