MW This top stock-picker spotted Nvidia and GLP-1s early - and made over 200%. Here's what he's buying now.
By Charlie Garcia
Citrini Research founder James Van Geelen identifies potential big money trends and stakes his claim far ahead of the crowd
James Van Geelen runs Citrini Research, regularly the No. 1 finance newsletter on Substack. His portfolio is up more than 200% since May 2023. A basic subscription to his investment insight is $999. I skipped that and went straight for the institutional tier.
Van Geelen has one of those backgrounds that shouldn't add up but does. Talented musician growing up. UCLA degrees in biology and psychology. EMT and paramedic work in South Central Los Angeles, where if you don't have a plan, you're going to have a really bad day.
He was set on becoming a doctor, then decided instead to build a healthcare company. Sold it to private equity. Started investing his own money in 2018 and hasn't stopped being right since.
Musicians learn to hear what's coming before it arrives. Paramedics learn to read chaos and act before the textbook catches up. Psychologists learn why people do stupid things with money. Biologists learn that systems have patterns, even when they look random.
Put all of that into one person and you get Van Geelen - someone who sees the market the way a jazz player hears a song. He knows where it's going before the rest of the band does.
He named the firm after citrinitas, a stage of alchemy that most people forgot about. It's the moment of yellowing when lead starts becoming gold but isn't gold yet. The transition before the transformation completes. That's where Van Geelen thrives - seeing the gold before everyone else notices the lead is changing.
The inspiration came from George Soros's "Alchemy of Finance," the first book that made Van Geelen see investing as philosophy rather than mere spreadsheets. Soros's core idea is reflexivity: Narratives aren't just noise, they're engines. Stories move capital. Capital changes reality. Van Geelen finds the stories that will move the capital before the capital even knows it's moving.
Second-order thinking
Stop asking what you think will happen. Start asking what must happen.
Van Geelen recently walked me through how he finds trades. Most investors watch the ball. He watches where it bounces next.
When Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) collapsed in March 2023, for example, most traders were scrambling to assess contagion risk. Van Geelen had already made his money. Not by predicting the bank would fail, but by being positioned for what the Federal Reserve would have to do next.
He'd been buying cheap Secured Overnight Financing Rate $(SOFR)$ call options - a contrarian bet that the market's certainty about rate hikes was overdone. When SVB forced the Fed's hand, those calls went from 2 cents to 93 cents - a 46x return.
On Dec. 3 last year, Van Geelen published a memo about opportunities in Venezuelan sovereign bonds, then trading at 17-20 cents on the dollar, with years of missed coupons compounding the legal claims. His base case was that the Trump administration was committed to regime change - the only question was how. Polymarket showed "Maduro out by 2026" at 53%. A month later, Venezuela's President Nicolás Maduro was gone.
You don't short the rubble. You buy what will benefit from the response to the rubble. That's where the money is.
Stop asking what you think will happen. Start asking what must happen. How will the market's reaction change the fundamental reality? What are the second-order effects? What are the hard constraints to a trend continuing, and where will money flow to relieve them?
Every December, Van Geelen publishes his trades for the year ahead. This year there are 26. Some he's betting on. Some he's watching. All of them are designed to eliminate blind spots. Here are four that kept me up past my bedtime.
The government has legislated that health insurers must make money. It's in the Code of Federal Regulations. Specifically, 42 CFR 438.4, which requires states to set Medicaid reimbursement rates that allow insurers to achieve at least 85% medical-loss ratios. Politicians disagree about everything except protecting their own re-election - and cutting healthcare for poor people polls slightly worse than kicking puppies.
Molina Healthcare (MOH) runs the lowest expense ratio in Medicaid of about 7%, which is 100 to 150 basis points better than competitors. The company doesn't use agents. Customer acquisition happens through state agencies. It doesn't advertise. Customers are assigned by bureaucrats.
It's the kind of business Warren Buffett noticed in 1976 when he bought Geico at distressed prices. Best-in-class costs. Well-defined customer base. Temporarily crushed stock.
The stock is down 40% over the past 12 months because Medicaid managed care has been assigned a permanent political discount. Markets assume Republicans will gut the program. But Van Geelen noticed that, since 1934, the incumbent president's party has lost an average of 26 House seats in midterm elections.
