Markets spend a lot of time preparing for the last war.
That is understandable. Investors are trained by pain, and the pain of the last few years was inflation. Every strong payroll print, every rise in oil, every upside surprise in wages, every resilient consumer datapoint was filtered through the same reflex: stronger growth means more inflation, more inflation means a more hawkish Fed, and a more hawkish Fed means pressure on risk assets.
For a while, that was the right playbook.
In June, we began testing whether it had become the wrong one.
The live hypothesis inside VMF Research was simple: the market may be vulnerable to a Dovish Shock. Not because growth is collapsing. Not because the economy is obviously breaking. Not because investors should expect a sudden return to the easy-money world of the 2010s. The point is more nuanced than that.
The market may have moved too far in pricing the wrong kind of strength.
If growth is driven by overheating, wage pressure, excess demand, and supply bottlenecks, the Fed has a problem. But if growth is increasingly supported by productivity, technology, automation, operating leverage, and better tools, then the policy equation changes. Stronger growth does not automatically have to mean higher inflation. In the right conditions, it can coexist with a softer inflation path.
That is the possibility we explored throughout June.
And if the market is priced for a hawkish shock just as the conditions for a dovish one are improving, the consequences could be substantial. Not for every asset, and certainly not in a straight line, but for a very specific group of assets that have been under pressure precisely because investors have feared tighter liquidity, higher real yields, and a Fed forced to lean harder against inflation.
That was the thread connecting our June work across VMF’s Strategic Asset Allocation, VMF’s Security Selection, and Alpha Tier.
This note is the map.
Start with the setup
The best place to begin is The Setup for a Dovish Shock.
This excerpt came from June’s issue of VMF’s Strategic Asset Allocation, where we started with the market’s reaction to stronger labor data. Payrolls surprised to the upside, prior months were revised higher, and wage pressure remained relatively contained. In an older market regime, that would probably have been received as a constructive mix: resilient employment without a clear wage spiral.
Instead, markets sold off.
Yields rose. Equities weakened. Precious metals came under pressure. Bitcoin fell. Investors treated stronger growth as an inflation threat and immediately moved toward a more hawkish Fed interpretation.
That reaction told us something important. The market was still using the inflation playbook of the last cycle. Strong data was not being read as economic resilience; it was being read as a policy threat.
Our question was whether that interpretation was too crude.
Productivity matters. If output per hour is improving, the economy can generate more real growth without the same inflationary pressure. Wages alone do not determine the inflation problem... wages relative to productivity do. If compensation rises but productivity rises with it, unit labor costs can remain better behaved than the market fears.
That is why the Dovish Shock thesis is not a fantasy about weak growth forcing the Fed to rescue markets. It is a more interesting possibility: stronger growth may be less inflationary than investors assume.
That distinction shaped the rest of the month.
The free excerpt introduced the framework. The paid issue went further, connecting the productivity evidence, the market’s policy reflex, the Fed’s likely reaction function, and the asset classes most exposed if the hawkish scare begins to fade.
Then follow the liquidity trail into crypto
The second stop is The Invisible AI Rails.
The Invisible AI Rails
Crypto has spent the past few months doing what it does best when confidence breaks: punishing believers, rewarding cynics, and making every long-term thesis look foolish.
At first glance, crypto did not look like a beneficiary of anything in June. It looked wounded. Bitcoin had sold off sharply. The broader crypto universe had weakened. Flows were poor, technical damage was real, and the asset class was being treated exactly as many skeptics have always described it: speculative liquidity beta.
We did not dismiss that bear case. In fact, the weakness itself was part of the point.
When markets become nervous, crypto is easy to sell. It is liquid, volatile, widely held by speculative capital, and extremely sensitive to liquidity expectations. If investors suddenly believe the Fed may be more hawkish, crypto often gets hit first and hardest.
But that is not the whole story.
The question we asked was whether investors were selling crypto because the long-term thesis had deteriorated, or simply because the asset class was functioning as a pressure valve for tighter liquidity fears.
That distinction matters because the irony may be that investors are selling one of the least visible AI trades to fund the most visible one.
The first AI trade was about the physical buildout: chips, memory, data centers, power, and infrastructure. But an agentic economy will also need financial rails. It will need wallets, stablecoins, programmable payments, settlement layers, verification, identity, tokenized ownership, and machine-readable economic infrastructure.
