This Year Is Going to Be Crazy… Crazy Profitable

Well, 2026 sure started off with a bang, didn’t it?

The ball had only just dropped when President Trump dispatched America’s special forces to kneecap Venezuela and capture its president.

The move wasn’t a complete surprise — I called it back in November.

But it’s nonetheless shocking to see the U.S. military deployed to such dramatic and dubious ends.

No doubt, Nicolas Maduro was an oppressive pariah, but that’s not what this was about.

Trump himself has made that clear.

“The oil business in Venezuela has been a bust, a total bust for a long period of time,” the president said in justifying the attack. “We are going to have our very large United States oil companies go in, spend billions of dollars, fix the badly broken infrastructure and start making money for the country.”

Indeed, Venezuela has the world’s largest proven oil reserves.

With roughly 303 billion barrels they hold 17% of the total global oil supply. That’s more than Saudi Arabia, which ranks second with 267 billion barrels, and six times more than the United States.

However, years of mismanagement, underinvestment, and sanctions have kept Venezuela from fully actualizing the potential of those reserves. The country only produces 1 million barrels of oil per day (bpd), which is less than 1% of global output.

By comparison, the United States leads the world by extracting 13.5 million bpd, while  Saudi Arabia pumps an estimated 10 million–12 million bpd, and Russia produces 9.4 million.

If Venezuela gets back to producing 3 million bpd like it did in the early 2000s that’d be a triumph.

Unsurprisingly, energy stocks are surging as the market anticipates newfound access to Venezuela’s bounty.

So, too, are defense contractors.

As they should be.

Maduro was removed with relative ease. There was almost no resistance aside from some diplomatic protestations. No American lives were lost. And the U.S. government seems to have transformed Venezuela from a communist antagonist in its own backyard into a compliant trade partner.

That’s a welcome narrative for an administration that’s been inundated with bad press and plummeting approval ratings.

Indeed, the Epstein files, job losses, tariffs, AI anxiety, a government shutdown, and a persistent affordability crisis have dominated the conversation for the past several months.

So this has to be seen as a political victory — even if it is an unsettling one for those who have misgivings about foreign interventions.

And if that’s the case, more military operations are likely to follow.

The Trump administration has made the Western hemisphere its top priority, pledging to “enforce a ‘Trump Corollary’ to the Monroe Doctrine.”

The assault on Venezuela made good on that pledge, and it put the rest of Latin America on notice.

That’s especially true for Cuba, Mexico, and Colombia — all of which Trump has criticized in the past.

Then there’s Iran which was already targeted by Trump last year, as well as in his first term. That country is currently in a state of upheaval due to its failing economy, unpopular leadership, and ceaseless conflict with Israel.

Even America’s allies are on edge, as Trump has vowed to annex Greenland and make Canada the 51st state.

Adding more fuel to the fire,  Congress last month authorized over $900 billion in defense spending for the current year. And when it’s all said and done, we’re likely to spend more than that — probably more than $1 trillion just as we did in 2025.

No doubt, 2025 was another blockbuster year for defense contractors. And given the start to 2026, I’d say we’re in store for an even bigger haul this year.

So if you want the latest and best picks, check out Secret Stock Files — an investment service that focuses exclusively on defense tech.

We’ve notched scores of triple- and quadruple-digit gains playing the defense sector. And my newest report is nothing short of mind-blowing.