The GOP's current majority is five seats. If Democrats flip the House this November, efforts to dismantle the Affordable Care Act are dead on arrival. Gridlock equals stability. Stability equals margin recovery.
The math gets interesting. Every 100 basis points of margin improvement adds roughly $4.50 to Molina's earnings per share. The industry expects 300 basis points of improvement as rates reset over the next two years. That's $13.50 in incremental earnings. At normalized margins, Van Geelen projects $28 to $30 in EPS. Slap a 13x multiple on that and you get $390. The stock currently trades at around $185.
The market is pricing in permanent damage. The Federal Register says margins must recover. Someone is wrong.
2. WPP
AI is going to destroy advertising agencies. Everyone knows it. WPP $(WPP)$ trades at 0.2 times sales because the market has priced in extinction.
But here's what the market hasn't priced: WPP doesn't disappear tomorrow. Instead, WPP could fire 20% of its workforce tomorrow and keep the revenue.
John Maynard Keynes predicted in 1930 that technology would give us 15-hour workweeks by the end of the 20th century. He was right about technology. He was wrong about human nature. We invented email jobs instead.
AI is about to fix that mistake, not by replacing companies, but by letting them replace the employees doing the logo-aligning at 2 a.m. so their managing director doesn't yell at them. Technology advances exponentially. Workforce reduction is linear. There's a gap. The gap is money.
WPP just secured a partnership with Google DeepMind. The stock trades like a corpse. The company trades like a turnaround.
3. Choice Hotels
Soccer's World Cup is coming to America in 2026. It's on the calendar.
Budget hotels have been crushed. International travel to the U.S. is anemic. America's K-shaped economy hasn't been kind to lower-budget Holiday Inn customers. Choice Hotels International $(CHH)$ trades at depressed multiples that reflect a consumer who isn't showing up.
But this summer, the consumer will show up. From everywhere. World Cup host city hotels are already booking up. And when the World Cup arrives, budget travelers can't be choosers.
Van Geelen calls this "what do we know will happen" investing. You don't have to predict anything. You don't need an opinion about interest rates or earnings revisions or whether the Fed chair had a bad breakfast. You just notice what's already scheduled and ask what's mispriced, given what must happen.
What must happen is that millions of soccer fans need hotel rooms in America this summer. Choice Hotels has hotel rooms in America. This isn't complicated.
4. Tax-refund beneficiaries
Overwithholding plus new tax breaks equals fatter refund checks.
Tax refunds for Americans in early 2026 will be 30% to 50% larger than normal. This isn't a prediction. It's arithmetic.
Congress changed the tax code for 2025 income, adding new deductions and credits. The IRS kept the old withholding tables. So throughout the year, employers withheld the old, higher amount even though employees will owe less.
Overwithholding plus new tax breaks equals fatter refund checks. Piper Sandler estimates 32% more money in Americans' pockets, concentrated in middle-income households earning between $60,000 and $400,000 a year.
These aren't people buying Hermès bags. They're buying the mattress they've been putting off, the refrigerator that's been making that noise, the down payment on a used car that doesn't have 150,000 miles on it. Economists call it deferred durables. Regular people call it finally having the cash.
Van Geelen's basket includes Somnigroup International $(SGI)$ (formerly Tempur Sealy), Whirlpool $(WHR)$ and Lithia Motors $(LAD)$.
The constraint is that the refunds must be larger. It's already baked into the tax code. The behavior is that middle-income households have spent refund checks on deferred durables for decades. The trade is owning the companies selling to them.
Van Geelen doesn't claim to see the future. He claims to see the present more clearly than markets do. The World Cup is on the calendar. The tax code is in the Federal Register. Midterm election history is in the record books. AI can already do the junior analyst's job. Medicaid margins are mandated by federal regulation.
The only question is how long it takes everyone else to notice.
Charlie Garcia is founder and a managing partner of R360, a peer-to-peer organization for individuals and families with a net worth of $100 million or more. He owns shares of Molina Healthcare. Follow him on X here.
Agree? Disagree? Share your comments with Charlie Garcia at charlie@R360Global.com. Your letter may be published anonymously in the weekly "Dear Charlie" reader mailbag.
MW This top stock-picker spotted Nvidia and GLP-1s early - and made over 200%. Here's what he's buying now.
