From The Advisor’s Fuel Podcast with Adam Koós, CFP®, CMT®, CEPA. Quarterly market check-in with John and Jack Kosar of Asbury Research.
📌 Market commentary from July 2026. This reflects conditions as of the episode’s recording date. Markets change quickly, so for our current thinking, check the latest episodes of The Advisor’s Fuel Podcast or recent articles at adrenalineadvisor.com.
Markets don’t fall the way they rise.
They climb slowly. They drop fast.
Most advisors never build a plan around that one fact until they’re already explaining a bad quarter to a scared client.e
On the latest episode of The Advisor’s Fuel, Adam Koós sat down again with John and Jack Kosar of Asbury Research for their quarterly market check-in, and the conversation is a good reminder of what a real risk management process looks like versus just hoping the market holds. If you want the framework behind that kind of process, the Million Dollar Blueprint webinar walks through how Adam built his own practice around it.
Why do markets climb slowly but fall fast?
Because the money moving markets up and the money moving them down behaves differently. John Kosar spent 17 years on the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, and he still remembers the traders, called locals, who wanted to be short all the time because “the money’s faster” on the way down. Markets grind higher and it’s slow and boring. They drop and it’s a fire drill.
That asymmetry is why Kosar’s firm doesn’t try to short a falling market. When their models go risk off, they move to cash or short-term T-bills instead of betting on the drop. Guess the timing wrong by even a little, and a short position can wipe out the gain you were trying to protect. Going to cash just takes you out of harm’s way until the data says it’s safe to get back in.
What does the current shift out of tech actually signal?
It signals a market getting more defensive, not one that’s falling apart. Over the past several weeks, money has been rotating out of mega cap tech and into industrials, and more recently financials and healthcare. Tech’s weight in the S&P 500 is sitting close to where it was in the leadup to 2008, when financials made up roughly 37% of the index before the market bottomed a few months later.
Kosar is careful not to call that a forecast. It’s a data point, not a prediction. But a few of the relationships his team tracks tend to line up right before a market gets tired:
When several of those show up together, it’s usually a market either catching its breath or starting to roll over.
Is the 200-day moving average still worth watching?
Yes, and it’s simpler than most advisors give it credit for. As Adam put it on the episode, “nothing good happens below the 200-day moving average.” Right now the S&P is trading roughly 8% above that trendline. The same setup preceded the market’s crack lower when the Iran conflict began and again during last year’s tariff-driven selloff.
It’s not a crystal ball. It’s a back of the envelope way to read the major trend without pretending to forecast where the market goes next. Kosar put it plainly: after 40 years in this business, he’s learned he’s not smart enough to forecast markets, but reading the data as it changes is a skill anyone can build.
What is the Correction Protection Model, and why build one before you need it?
It’s Asbury Research’s oldest model, close to 15 years old, and it was built directly in response to 2008. A lot of investors got wiped out in that crash, sold at the bottom, and then never found the courage to get back in, even as the market fully recovered. The model’s entire job is to stay invested through the market’s slow, steady climb (which is most of the time) and step aside into cash when a real correction shows up, rather than trying to time an exit or a short.
The logic Kosar uses with clients is simple: nobody asks for 40% upside with unlimited downside. What they actually want is smaller drawdowns and lower volatility, even if it means giving up some upside along the way. Building that model before the correction, not during it, is the whole point.
How do you get clients to stop panicking about the headlines?
You give them permission to stop watching. Adam shared a story about a client who kept the news on around the clock because she was afraid she’d have nothing to talk about with friends at lunch if she didn’t stay current on every political headline. That fear, more than the market itself, was driving her stress.
His advice was blunt: turn off the political news, read a book, go for a walk, spend the money you’ve built on the people and experiences that matter. Find an advisor who knows what they’re doing, let them drive, and if they’re not driving well, find a new one. Clients don’t need to track every tick. They need a plan they trust enough to stop checking the dashboard every day.
Where to go next
If this conversation is making you rethink how you talk to clients about risk before the next correction hits, a few places to go from here: