How to Find the Best Stock Ideas in 2026

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3:55Andrew:I love this podcast because it crushes your dreams of getting rich quick. They actually got me into reading stats for anything. You're tuned in to the Investing for Beginners podcast. Led by Andrew Sather and Dave Ahern. Step-by-step premium investing guidance for beginners. Your path to financial freedom starts now. Starts now.

4:18Dave:All right, folks. Welcome to Investing for Beginners podcast. Today, we're going to talk about how to find investment ideas in the stock market in 2026. so this would be a great lesson in how to source investment ideas so with that let's uh let's talk about how you how you find stock ideas what are your thoughts well you just said a word that

4:41Andrew:pops in my mind and it's a great one and a resource that gets even better and better over time but that is podcasts podcasts have been such a great way to get ideas and also get deeper than surface level insights on companies. And you're starting to see more and more of this stuff. I think it is important to understand the founding story of a business if the founder CEO is still there. It can be important to understand the background, even if maybe the founder isn't there, but just to give you a download of how an industry works. I've used this example before, but I listened to Shoe Dog, and that taught me more about...

5:27Andrew:Shoe Dog's the memoir with Phil Knight, who founded Nike. That taught me more about retail and the shoe business, obviously, and things like working capital and inventory in a way that's way more digestible than trying to read it from a textbook. so podcasts and founding stories and just content about businesses can be such a great way to find ideas to maybe give you insight into some of those outliers where you might look at a stock and be like I would never buy that but if you start to learn the background and you start to understand the actual story behind it then maybe it opens up your horizons a little bit And so I think podcasting can be a great way to do that.

6:18Dave:Yeah, I 100 % agree. And the great thing about podcasts is that the format naturally leads to longer in-depth conversations about the company so that you can explore different aspects of the business a lot more. you can get a better sense of the struggles maybe that the company went through to get to where they are. A lot of times when we come into the investing world, we may be way later in the Nike story. And so we don't understand how hard it was for Phil Knight to go from idea to selling their shoes to Michael Jordan and the Air Jordan story. There was a lot that happened in between those two points.

7:04Dave:And so podcasts can certainly give you a lot more flavor. One of the things that I loved about the Acquired podcast is the in-depth and the storytelling that they go into all these different companies. And sometimes they're companies I'm not interested in any way, shape or form. But because they're telling these stories, you can get a better sense of the companies. And it also gives you ideas. Maybe not that particular company itself, but when they talk about tangential businesses or competitors to that business, it can give you insights into that industry as well. So podcasts are a fantastic source of other to generate investment ideas.

7:45Yeah.

7:46Dave:What else? Well, I think we would be remiss if we didn't mention social media. it is a it can be a challenging place to swim for sure there's a lot of pitfalls a lot of tidal pools there's a lot of waves that can wash you over so you have to be careful of the diet that you consume on social media but as somebody who's been a user of the x or twitter for a little now, you can filter out a fair amount of stuff you don't want to see, which can help correct your information diet. And so if there are people on there that are pitching stocks or constantly pumping and dumping kind of things, you can mute that kind of stuff.

8:36Dave:If you don't want to hear about oil or if you don't want to hear about crypto or any of those kinds of things, You can mute all those things. And so it can help focus your stream much more. I would admit I haven't done that on some of the other platforms, but I don't generally use those for investment ideas. But when you have a good collection of 50 to 100 people or more that you respect and think are good analysts, you can get a lot of potentially really good investment ideas from a place like social media, depending on how you try to source your information. So that is something that I have used over the years, and I've gotten a few ideas from there along the way.

9:18Dave:So it's not something I'm going to go and find an idea every single day, but it certainly is helpful to hear people talk about companies maybe you're interested in and to see what their take is to help form an opinion on whether it's something you want to look into deeper or not.

9:35Andrew:What are some accounts that would be good to start to follow to get ideas? Oh, gosh.

9:41Dave:I think some great ones would be our friends, Brett and Ryan at Chit Chat Stocks. They both have individual accounts, but if you follow the Chit Chat Stocks account, they do a really good job of doing very in-depth analysis. Sometimes they follow very small companies. Sometimes they follow larger companies, but they have a pretty eclectic mix. And so that could be a great source of really good information. I also follow John Rotanti, who we've had on the show several times. He's a great source of information, especially for investment ideas. He has his own portfolio that he manages now. And sometimes he will talk about particular companies that are in that portfolio.

10:20Dave:And so he's a smart, smart cookie. So he's a great resource. There's another gentleman that I follow. His name is Abdullah and his handle is mostly borrowed ideas. He's mostly a tech investor, but he's very smart. He's a great analyst and he follows a lot of the big tech companies as well as some of the smaller ones. And so he can be a great resource for investment ideas. But if you're curious at all about all the people I follow, I don't remember all of them. It's like 190 or 200 people. If you just go to at IFB underscore podcast and look and see who I'm following, you can click on that and it'll give you a list of all the people that I follow.

10:59Dave:And I only follow people that I think are good analysts or will bring some value to me or anybody that follows us. So if you want to go deeper on that, that's what I would recommend.

