We’re a little over halfway through 2026, and frankly, so far it’s been a weird year.
I was thinking about that in the context of this week’s Term Sheet Podcast with Josh Wolfe, Lux Capital cofounder and backer of companies like Anduril, Applied Intuition, Hugging Face, Impulse Space, Osmo, and Physical Intelligence. Wolfe invests with a broad lens—often both scientific and geopolitical—and he had some combustible predictions for the remainder of this strange year through 2027.
The first of his predictions: Warren Buffett will die soon, and we could see a crisis in the Nasdaq.
“I believe we’ll see a headline—possibly the end of this year, maybe early next, a sad but realistic one—which is I think Warren Buffett dies,” Wolfe said. “And the headline says something like ‘reports of the death of Buffett were not exaggerated, but the reports of the death of value investing were.’”
Value investing—an investment strategy that emphasizes buying stocks trading below their intrinsic value—in recent years has fallen out of favor. So, here’s what Wolfe believes could happen: Tech mega-caps are more fragile than they look, and the widespread adoption of index investing has created a market structure that automatically and indiscriminately bolsters the largest companies. So, if there’s a sweeping Nasdaq decline (say, 10% to 15%) concentrated heavily in the Magnificent 7, it could create a crisis—and an opening for value investors.
He calls this scenario a “lower probability, high magnitude outcome,” relatively unlikely but consequential.
“I don’t know if it’s going to be Dan Loeb or David Einhorn or my wife, Lauren Taylor Wolfe, or some other value investor,” Wolfe said. “It might be some new person, but people suddenly say: ‘Oh my god, how are they outperforming by 30 basis points, 300 basis points? When the market’s down 15, and they’re up 15. I do think that we see a scenario that would be unexpected in that shift from passive growth, which has been dominating for the past ten-plus years, into active value. That’s not self-serving for me as a venture investor.”
Something else Wolfe thinks could be possible: That the war in Iran ultimately creates seismic societal pressures in Europe.
“You could have a scenario I would put reasonably low odds on—let’s call it 10%, which is still maybe high but a huge order of magnitude of importance—where fertilizer scarcity leads to a food crisis on the periphery of Europe,” said Wolfe. “Maybe it’s a place like Macedonia or Bulgaria. Compounded with migratory pressures, you get an economic crisis in the EU, you have a decline of currency, a decline of markets, and you have panic. You get a rise of the sort of far-right strongmen that typically are there.”
Wolfe has hoped, as he’s shared this idea with intelligence professionals, that it might get totally rebuffed. Not so.
“As I’ve shared this hypothesis, I always want people to either pooh-pooh it or sort of invalidate it,” he said on the podcast. “But instead they’ve said that the sort of Hitler or Mussolini or strongman of the 30s and 40s is already in Europe. They don’t know if he’s 35 years old or 45 years old or 55 years old, but he’s there waiting for the stage. And that’s chilling.”
Wolfe wants to be clear: Imagining worst-case scenarios is part of success. He even has an optimistic streak, in the macro sense and in his way.
“I always like to say that failure comes from a failure to imagine failure, so I’ve imagined a geopolitical and socioeconomic failure,” said Wolfe. “Life will always continue to get better because of technology. While I’m very cynical about people—people are unchanging in their Shakespearean motives, ‘there’s daggers in men’s smiles,’ we’re full of envy and jealousy, and vainglorious—but technology compounds because of science. When you zoom out, it’s amazing, and the march of progress will continue despite the daily headlines.”
If you want to hear more from Josh about where ideas meet businesses, listen to the full podcast here.
See you tomorrow,
Allie Garfinkle X: @agarfinks Email: [email protected]
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