The Stock Market is Going Up AGAIN - Is Now the Time to Buy?

The stock market is up big today after the US and Iran announced a ceasefire and that they are in negotiation. The Dow Jones is up 2. 75% the NASDAQ is up 2. 72% and the S& P 500 is up 2. 3% and basically every part of the market is up right now except for oil and gas and that is due to oil prices falling nearly 18% over the past day and this is just one example of what a wild ride investing in the stock market is. We've been seeing a lot of volatility since the conflict started. We had about an 8% drop in the S& P 500 and earlier this week it was looking like it could either go down or up and that was really depending on how the conflict went. But as we sit here today is the market sell-off of 2026 over? Throughout the video I'll give my thoughts on that and I'll share which stocks I'd be buying right now. With that said, let's roll the intro and get into today's market

update. The following reflects the opinions of a man who spends far too much time thinking about stocks. Please do your own research before making any investment decisions. Nothing in this video is personal financial advice. Continue at your own risk. My name is Zach. This is Dividend Data and you should leave a like and subscribe to the channel if you enjoyed the video. Now the interesting thing is

with the market being up today, I went and took a look at my portfolio and my dividend focused account that I update every month on the channel. That account is actually down and the reason is the exact same reason why it's been holding up so well in early 2026 and that's because I own quite a few energy stocks in this account. And those are selling off big today with the drop in oil. Exxon Mobil down 6. 33% Hess Midstream down 2% MPLX it's down slightly. And as we're looking at the stock market, basically everything that was doing well in early 2026 is selling off today. Anything that was perceived as a flight to safety in the war with high oil prices, that was energy stocks. It was also defense stocks and it was value based names like the Altria Group. And the things that are going up most today are the more risk-based names. Any company that's considered more of a growth stock. So in my portfolio Google was up big, Microsoft was up a bit. And the question is whether or not the early sell-off is over and market conditions are going to change as we go through the year. So I'll give my thoughts on that and then I'll give some examples of which stocks I'd buy right now that I think are good buy and holds for 2026 and beyond. So is the market

volatility related to the war over? The answer to that is I don't know. It's a two-week ceasefire with negotiations happening and knowing all of the parties involved it's very likely there will be a couple of bumps along the road. And of course the market will likely choose to overreact one way or another. But in general my stance is the same since this conflict started. I don't think this is going to be some long years on war and I think probably a month or two from now people will not be talking about this at all. At least when it comes to the stock market. By year-end I'd expect we go back to the 70 or $60 oil range, but we'll probably have pretty high prices for the next month or two as the market adjust to the supply chain disruption and as the war-based trading kind of phases out of the market. So I don't know if it's entirely over, we could have some bumpy days along the way. But in general I'm keeping my investing strategy focused on the long term. And I'm pretty excited for some of these energy stocks to start selling off again because I would like to add to my positions in Hess Midstream and MPLX. So, let's get into my buys, but first I

have a short story I want to share with you guys and it's related to a product I was showing earlier in the video. I have a cool story to tell you. This past weekend I was invited to an event hosted by Moomoo partnering with YouTube. I got to meet a bunch of other financial influencers, which is always interesting. When you do something like this for work, it's a little rare to meet people who can kind of relate to your day-to-day. It was a pretty good time. We got some presentations from YouTube about how they think about financial and investing content. Plus, we got some demos from Moomoo and I was actually pretty inspired by how impressive their tech was. As an example, when you're there they just announced this Moomoo skill and you can connect that to your AI agent, whether it's Open Claw, ChatGPT, Claude. It works with Claude Code and Codex. You can analyze your Moomoo portfolio with it, analyze option strategies, use AI to help you visualize the supply chain of a company. So, as someone who's a little nerdy and works in fintech products, I thought a lot of their tech was pretty cool. I was also impressed with how in the weeds and detailed the CEO was. That's the guy presenting right there. I got to take a picture with him at the baseball game and Moomoo they're one of the main brands that sponsored the Mets. So, we got to go opening day for the Mets. That was a pretty cool experience. And hey, it gave me an excuse to visit some of my friends in New York as well. So, thank you to Moomoo and if you want to sign up for the brokerage, you can download their app with my link in the description and pin comment of the

video. But now, let's get to which stocks I would be buying right now. And in general, it's high-quality companies that I think are at attractive price that will compound in the future. And since we are talking about energy, I will lead with some energy stocks. And when I say that, I do not mean the oil producers, the majors. I am not talking about Exxon Mobil, I'm not talking about Chevron. These companies are overpriced right now unless we keep a $100-plus oil for a prolonged period of time. And believe me, if that happens, these companies are going to make a killing. I mean, we saw what happened in 2022 and they produce even more volumes more efficiently now. So, their earnings per share, if we stayed at that high dividend environment for a long time, probably would end up exceeding those 2022 earnings. But, I'm not betting on that happening, and I have not bought ExxonMobil anytime recently. I bought this stock in 2020. My cost basis is super low, so I've just kept it as a part of my position. I reinvest my dividends, but as we start to see energy

