$40 Trillion National Debt & Vanguard Buys Altruist – Monthly Market Update Podcast – September 2026

So August, 2026.

This is a heat map for those that haven't seen this kind of graph before.

The larger the box, the larger the company, the greener, the more, the higher the returns for this period and the redder, the worst the returns for the period.

So this is for the month of August.

Mega cap name.

So the top 50 stocks in the S&P 500 were up almost 3%.

S&P 500 not far behind at 2.7. S&P GARP, one of our preferred ways of investing.

It's growth at a reasonable price.

So it's a filtered down version of the S&P 500.

About flat, I believe Google is a big part of GARC.

So it being down 10% is probably one of the parts that is weighing on GARC, but also just in general, some months it's further than the market, other months it's down.

Small caps down 0.7%, 0.64. Another, again, large part of GARC, usually growth at a reasonable price skews to the smaller size types of companies.

Global ex-U.S., so non-U.S. companies, up over 3%.

So they were the best performing stocks for the month of August, outperforming the U.S. stocks.

Aggregate bonds up 0.4%.

Gold, one of the best performers on this list for this month, up 9%.

Crude oil about flat.

And Bitcoin making a resurgence this month up 25%.

Anything jump out at you, Gordon?

Well, I thought it was interesting.

You know, small cap, a bit of a retrenchment for most of this year and a lot of last year.

Small caps were really chugging along great, even better than the large caps.

So I'm not sure what's happening there.

Still, S&P 600, that's like...

There's the 500, then there's 400 mid-cap, and then 600 small.