Open a financial publication today and you’ll find yourself in one of two worlds. 

In one, the stock market is barreling past milestones with no signs of slowing down, smashing through hurdles that would stop any other bull run dead in its tracks. The US economy’s unparalleled strength, matched with the paradigm-shifting power of AI, has created an absolutely alchemic formula. Not even the most toxic combination of persistent inflation, sweeping tariffs, and stumbling labor data can dilute it. 

In the other, the major indexes’ record highs are buoyed by an AI bubble waiting to pop. Nvidia’s $NVDA ( ▼ 2.78% ) $4 trillion market cap is a single Jenga brick with the entire weight of the US equity market balancing precariously on it. The probability of a recession exceeds 90%, assuming we’re not in one already. And amid unprecedented trade tensions, mounting geopolitical turmoil, and the amount of cash in Warren Buffett’s portfolio, any potential downturn that does materialize could be among the worst ever seen.

Those are the stories the media is telling. And, given today’s uniquely uncertain economic environment, neither is necessarily unbelievable. But both are, undoubtedly, extreme. It’s hard to imagine an RIA giving these same, decidedly unmeasured takes to their clients, the ultra-wealthy individuals paying for actionable advice on how to navigate this unsteady landscape. 

So what stories are they telling instead? We set out to find out. 

We asked three wealth advisors with diverse books, backgrounds, and investing philosophies to weigh in on the market. 

Mary Gilligan is “a manager of managers.” Her company, MG Financial, is a holistic wealth planning firm that does “everything for the client” — typically entrepreneurs, C-Suite executives, and venture capitalists. As Gilligan summed it up, “We’re the first call.”

Meanwhile, Scholtz & Company is a self-styled “old-fashioned shop.” Founder Peter Scholtz joined our Zoom call in a contrast collar oxford and navy suspenders, vowing to be “the last person in New York wearing a suit.” The Gordon Gekko lookalike summed up his approach with a fittingly simple soundbite: “We actually invest money.” In other words, his firm doesn’t traffic in ETFs or mutual funds, just specific stocks or bonds. 

The stock-picking approach is shared by Vitaliy Katsenelson’s Investment Management Associates (IMA), another “dying breed” with a focus on assets over funds. But IMA has gone all-in on the philosophy. The firm focuses solely on investing in individual stocks, buying and selling equities both stateside and globally, and often leveraging clients’ entire net worth to do so.

But despite their stylistic differences, there’s at least one thing these three industry stalwarts have in common: a measured view of the current market uncertainty.

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Gilligan splashed cold water on all sweeping predictions, bullish and bearish alike. “We don’t try to predict where the market’s going to go,” she said. “Rather, we try to work with where we are right now and take advantage of things as they unfold.”

Scholtz “couldn’t be more on the fence” either. He similarly trumpeted the need to position portfolios in preparation for either outcome. “For my 60/40 balanced accounts, my asset allocation is 60% stocks,” Scholtz stated. I’m right on my benchmark, eager to figure out which way is this thing going to fall.”

Katsenelson has also been adapting to growing uncertainty. “Over the last six months or a year, we started to reduce position sizes,” he said. “The stock market today is one of the highest valuations in modern history. The number of unknowns has been increasing.” 

He went on to emphasize an increased need for diversification, to prevent a whole portfolio from being brought down by “a new tweet from the White House that suddenly changes the nature of the business.”

In terms of potential pitfalls, Scholtz pointed to one that’s right around the corner. “The next job report is going to be critical. If that print is negative,” he predicted, “this market’s going off the high dive.” The August Employment Situation is due Friday, Sept. 5.

However, even if a downturn does materialize, Gilligan argued it wouldn’t be the worst-case scenario: “A recession is not a bad thing. A correction is not a bad thing. These are actually healthy things for an economy in general. When things get overheated, we just try to trim what’s done really well. There’s no panic.”

We asked each advisor to identify the stocks, asset classes, or themes they’re watching most closely in the current environment. Here’s what they said. 

Scholtz & Co has leaned heavily on fixed income as a differentiator. “We’re very good in bonds,” Scholtz said. “We’re rather sophisticated. We find 35 bonds that are steel and a great deal, and we can buy those bonds and it moves a needle.”

The shop identified a particular opportunity in structured products: steepener bonds. These floating-rate bonds tie their coupon payments to the spread between long-term and short-term government yields. “The coupon is a function of the 30-year government minus the two-year government times an integer,” Scholtz explained. With the yield curve inverted, “they paid nothing and they traded like they would never pay anything, even though 90-some-odd percent of the time the yield curve is not inverted.” 

That disconnect created a rare bargain. “We looked at the bonds due in the mid-30s, early 30s, and we could see that these steepener bonds with zero coupon were yielding as much to maturity as the regular coupon bond. You were paying nothing for the idea that they might generate an 8% coupon someday.” Scholtz adds that while he’s “not real optimistic on the long end,” he’s “very optimistic that the yield curve will steepen some more” and continues to focus on investment-grade opportunities in credit.