stocks become less popular in the market and sell off again, I am excited to pick up these midstream oil gas stocks that I've been buying in late 2025, and I want to keep adding to the positions. As an example, we have HESM. It's just under an 8% dividend yield right now. And one of the reasons why I like these companies is they're shielded from the commodity prices, and these are fee-based midstream companies. It's based on the volumes. So, they do well even in low oil price environments, as long as they don't stop drilling. HESM is one of my personal favorites in my dividend growth portfolio, and it has a rare combination of high dividend yield with high dividend growth. It's an 11. 31% 5-year compound annual growth rate for the dividend, and they've been increasing the payment every single

quarter. Likewise, I'll be looking to add more MPLX. Again, this is assuming that they start to sell off as the sector rotates. 7. 8% dividend yield, high dividend growth, 9. 3% 5-year CAGR, and their two most recent increases were both 12. 5%.

And the rest of the stocks I'm going to share today, they are high-quality companies that will continue to grow and compound. And spoiler alert, it's a lot of big tech companies. As an example, we have Microsoft. I've been buying a ton of Microsoft. I still think it's very attractive at current prices. They are growing their earnings per share at a high rate. Analysts are expecting continued high earnings per share growth, and they are trading at a historically low P/E ratio of 22. Another stock I'd be looking to buy is

Alphabet. And they're not as cheap as Microsoft right now, and they went up 4% today, but in the grand scheme of things, I think this stock's going to crush it over the next decade. Earnings per share growth accelerating, double-digit into the future. And the key trend that I'm identifying right here is I'm talking about the best businesses in the world with extreme competitive advantages and having very large profit centers. With Alphabet, it's Google Search, that's a cash cow business. With Microsoft, you have Microsoft 365, that's a cash cow business. Microsoft also has their cloud business with Microsoft Azure that is growing incredibly fast. Google's cloud business, Google Cloud, is also growing incredibly fast. Both companies, I think, are going to be huge beneficiaries of AI. Google is arguably the best AI company in the world. They are operating at the frontier with their models, competing with Anthropic and OpenAI. But they have the expertise and the funding across the entire level of the stack. They have Google TPUs, they have Google Cloud, they have the models, they have the applications, they have the distribution. I'll also give a

shout-out to Meta Platforms here. I know a lot of people have been buying this recently. I also like the stock right now. Again, they're one of the most dominant big tech companies in the world. They're trading at a relatively attractive valuation around 21 times forward earnings. But similar to Microsoft, these companies, they're growing fast. I will also give a

shout-out to Amazon. I think they will do very well. Dominant business, fast-growing earnings. And when it comes to cloud, Amazon Web Services, they're going to be one of the big providers of AI. And the final stock I'm going to

share today is Nvidia. That may be surprising to some of you. But personally, I think Nvidia, they have another 2 years of very high growth. As you can see, their earnings per share have exploded. I had to zoom into 5 years because on when you look at it on all of the years, it's ridiculous. And despite all of the talk of the AI bubble and everything, you can argue that maybe the spending levels right now aren't sustainable. But the big tech companies, they're paying it. And they're probably going to keep increasing CapEx for the next couple years. A lot of that money is going to go to Nvidia at a very high margin. So Nvidia, they're going to go from a hundred billion dollars of free cash flow to hundreds of billions of dollars of free cash flow. They're expected to grow their earnings per share by 70% this fiscal year, probably an understatement. And despite the AI bubble talk, the company's trading at a 21 forward P/E ratio. The business is growing faster than their stock price has been growing. So at today's price, I think Nvidia it still has a lot of juice left. That said, I do think it gets cloudier when we talk three to five years out because all of the incentives are in place for Google, for Amazon, for Microsoft to start developing their own chips. They're in the process. TPUs are in active development at a high scale. Microsoft, they have their Myria 200 chips, those are scaling up as well, but we're in early phases for all of this. You also have the Tesla Tera Fab and Tesla's doing their own chips as well. But right now, Nvidia, they're still a huge provider to all of these companies. Not to mention all of the neo clouds, too, things like Coreweave. All of these data centers, Nvidia, they still have a dominant position. And it's going to be like that for three plus years. But the incentives are in place for these companies to not want to be reliant on Nvidia. They don't want to be giving all that margin to Nvidia. But again, for the next couple years, Nvidia is going to be printing cash. I'm considering adding this one in my Roth because then I can cycle out of it in the future with no tax penalty. So I hope you enjoyed

this little market update. I saw everything going up in the news and I figured I had to make a video about it. Let me know in the comments what you think of whether or not this sell-off is over. Make sure to leave a like, comment, and subscribe to the channel. If you want to use the research tool I showed there out, it's all available at dividenddata. com. The link is in the description and pin comment of the video. Thanks for watching.