If you’ve been checking your investments every time a new policy announcement drops, Marta Norton, Chief Investment Strategist at Empower, has a message for you.
“Leave the politics for the Thanksgiving dinner. They really don’t play a role in your portfolio,” she told Jean Chatzky on this week’s episode of the HerMoney podcast.
“What actually drives stock performance,” Norton explained, “is the underlying cash flows or earnings income that the stock ultimately generates.” Making investment decisions based on political news, she warned, means “distorting your portfolio from its main objective and from the drivers that are actually going to determine its performance.”
The AI Story Powering (and Potentially Threatening) Your Portfolio
The same theme that has sent markets soaring is also creating a new kind of risk that every investor needs to understand.
“Increasingly in the S&P 500 or really any other kind of market cap weighted representation of the US market, you see that it’s concentrated in the Magnificent Seven,” Norton said. “A lot of these companies are variations of the same theme. They’re all kind of focused around technology in one way or another, and increasingly AI within technology.”
But Norton isn’t sounding the alarm just yet. “When you think about the growth prospects for the US and what AI can do, Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google, said AI is more transformative than electricity or fire,” Norton said. “To the extent that that’s true or half true or a quarter true, you do want to have an economy that’s able to take that bull by the horns.”
Her advice: “You don’t want to necessarily put all your chips in the game with some of these names, and you also don’t want to avoid them altogether, because they are a big part of the market.”
The SpaceX IPO: Are Everyday Investors Really Just Party Favors?
The SpaceX IPO was the biggest in history, and investors are wondering whether regular people should be buying in. Financial creator Vivian Tu made waves with her take that everyday investors aren’t party guests in this stock… they’re party favors, serving as an exit strategy for insiders who have been waiting over a decade to cash out. Norton had thoughts.
“When we look at 2026, one of the defining developments over the course of the year is this triple IPO,” she said, referring to SpaceX, Anthropic, and OpenAI. “These are companies that have incredibly recognizable business models that have been raising enormous amounts of money and have grand ambitions all tied one way or another to AI.”
As for whether the SpaceX IPO makes everyday investors the party favor, Norton said: “I think that remains to be seen. It depends on how these lockups play off against the index buying and also, of course, the long-term future [of these companies].”
What the Rest of 2026 Could Look Like: Best and Worst Case
Norton’s best-case scenario for the second half of 2026 centers on the AI engine continuing to drive markets forward. “It’s conceivable that we could have a year where the market just continues to deliver. The AI theme is this massive economic engine that’s begun to really show up in the GDP numbers, and that’s creating this growth accelerant that has its tentacles not just in technology.”
“My existential worst case is that AI proves to be nothing other than a red herring. It never amounts to more than fun conversations with a chatbot, and doesn’t transform the economy,” she said.
But whatever happens, Norton’s message was clear: there’s no need for alarm. “Some of the best times to invest in my own career have been periods of great dislocation. Even if we were to get something like that, it’s not something to panic about.”
MORE ON HERMONEY:
- Jobs Are Up, Morale Is Down: What’s Really Going On in the U.S. Economy
- The Truth About Annuities: Busting Myths and Answering Your Biggest Questions
- Ask Jean: “Nothing for me has changed financially – so why did my credit score decrease?”
And if you’re ready to make your money work even harder for you, be sure to pre-order Jean’s new book, The Forever Paycheck — her guide to building the kind of secure, steady income stream that lets you actually enjoy the retirement you’ve spent a lifetime working toward.