By Charlie Garcia
Citrini Research founder James Van Geelen identifies potential big money trends and stakes his claim far ahead of the crowd
James Van Geelen runs Citrini Research, regularly the No. 1 finance newsletter on Substack. His portfolio is up more than 200% since May 2023. A basic subscription to his investment insight is $999. I skipped that and went straight for the institutional tier.
Van Geelen has one of those backgrounds that shouldn't add up but does. Talented musician growing up. UCLA degrees in biology and psychology. EMT and paramedic work in South Central Los Angeles, where if you don't have a plan, you're going to have a really bad day.
He was set on becoming a doctor, then decided instead to build a healthcare company. Sold it to private equity. Started investing his own money in 2018 and hasn't stopped being right since.
Musicians learn to hear what's coming before it arrives. Paramedics learn to read chaos and act before the textbook catches up. Psychologists learn why people do stupid things with money. Biologists learn that systems have patterns, even when they look random.
Put all of that into one person and you get Van Geelen - someone who sees the market the way a jazz player hears a song. He knows where it's going before the rest of the band does.
He named the firm after citrinitas, a stage of alchemy that most people forgot about. It's the moment of yellowing when lead starts becoming gold but isn't gold yet. The transition before the transformation completes. That's where Van Geelen thrives - seeing the gold before everyone else notices the lead is changing.
The inspiration came from George Soros's "Alchemy of Finance," the first book that made Van Geelen see investing as philosophy rather than mere spreadsheets. Soros's core idea is reflexivity: Narratives aren't just noise, they're engines. Stories move capital. Capital changes reality. Van Geelen finds the stories that will move the capital before the capital even knows it's moving.
Second-order thinking
Stop asking what you think will happen. Start asking what must happen.
Van Geelen recently walked me through how he finds trades. Most investors watch the ball. He watches where it bounces next.
When Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) collapsed in March 2023, for example, most traders were scrambling to assess contagion risk. Van Geelen had already made his money. Not by predicting the bank would fail, but by being positioned for what the Federal Reserve would have to do next.
He'd been buying cheap Secured Overnight Financing Rate (SOFR) call options - a contrarian bet that the market's certainty about rate hikes was overdone. When SVB forced the Fed's hand, those calls went from 2 cents to 93 cents - a 46x return.
On Dec. 3 last year, Van Geelen published a memo about opportunities in Venezuelan sovereign bonds, then trading at 17-20 cents on the dollar, with years of missed coupons compounding the legal claims. His base case was that the Trump administration was committed to regime change - the only question was how. Polymarket showed "Maduro out by 2026" at 53%. A month later, Venezuela's President Nicolás Maduro was gone.
You don't short the rubble. You buy what will benefit from the response to the rubble. That's where the money is.
Stop asking what you think will happen. Start asking what must happen. How will the market's reaction change the fundamental reality? What are the second-order effects? What are the hard constraints to a trend continuing, and where will money flow to relieve them?
Every December, Van Geelen publishes his trades for the year ahead. This year there are 26. Some he's betting on. Some he's watching. All of them are designed to eliminate blind spots. Here are four that kept me up past my bedtime.
1. Molina Healthcare
The government has legislated that health insurers must make money. It's in the Code of Federal Regulations. Specifically, 42 CFR 438.4, which requires states to set Medicaid reimbursement rates that allow insurers to achieve at least 85% medical-loss ratios. Politicians disagree about everything except protecting their own re-election - and cutting healthcare for poor people polls slightly worse than kicking puppies.
Molina Healthcare (MOH) runs the lowest expense ratio in Medicaid of about 7%, which is 100 to 150 basis points better than competitors. The company doesn't use agents. Customer acquisition happens through state agencies. It doesn't advertise. Customers are assigned by bureaucrats.
It's the kind of business Warren Buffett noticed in 1976 when he bought Geico at distressed prices. Best-in-class costs. Well-defined customer base. Temporarily crushed stock.
The stock is down 40% over the past 12 months because Medicaid managed care has been assigned a permanent political discount. Markets assume Republicans will gut the program. But Van Geelen noticed that, since 1934, the incumbent president's party has lost an average of 26 House seats in midterm elections.
The GOP's current majority is five seats. If Democrats flip the House this November, efforts to dismantle the Affordable Care Act are dead on arrival. Gridlock equals stability. Stability equals margin recovery.
The math gets interesting. Every 100 basis points of margin improvement adds roughly $4.50 to Molina's earnings per share. The industry expects 300 basis points of improvement as rates reset over the next two years. That's $13.50 in incremental earnings. At normalized margins, Van Geelen projects $28 to $30 in EPS. Slap a 13x multiple on that and you get $390. The stock currently trades at around $185.
The market is pricing in permanent damage. The Federal Register says margins must recover. Someone is wrong.
2. WPP
AI is going to destroy advertising agencies. Everyone knows it. WPP (WPP) trades at 0.2 times sales because the market has priced in extinction.
But here's what the market hasn't priced: WPP doesn't disappear tomorrow. Instead, WPP could fire 20% of its workforce tomorrow and keep the revenue.
John Maynard Keynes predicted in 1930 that technology would give us 15-hour workweeks by the end of the 20th century. He was right about technology. He was wrong about human nature. We invented email jobs instead.
AI is about to fix that mistake, not by replacing companies, but by letting them replace the employees doing the logo-aligning at 2 a.m. so their managing director doesn't yell at them. Technology advances exponentially. Workforce reduction is linear. There's a gap. The gap is money.
WPP just secured a partnership with Google DeepMind. The stock trades like a corpse. The company trades like a turnaround.
3. Choice Hotels
Soccer's World Cup is coming to America in 2026. It's on the calendar.
Budget hotels have been crushed. International travel to the U.S. is anemic. America's K-shaped economy hasn't been kind to lower-budget Holiday Inn customers. Choice Hotels International (CHH) trades at depressed multiples that reflect a consumer who isn't showing up.
But this summer, the consumer will show up. From everywhere. World Cup host city hotels are already booking up. And when the World Cup arrives, budget travelers can't be choosers.
Van Geelen calls this "what do we know will happen" investing. You don't have to predict anything. You don't need an opinion about interest rates or earnings revisions or whether the Fed chair had a bad breakfast. You just notice what's already scheduled and ask what's mispriced, given what must happen.
What must happen is that millions of soccer fans need hotel rooms in America this summer. Choice Hotels has hotel rooms in America. This isn't complicated.
4. Tax-refund beneficiaries
Overwithholding plus new tax breaks equals fatter refund checks.
Tax refunds for Americans in early 2026 will be 30% to 50% larger than normal. This isn't a prediction. It's arithmetic.
Congress changed the tax code for 2025 income, adding new deductions and credits. The IRS kept the old withholding tables. So throughout the year, employers withheld the old, higher amount even though employees will owe less.
Overwithholding plus new tax breaks equals fatter refund checks. Piper Sandler estimates 32% more money in Americans' pockets, concentrated in middle-income households earning between $60,000 and $400,000 a year.
These aren't people buying Hermès bags. They're buying the mattress they've been putting off, the refrigerator that's been making that noise, the down payment on a used car that doesn't have 150,000 miles on it. Economists call it deferred durables. Regular people call it finally having the cash.
Van Geelen's basket includes Somnigroup International (SGI) (formerly Tempur Sealy), Whirlpool (WHR) and Lithia Motors (LAD).
The constraint is that the refunds must be larger. It's already baked into the tax code. The behavior is that middle-income households have spent refund checks on deferred durables for decades. The trade is owning the companies selling to them.
Van Geelen doesn't claim to see the future. He claims to see the present more clearly than markets do. The World Cup is on the calendar. The tax code is in the Federal Register. Midterm election history is in the record books. AI can already do the junior analyst's job. Medicaid margins are mandated by federal regulation.
The only question is how long it takes everyone else to notice.
Charlie Garcia is founder and a managing partner of R360, a peer-to-peer organization for individuals and families with a net worth of $100 million or more. He owns shares of Molina Healthcare. Follow him on X here.
Agree? Disagree? Share your comments with Charlie Garcia at charlie@R360Global.com. Your letter may be published anonymously in the weekly "Dear Charlie" reader mailbag.
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January 28, 2026 07:50 ET (12:50 GMT)
MW This top stock-picker spotted Nvidia and -2-
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More from Charlie Garcia:
I refused to invest in Tesla for years - but now's the time to bet on Elon Musk
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-Charlie Garcia
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