11:13Andrew:That's awesome. Yeah. The conversation we have with John Rotanti, if you're looking for infrastructure ideas, which seems to be something people are more and more gravitating towards with all the AI stuff going on, Google Investing for Beginners podcast, John Rotanti, and click on the latest episode we did with him. He shares some infrastructure ideas and you can get a sense because I mean, it's pretty obvious that infrastructure needs to be built, has been built, is continuing to be built. So if you talk about like relevant ideas, timely ideas for 2026, I think that's a great place to start. Yep.

11:51Andrew:Yep. Absolutely. Totally agree.

11:53Dave:Do you have, any other media platforms that you think could be potential idea generation places that you might look at?

12:04Andrew:I like YouTube. I don't know. I feel like some people are into the whole YouTube thing and some people just aren't. But I do like YouTube. I think people on there... For me personally, I like the ones that kind of go deeper into a business. Not so much like give me a rapid fire stuff. I want something in depth. And I want something that gives me an insight that I haven't thought of. It's one thing to get ideas or get lists of tickers. But in my opinion, if you want really good ideas, you need to have people who are giving you ideas for companies that shift your thinking on the company a way you've never thought of it before.

12:48Andrew:Because really, what are we doing when we're buying stocks? We're trying to, it's a game where everybody's trying to find that special company, that special stock that is under the radar, that's not being fairly priced. That's really the game we're all playing. And so in order to achieve that, you need to have these ideas that are beneath the surface different. There's something special there. And so I like when different YouTubers go deeper into stocks. One that pops to mind is Company Man. It's entertaining. Even my 13-year-old daughter likes to watch it too because he'll pit Quiznos versus Subway or something and why the Quiznos fail and things like that.

13:35Andrew:So it's a lot of relevant stuff. But it can give you these stories or these insights, insights, fresh ways to look at names and companies we're all familiar with that all it takes is just that one idea, that one little tick of imagination to say, oh, maybe the market's missing something here. And that can lead to some fantastic ideas. We all know how important it is to make smart decisions in our business, our investments, our finances. Getting the best for less matters. Yet how many of us have looked at our life insurance policies lately? You have to ask yourself, is your coverage enough given all the economic uncertainty or are you overpaying?

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16:38Dave:That's a great one. I would freely admit I'm not a YouTube sickle like you are, but I have explored a little bit and seen some of what you're talking about. And to your point, it's really good. I think a lot of times we always look for confirmation bias or confirming the thoughts that we have about a particular company. positive or negative. And sometimes it can be really, really helpful to look on the other side of the trade, if you will, to look at contrarian viewpoints. Sometimes you may 100 % disagree with them and that's okay. But I think trying to be open to the idea that there may be something about the business that you may not understand, or maybe you were thinking differently about it and this person can unlock an insight into a particular company can be very very very helpful it kind of goes to the idea that charlie munger preached all those years ago invert always invert it's that's kind of the same idea as trying to look for opposite ends of the trade and see if you can find something that maybe they can reveal to you that maybe you hadn't thought before because it happens all the time we may think we know everything about a company and you come across some tidbit or the way somebody phrases something or puts a piece of information that you hadn't considered before.

18:01Dave:And it can kind of open up a whole new arena for you, not only for that company, but maybe a sector or an industry or a particular, you know, how to look at that particular investment. So it can be very, very revealing. So I'd encourage you to not just look for, hey, everybody, I love this company. I'm going to look for people that all love this company. while that can be helpful too also looking on the other side can be very helpful as well yeah 100 so i think uh another place that i like to look is is reading i know it's boring

18:39Andrew:and that's not 2026 come on now who's doing that anymore come on now right exactly

18:48Dave:Sometimes the timeless classics stay relevant. So reading blog posts, reading Twitter, reading books, reading 10Ks, those kinds of reading earnings calls, listening to what other owners of businesses that you're interested in are saying about their competitors. A lot of times it will be generic or very surface level, but every once in a while you're going to get a nugget. I think it's Matthew Prince. I'm going to blank whether he's Cloudflare or CrowdStrike, but one of those two. He is very opinionated, shall we say, and he will cut into competitors. and sometimes if you read well enough, sometimes you can find some nuggets in what he's saying and you can go and investigate the other companies and discover that what he is saying is true and so it can give you a better insight into, okay, whether this company is really as good as maybe you thought it was based on what a competitor is saying about the business.

20:00Dave:You're not going to find that a lot so don't think that that's going to be everywhere you look but occasionally you will find that. But just reading and listening to other earnings calls, listening, reading other reports can be very, very helpful to find investment ideas, especially when other competitors are talking about those companies. It could be very revealing.

20:24Andrew:So how does one find good blogs to read?

20:30Dave:One finds good blogs by following the same people I follow. No, I'm just joking.

20:38Andrew:Nuggets newsletter.

20:40Dave:Yeah, the Nuggets newsletter. Thank you. That's a really good way. One of the things that I do every Tuesday is I send out a free newsletter. If you subscribe to our newsletter at einvestingforbeginners.com, subscribe. We have a newsletter called The Nuggets that we send out every Tuesday. And included in that are at least six links of different things that I've come across in my investigations during the week prior that I thought would be interesting and educational and helpful to our readers. And so that could be a really good way to discover other people, people like Thomas Chua, who I'm a big fan of his writing.