If software agents are going to transact, pay, verify, settle, authenticate, and coordinate economic activity, then the digital-financial stack becomes more important, not less.
That does not make every token valuable. It does not rescue every bad crypto project. It does not eliminate volatility, regulatory risk, or speculative excess. But it does suggest that parts of the crypto stack may belong in the AI infrastructure conversation in a way the market still does not fully appreciate.
That was the point of the second excerpt.
Crypto was being sold as liquidity beta. We asked whether parts of it may also be invisible AI infrastructure.
Paid subscribers received the full bear case, the technical context, the portfolio implications, and the decision rules for what would make us more constructive or more cautious.
The shock that mattered may not have been the one investors feared
The third stop is The Hike That May Never Come.
This excerpt came after the macro setup became even more interesting.
Oil had started falling after the preliminary deal with Iran, easing one of the most visible inflation pressures in the market. At the same time, investors were still focused on the possibility that the Fed could be pushed toward a more hawkish path.
That combination was important.
A major inflation input was cooling just as markets had become increasingly worried about rate hikes. If oil continued to fall, if inflation data softened, and if productivity kept improving, then the market’s hawkish interpretation could become vulnerable. The surprise might not have to be an immediate rate cut. It might simply be the disappearance of a hike investors had started to fear.
That is why the title mattered.
The hike that may never come can be just as important as a cut if markets have already priced too much tightening.
This is where June’s work moved from macro into opportunity.
If the market is positioned for the wrong shock, the assets most punished by the hawkish scare deserve attention. That includes precious metals, miners, and other parts of the Alternatives bucket that had been under pressure as real yields, the dollar, and liquidity fears moved against them.
Gold is the monetary anchor of that world.
Silver is the accelerator.
And when silver begins to work, the right miner can offer far more torque than the metal itself.
That is where June’s paid Security Selection issue became especially important. We examined a silver miner that we believe offers one of the most compelling risk/reward setups in the precious-metals universe today. It is not the safest corner of the market... silver miners never are. They are volatile, operationally complex, and highly sensitive to the metal itself. That is exactly why they can become so powerful when the cycle turns.
Our filter was strict. We wanted real producing assets, not an exploration dream. We wanted meaningful silver exposure, enough scale and liquidity to matter, a balance sheet that does not force bad decisions during normal commodity volatility, and a technical setup already showing relative strength.
The public excerpt explained the macro door opening.
Paid subscribers received the company, the thesis, the valuation context, the technical setup, the risks, and the portfolio sizing.
Finally, widen the lens to trust
The final stop is The Only Assets That Owe You Nothing.
The Only Assets That Owe You Nothing
The most important hypothesis we are testing right now is also one of the most consequential for portfolios: the market may be preparing for the wrong monetary shock.
This excerpt came from June’s Alpha Tier issue, where we stepped back from the immediate macro debate and asked a more fundamental question:
Where should investors place their trust?
Every portfolio is built on promises. Cash depends on the currency preserving enough purchasing power. Bonds depend on issuers repaying us in money that still holds value. Equities require trust in managers, boards, founders, controlling shareholders, incentives, and capital allocation.
Gold and Bitcoin ask something different.
Gold has no management team, no board, no quarterly earnings call, and no promise to pay. Its monetary relevance rests on physical scarcity, durability, history, and the willingness of households, institutions, and central banks to hold an asset that is not another party’s liability.
Bitcoin is younger, more volatile, and more liquidity-sensitive, but it is also a portable, verifiable monetary network with digital scarcity enforced by code and distributed consensus.
The usual debate tries to turn them into rivals. Gold people mock Bitcoin as speculative code. Bitcoin people dismiss gold as an analogue relic.
We think that is the wrong argument.
Portfolio construction is not a search for one monetary religion. It is the combination of assets that can survive and benefit from different regimes.
That is why we have argued from the beginning of VMF Research that both Gold and Bitcoin deserve a role in sophisticated portfolios. They solve different trust problems. They respond to overlapping but not identical drivers. And in a world of fiscal dominance, unstable bond diversification, and recurring monetary stress, assets outside the traditional stock-and-bond framework become more important.
This was the deeper layer of the June Dovish Shock work.
If the market has over-discounted hawkish policy, alternatives can recover. But the reason we own alternatives is bigger than one Fed repricing. The traditional 60/40 portfolio is not dead, but it is incomplete. A world of higher debt, more fiscal intervention, geopolitical fragmentation, and periodic inflation stress requires a broader architecture.
Alpha Tier’s job was not simply to say “buy more gold” or “buy more bitcoin.” The question was more disciplined: does the Model Portfolio already carry enough exposure, is that exposure balanced correctly between resilience and torque, and should the next unit of capital go into physical monetary assets, higher-beta expressions, or short-duration liquidity?
Sometimes preparation justifies action.
Sometimes it justifies patience.
Paid subscribers received the full portfolio decision.
The June reading order
Read June in this order:
1. The Setup for a Dovish Shock
The market may be interpreting stronger growth through the wrong inflation framework.
2. The Invisible AI Rails
Crypto is being sold as liquidity beta, but parts of the stack may become critical infrastructure for the agentic economy.
3. The Hike That May Never Come
The market may have priced too much hawkishness just as oil, productivity, and inflation data could move the other way.
4. The Only Assets That Owe You Nothing
Gold and Bitcoin solve different trust problems inside a portfolio that can no longer rely only on stocks and bonds.
That was June inside VMF Research.
A live hypothesis.
A sequence of tests.
And a portfolio question.
The hypothesis was that the market may be vulnerable to a Dovish Shock. The tests moved through productivity, oil, the Fed, crypto, precious metals, silver, miners, Gold, Bitcoin, and the broader architecture of trust.
Free readers can follow that trail through the public excerpts.
Paid subscribers received the implementation behind it: the full asset-allocation framework, the crypto bear and bull case, the Alternatives stress test, the silver-miner recommendation, the valuation and risk work, the technical confirmation levels, the Alpha Tier model portfolio decision, and the monitoring framework we will use from here.
That is what we are trying to build at VMF Research.
Not a collection of market opinions, but a research process that connects macro regime, asset allocation, security selection, and portfolio construction.
In June, the market was preparing for the wrong shock.
We started preparing for a different one.
A quick note on accountability.
We don’t publish these theses to be right on paper. We publish them to express edge in the real economy. Our Leaderboard shows the exact scorecard since inception, tracking every position, our compounding outperformance against the market, and the triple-digit winners we’ve captured along the way.
You can view the exact numbers on our Leaderboard.
Important Disclosure
This article contains general investment research and market commentary produced by Vasco Marques de Freitas, CFA, CMT, Founder and CEO of VMF Research, Lda. It is provided for informational purposes only and does not constitute personalised investment advice, portfolio management, or a solicitation to buy, sell, subscribe for, or hold any financial instrument, security, crypto asset, commodity exposure, fund, ETF, ETP or other investment product.
The article summarises themes and research published by VMF Research during June 2026 across VMF’s Strategic Asset Allocation, VMF’s Security Selection and Alpha Tier. References to securities, asset classes, model portfolios, paid research or public Substack excerpts are made to explain VMF Research’s research process and should not be treated as a complete investment thesis or as a substitute for the full paid publications.
The views expressed are stated as of the date of publication and may change without notice. Forward-looking statements, scenarios and hypotheses, including the discussion of a possible “Dovish Shock”, are inherently uncertain and may not materialise. Past performance is not indicative of future results. All investments involve risk, including the possible loss of capital. Cryptoassets, precious metals, mining equities and other alternative assets can be highly volatile.
VMF Research’s Model Portfolios are illustrative research portfolios. They do not represent client assets, personalised mandates or transactions executed on behalf of subscribers. Each reader remains responsible for assessing whether any investment is appropriate in light of their own objectives, financial circumstances, risk tolerance, liquidity needs, tax position and investment horizon.
Disclosure of interests: legal entities controlled by the author hold long positions in Coinbase Global, Inc. and in a listed Bitcoin ETP. VMF Research Model Portfolios may hold positions in securities, funds, crypto asset exposures, precious-metals instruments or other assets discussed or referenced in this article or in the paid publications mentioned above. These interests may create potential conflicts and should be considered when evaluating the analysis.
Readers should conduct their own due diligence and, where appropriate, consult an authorised financial intermediary or other qualified professional before making any investment decision.