Energy has been front of mind for many traders, as forecasts call for soaring demand due to the massive data centers required to run AI tools. The sector is front of mind for Katsenelson, too, but not in the way you might think. 

“We’ve been buying oil companies in the US, Canada, and Norway. For the last 10 years, everybody went green, [and] oil became as toxic as tobacco stocks. Demand keeps going higher, but supply is constrained.” He also pointed to natural gas as a key beneficiary of both AI data center growth and shifting global supply. “Data centers consume a lot more energy,” Katsenelson concurred. “40% of the energy comes from natural gas.”

But Scholtz took a more cautious stance on the sector, calling energy a “tough space” with limited growth potential. “Exxon Mobil is trading for the same price that it traded in 2014,” he said. “The only way to really make money in energy is to find a teeny E&P company that can grow unit production for eight years. And if you buy it when oil is down and out, you get a double whammy. But oil’s not down and out, it’s probably roughly where it belongs. And until it is, I’m not going to be looking at any energy really.”

European defense emerged as another theme, but once again, the advisors had different views on where the opportunity goes from here. 

Scholtz highlighted Germany’s Rheinmetall $RNMBY as a prime example, deeming it “the best performing defense stock in the world.” He went on to predict that the company, which manufactures artillery shells used by Ukraine, will “be growing at 30% through the decade.”

Katsenelson was similarly bullish on the sector’s potential — albeit several years earlier. “Our largest position today, which we held for the last three or four years, is European defense stocks. When we were buying them, nobody cared about them. They were monopolies with stable cash flows, and very cheap. But [...] I would not be buyer of them most of them today.”

Healthcare proved to be another divisive sector. “I think [healthcare] is going to really struggle for a while, so we’re kind of avoiding that,” said Gilligan. “We don’t usually make sector bets. If we have a manager who’s heavily weighted in health care, we want to see that turning first before we would add to them.”

Katsenelson has approached the space differently, focusing on health maintenance organizations. “We just took a position in HMOs,” he said. “The sector is down 50 to 60%.” 

However, Katsenelson struggled to identify a single leader among players like Unitedhealth Group $UNH, Humana $HUM, and Elevance $ELV. So he put his diversification strategy into practice: “Instead of me buying one, we bought four as a basket.” IMA is betting on the sector’s recovery, more so than a single company’s strength.

MG Financial has its eye on the housing market as a potential opportunity amid market turmoil. 

In the wake of the 2023 regional banking crisis, “banks clearly had to shore up their balance sheets, and that has had a huge impact on real estate,” Gilligan said. “But there’s a lot of quality real estate out there, and some of it was probably priced too high. Now there are opportunities where you can pick up some really great properties at reasonable prices, so you can take advantage of that fallout.”

Everyone under the sun has thoughts on Nvidia, and the advisors were no different. In fact, they found rare common ground when it came to the world’s largest company by market cap. 

“Nvidia is in a highly cyclical business,” Scholtz said. “Their earnings don’t flatten out. They plummet. Obviously, they have a monopoly right now, and I don’t think that’s going to go away tomorrow. But somewhere down the road [...] this thing is going to do a swan dive.”

Katsnelson echoed the caution. “There’s a difference between a great company and a great stock. Nvidia could be an incredible company. But the price you pay matters,” he said, adding that competition is already brewing. “Google does not like to write those checks to Nvidia for tens of billions of dollars. So what are they doing? They’re developing their own chip. So does Facebook, so does everybody else. At some point, they’re going to be competing products.”

In the long run, Gilligan maintained she’s “very positive on tech”. But, she added, “there are concerns because of the whole AI hype. There are things that are definitely overvalued.”

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Finally, we asked the advisors for the one piece of advice they find themselves giving most often in the current economic climate. For all their different perspectives, each answer amounted to the same guidance: don’t let emotions drive your portfolio. 

Gilligan put it bluntly: “Do not invest based on your political views and feelings. That has nothing to do with how you should invest in the financial markets.” 

Scholtz has seen the same reflex from both sides of the aisle. “When Obama was president, my conservative clients wanted to sell all their stocks. Likewise with Trump, my liberal clients want to sell everything. Don’t react to news like that.”

Instead, they stressed patience and discipline. “I think this is the time when you want to get rich slowly,” said Katsnelson, warning that “everybody participating in the hype and saying this time is different may end up being right for a while, but at some point there will be a great reset.” 

But, Scholtz added, that doesn’t mean you should wait on the sidelines either. “The republic will muddle through, and the most dangerous asset in the long term is cash. When you’re heavy cash and the market zooms up, it’s not coming back.”

In other words, the headlines may not matter, regardless of what “world” we’re in. The trick isn’t to time the storm. It’s to build a ship that can endure any weather.

Read more about these advisors’ perspectives on the market here: