Is Worry Dead? Nearly All Assets Are Rising Now | Lance Roberts

Summary

Market Outlook: The podcast discusses the unusual simultaneous rise in multiple asset classes, indicating significant speculative activity in the markets.
Investment Strategies: Lance Roberts highlights the importance of managing risk and taking profits in overbought sectors, while maintaining a bullish stance on equities.
Company Highlights: Oracle's significant stock price increase is attributed to its confirmation of AI-related capital expenditures, aligning with Nvidia's projections, suggesting a strong AI infrastructure buildout.
Economic Indicators: The discussion covers the impact of inflation data on bond yields, with a focus on the significant role of housing costs in the Consumer Price Index (CPI).
Market Sentiment: Despite concerns about potential corrections, the overall sentiment is optimistic, with expectations of continued market strength and a focus on strategic asset allocation.
Investment Opportunities: The podcast emphasizes the importance of thematic portfolios, such as AI and all-weather portfolios, which have shown strong performance in recent months.
Risk Management: Lance advises on the importance of rebalancing portfolios and managing exposure to mitigate risks associated with market volatility and overbought conditions.
Long-term Perspective: The conversation underscores the need for a long-term investment strategy, focusing on consistent returns and capital preservation amidst market fluctuations.

Transcript

And the and the accumulator model, which is for people just starting out investing, it's just a just a it's just a a basket of some very basic, you know, S&P index, NASDAQ, small cap, midcap, international. That one's up six and a half% in 15 days. That should not be happening, right? All these asset classes should not be running together at the same time. You should have some some divergences, but that's just how much speculative activity you've got going on the markets right now. Welcome to Thoughtful Money. I'm Fal Money founder and your host, Adam Tagert, welcoming you back at the end of the week for another weekly market recap featuring my very good friend, the gobsmacked portfolio manager, Lance Roberts. Lance, how you doing? Why go? That's a good one. Because there is so many things going on that I can't wrap my brain around, Lance. Um, I got a ton of them here. This is going to be a real interesting list to get through if we can get through the whole thing this week. We'll go we'll go we'll go fast. I'll keep my answers short. Okay. Well, good luck. Um, first just to nod, we are recording this uh on 911. Um, an event that gobsmacked the country and the world I think that we still are recovering from. It was one of those events in history that literally just changed the course of history. Um, uh, I got a lot of friends, uh, who, you know, were firsthand witnesses to it. I'm sure you probably do, L do too, Lance. Friends, I lost friends in that in that. Yeah. Um, and I'm sure enough the financial community watching here that we have a lot of folks that have done the same as well. So anyways, just um taking a moment to remember what went on then and the uh you know, do you do you remember do you remember what you were doing at the moment the plane hit the tower? Uh I hate to say this, I was actually asleep. Um I woke up because I was on the West Coast. Yeah. I woke up and um we were we were um just about to become parents for the first time and my wife had gotten up and had just left and we were staying at her parents and I woke up and I was kind of groggy and her my mother-in-law was just walking around saying they're gone they're gone and I didn't know what she was talking about and then she finally came out of the buildings or what buildings right and then of course got to see the aftermath of this and um went into work I was working for Yahoo Finance at the And we had a a group of people that that were on a plane going to Manhattan uh for meetings that day uh that got turned around. Unfortunately, they were safe, but they were going to meet with Caner Fitzgerald, which was one of the floors that was taken out by the plane. Yeah. Which is actually I had two friends that worked for Cantor at the time that didn't make it out of the building. Yeah. So, um but but it's interesting, you know, there's there's these events in history that happen where you can remember exactly what's going on. I was we were in a a high-rise building uh here in Houston and we were on the 11th floor of this firm I was working for at the time and my my and one of my co-workers had this little television in his office and this was back in the day they had rabbit ears and stuff so just let you know how long it's been a little 9 in black and white television and I walked into his office because you know the market had just opened right things are just getting off the the ground in the morning and I walk into his office and you know there's all of a sudden the news shifts over and there's this building you know kind of with smoke coming out of it and I'm and I'm looking at at you know my coworker and going how does a plane hit a building they have GPS and navigation and all this stuff you know how does a plane fly into a building and you know that how can that possibly even happen and you know to your point kind of gossmacked at just you know how this could this could occur and then right then was the second plane building and you know then it was kind of all sunk in that you what was going on and but yeah I mean there's you know there's a few things in life you can remember very spe very very vividly you know that occur and and you know 911 was definitely one of those one of them yeah um my my co my business school roommate had moved to New York at that time and was for some reason was home but his his office had a view of the world trade center or his home had a view of the world trade center and um like you Lance I just remember him telling me like he couldn't believe his eyes you know when He saw the first plane but again there you're still thinking accident and then he saw the second plane on its way and again the brain just rebelling like wait a minute this just can't be happening this way right so anyway sadly there were a few things like that that we may talk about today so um but anyways um our our our deepest memories and condolences for those who lost loved ones on 911 um all right so that's a very sad anniversary just real quick want to get out happy anniversary um I My wife and I celebrated our 25th anniversary last night. Uh it was a great time. We went to a really nice dinner at a kind of a high-end farmhouse and um it was kind of fun. We had a great time, but was funny is walking in uh this gentleman was just sort of staring at us and we were kind of wondering something on my shirt or whatever and he goes, "Hey, are you are you Adam Tagert?" So it was it was so funny that that we got recognized from this program on our on our anniversary. and Joe from Chicago, if you're watching, it was a pleasure to meet you and your wife last night. And my wife actually, she hit a home run. She got me an absolute great uh anniversary gift from me. Um, which Do you know what a TheraGun is, Lance? I don't. Um, it's basically like a jackhammer with a rubber knob on it. This is this actually what it looks like. Um, and it's for basically pounding out like your aches and pains. It's it's they call it a percussive massager, but it's really like for sports injuries or sports recovery. So, it gets in there and it like breaks up scar tissue and uh uh you know gets tight ligaments to loosen up and things like that. So, I put this thing on last night and it was uh it was it was kind of like a pleasant back alley beating if you can imagine that. But but my body which is you know it's it's very stiff just by its nature. But of course I've been leaning into this with a strength training program and stuff like that. So, I've got a lot of of aches and pains and tight muscles and stuff like that, and this thing was just the best ever. So, if you're an athlete and you've ever been dreaming about uh having something like that, I can tell you it is even better than I hoped it would be. That's awesome. Yeah, you should try it sometime, my friend. Um All right. Um well look Lance um uh so on the theme of gobsmacked um uh we've seen some more indicators over the past week that you know kind of like some of the the price action we saw during the dot bubble um and in and so there was a there was a business called I think QMM this is two days ago they announced that they were going to basically start like a crypto treasury right that that they we're going to get some Ethereum and Salana, maybe a little Bitcoin, whatever. And you know, that's kind of the thing to do, right? And the small little stock went up by like I think 2,000% at one point during the day, right? Um, so just I mean, and of course, they're not creating any new value. They're just saying, "Oh, we're going to, you know, put some of these assets in our treasury." But it it just sort of like back in the old days when you put.com at the end of your your brand, uh, you know, this thing shot the moon. Uh it's come down a lot since then, but again, you know, this is this is that kind of bubbleicious activity. But then, Lance, Oracle, right? Yeah. You had a what a a $650 billion company shoot up by another 40% uh because of guidance it gave. And you know, they're always giving you their rosiest hopes in in in those earnings calls with their forward guidance. And and the stock had jumped, I think, like 30 plus% in the a few minutes after the guidance was released. So meaning totally unvetted by the analyst community. That just seems I mean again I was gobsmacked when I saw that. So I'm curious what are you thinking? Well first of all I didn't mind it because uh in the new Simplevisor portfolios that we just launched we owned Oracle and two of them our AI model and our crypto model. So um yeah so it was great. I actually went in right after the open yesterday and trimmed them back to weight and took some profits in it. Um but you know the the reason that you know the market really liked that news is because when Nvidia reported their news they put these projections out for data center builds and everybody was like oh nobody's going to build that many data centers and blah blah blah and uh there's a lot of questions around that and of course the the commentary over the last you know kind of couple of weeks now has been oh a the AI trade's dead blah blah blah well what Oracle's announcement did was basically confirm what Nvidia already told us. And so now you've got two major companies confirming the capex buildout on AI that's coming. And that just really kind of reset the table on revenue expectations. So that's why you saw that big jump yesterday. Okay. And I could see that resetting revenue expectations on Nvidia. Um hey, okay, all this capex is going to get spent. Who's going to benefit from that? But um you know Oracle's on the infrastructure side. It's great to have chips, but I got to have the infrastructure. You know there there's and this is when you're thinking about AI. This is why we own pipeline companies as well. You got to have you got to have energy. You got to have power, right? And so they can't get power off the grid. So they've got to go behind the meter and attach the data center to a natural gas pipeline. So that's why we own pipelines. Um you got to it's great to have chips, but you got to have all the connectivity, the you know the the software programming, etc. to make AI work. So, Oracle plays in that space. Arista Networks, Broadcom, you know, there's there's a lot of other companies that when you think down the chain of what you need to make AI actually function, there's a lot of companies that will benefit from that. So, do we see a similar reaction amongst a lot of those other names as well? Are they 30 30 something% in the past couple? Well, not 30%, but Oracle's kind of been a lagger to the group. you know, it's it's kind of been sitting over there on the sidelines, but I mean, it's done well, but it hasn't done it hasn't been in Nvidia, right? Um, so a lot of that was just is like, okay, there's the new and look, yesterday's move was very exaggerated. Um, so again, that's going to work itself off. It's going to return back to some level. It's extremely overbought right now. So, again, that's why I took profits in it yesterday because there was no way it was going to sustain that move. Um, and again, it's down like five, you know, 4% today. So, it's just kind of giving back up some of that excitement. But, you know, you've seen a lot of, you know, look, Arista Networks is up, you know, 60 70 80% from April lows. Um, you know, uh, Broadcom's just had an awesome run here over the last, you know, few weeks in particular. And again, a lot of this is the speculative nature of the market. Um, every asset class is going gang busters right now, which is unusual, but it shows you just how bullish the market is. There's so much money chasing. I mean, bonds are doing great. Gold's doing great. Gold miners are doing great. Those are defensive names. Those shouldn't be doing as well when the market's doing well, but stocks are doing great. Small cap, midcap is doing great. There's virtually basically if you can throw your money somewhere in the market, it's doing very well. I was just talking about this morning as a good example about this. I'll let me share my Can you give me the screen real quick? You got it. Yeah. So, I was just talking about this morning. We're doing our uh real investment show this morning. I was showing these uh new portfolios that we've launched on the on Simplevisor. And so if you take a so these thematic portfolios were all launched on August the 1st. This is September the 11th. This is a month and a half. And the AI portfolio is up almost 7%. The all weather portfolio which owns gold, gold miners, silver, platinum, you know, some very conservative stocks that own some fixed income. It's based on the permanent portfolio model. So it's a it's a more conservative portfolio allocation. It is it's almost kind of the anti- AI portfolio. Yeah, exactly. And it's up for you know this this is the Adam Tagert bunker portfolio. So if you listen to Adam Tagert, this is the this is the the portfolio you want. It's up five it's almost up 5% here, right? Growth a pure growth portfolio is up five and three quarters and small cap midcap's up 10 in a month and a half. It's up 10%. And the and the accumulator model, which is for people just starting out investing, it's just a just a it's just a a basket of some very basic, you know, S&P, index, NASDAQ, small cap, midcap, international. That one's up six and a half% in 15 days. That should not be happening, right? All these asset classes should not be running together at the same time. You should have some some divergences, but that's just how much speculative activity you've got going on the markets right now. And again, that's not a bad thing, but it just goes to kind of show you where where the markets are trading right now. Um, all right, let's dig into that that last point. Um, that's not a bad thing. Um, I don't know. Let me just ask you this, though. I mean, we we, as Darius Dale, you know, colorfully says, uh, the party gets at its uh, ragingist right before the cops arrive, right? Um, is this the sign of a party getting out of control where just everything gets bought and yeah, it's it's super fun in the moment when you're in it, but are there consequences to be paid for this or is this is there a good argument to be made that hey, this is the time to be strong and long? Well, you should be strong and long right now. Um, for sure. And and will there be a payback for this at some point? Sure. Um, you know, markets are very getting very overbought. They're very extended. um you're going to have a 3 to 5% correction at some point, but again that could be this month, it could be November. Um you typically get a correction in the first week of December because you have all the mutual funds distribute their annual gains and distribution. So you typically get a correction there. Um so yeah, you're going to get a pullback here at some point and that'll give you a good opportunity to put some more capital to work, but you should not be bearish on the markets um at at all. There's no reason right now to be bearish on the market in terms of terms of thinking that we're about to go into like the next major downturn in the markets. Um, you know, it's it's and I'm trying to bring up a graphic for you just real quick. Yeah, do because because right before we turn the camera on, you were starting to tell me this off camera, so I want to hear. Right. So So again, and and we publish this. So, if you follow me on Substack Roberts or you go to realinvestmentadvice.com and follow me there, every week we publish our weekly bull bear report, which I know Adam also publishes on his uh on his uh Substack as well. Um, but in that uh newsletter is a very important graphic and I publish this. I update it every week and I publish it. Now, let me I have to explain this a little bit. It's a little bit complicated, so just bear with me for a second, but you'll get the gist of this. But this is what we call our risk range report. And what this measures is it measures sectors and markets. So this covers all the basic sectors of the S&P 500, uh, dividend stocks, equal weighted stocks, small cap, midcap, international, emerging markets, gold, dollar, gold miners, and bonds. And what it looks for, it looks for each individual sector and how does it normally trade in a given month. So just say for instance that basic materials on average historically speaking going back through history on average gains or loses one and a half% in a month. So it kind of looks at its volatility and then it looks at how the how the how that sector is performing since the end of the since the end of last month. How is it performing? And so if it starts to trade outside of its normal volatility range, then it's overbought and you're likely going to have a correction. If you're trading below that long-term range or outside of that normal risk range, it tells you there's probably an opportunity to buy that position. In other words, it's oversold. But but where I really want you to focus is on these last three columns. So the the the sec this first and second column are the deviations from the short-term weekly moving average. So this looks at two weekly moving averages, a third a 13week moving average and a 34-week moving average. So this is very slow to move. This does not move quickly. So this is not for traders. This is for asset allocators. Um so what you're looking for is when markets deviate too far from their their longerterm moving averages. Moving averages are like gravity. So if I get too far from that moving average eventually gravity is going to pull that price of that stock back to that moving average or below it in time. Now it doesn't again these are weekly so it doesn't mean tomorrow but at some point you're going to have a correction back that moving average. So when these deviations like for instance communications are trading 12% above their long-term average. Whenever you're above 10% above your long-term moving average, that's kind of a warning to take profits and rebalance some of your risk. Um, you know, technology stocks are 12%. Um, you know, healthc care is 10% uh, sorry, uh, discretionary stocks are are trading 10% above the moving averages. So, that's a great thing to look at and say, okay, I need to go in and reduce that risk to the portfolio. And that doesn't mean sell everything. It just means just rebalance it back to target just like I did with Oracle in the crypto and the AI model. It has a 5% waiting in both those portfolios. Excuse me. That move took it to six and a half. So I trimmed it back to five. Didn't sell it. Still own it. Just took some profits. Um you know, gold miners right now are 33% above their sorry 36% above their long-term average. So again, just these are the warnings that come from this. out. So, what I want you to pay attention to though is this last column. This last column is the crossover of those two moving averages. So, when the short-term moving average crosses above the long-term, that's a bullish crossover. When it crosses below that, that's a bearish crossover. And so those are those are kind of a signal for the markets or for those sectors. At the beginning of or sorry at the end of 2021 we had about 14 of these sectors being bearish. When you start getting numerous of these sectors having bearish crossovers that's a good indication that markets are about to go through a corrective phase. And of course 2022 we had the 20% correction. Last year we had a few of these being a bearish crossovers. We had about 10. And so there was some worry that this year that markets were going to struggle a bit have a bit of volatility which we did have. But since the April lows, this market has rallied so strongly that we've now reverted all those bearish crossovers except for three back into bullish ones. The point about that is is that when you have numerous markets on bullish crossovers, it's very hard to have a big correction in the markets. So, we won't have a 20 or 30 30% correction in the markets unless some event shows up like a credit event or some type of economic shutdown, whatever it is. It's got to be pretty substantial because right now the bullish biases behind the markets and all those moving averages are now providing lifting support for the market. So we can have 5 to 10% corrections like a correction back to the 200 day moving average right now would be about 9% or so. So a 5 to 10% correction would be completely normal in this market but it's not going to devolve into a much bigger correction until you start triggering more bearish crossovers in the market. And that's why this table's so very important when it comes to allocators because what this table tells you right now is that you need to be primarily allocated to equities and holding that exposure for right now and just managing the risk. It doesn't mean just blindly hold it. Manage your risk, but you know take profits when things are really overbought, really extended from from, you know, kind of long-term means. When they're very oversold, buy them back, add them back to the portfolio. You know, increase your exposure. But being really negative on the markets is going to be a loser bet here for a while. Okay. Um might be a poor analogy, but but this is almost like a a CAT scan of the market. Um which says, hey, you know, barring this guy gets in an accident. Um you know, he's actually pretty healthy right now. um versus if that thing was riddled with with bearish reds, you'd be saying, "Hey, look, there's, you know, there's something internally metabolically that's not unwell about this market." Yeah. Well, yeah. And think about it this way. Um if you're really So, if you're really healthy, right, and you come down then just say you come down with the flu, right? You probably survive the flu, right? And so you go to the store, you get a flu shot, and you you you're sick for a couple days, you feel better, but your body fights it and you're okay. That's kind of where the market is right now. It could handle a a flu at the moment and and be okay. But if you know you're really sick, you've got a lot of morbidity issues and then you get the flu, it's a potentially different outcome. Exactly. That's exactly the analogy I was thinking. Yeah. Yeah. And and that's and that's really kind of what we've got going on here is this market's super healthy right now. Um there's a lot there's lots of little pockets to be concerned about. I'm not saying you shouldn't be concerned about the pockets and that's why why it's so important to manage risk. you know, position size in your portfolio, learn to take profits, you know, learn to to buy things when they're oversold, those type of things. But, you know, being hugely negative and being primarily in cash, that's going to really that'll hurt you more right now than being allocated to the markets. Um, so I just want to pair credit spreads with this, Lance. And yeah, we can have the debate that maybe credit spreads aren't as accurate an indicator as they were in the past, but but from what they're telling us right now, they're telling us there's nothing to systemically to worry about the market systemically right now because they're so tight. Yeah. And I wouldn't say that, you know, they're not as good of an indicator as they once were because I don't think that's true, right? Um, credit is very sensitive to changes in economic dynamics. And again, is know this is and this is the problem with a lot of the narrative that's out there about, you know, bonds and stuff. It's like, oh, it's the debt and the deficit. That has nothing to do with bonds. Um, it's about really economic growth, inflation, those type of things. That's what drives yields. And that's why, you know, yields have been dropping very sharply sharp sharply lately. Um this morning we cracked 4% on the tenure yield on the back of this latest inflation data because every all the data we're getting these revision these earn these employment revisions we had on Tuesday 911,000 fewer jobs than expected the PPI data yesterday was really weak. Uh the the data today from CPI came in weaker than expected. So everything is suggesting that the economy is slowing down much more quickly. Um and you know take a look at what's going on with multif family in particular. There's there's a lot of demand drop for multif family housing and that is also symbolic of kind of what's happening with the underlying economy. So that supply demand imbalance is really starting to show up here and credit spreads aren't yet reflecting that and you know but it's going to come at some point credit spreads are going to start to to to widen um particularly between junk bonds and say treasury yields. I'm sorry. Go ahead. I'm just Yeah, I'm just saying that that's one of the easiest predictions ever only because there's no daylight between them right now. They've got nowhere to go but wider. Yeah. But yeah, but in particular junk bonds importantly will will reflect concerns over economic weakness because it is a proxy for, you know, kind of a performance chase, right? You know, high yield is basically a proxy for the stock market. So if the stock market starts to reflect problems, it's going to show up in high yield. We'll see those spreads start to blow out. But again, they're not showing anything right now. And that is which was my point. You pair that with your cat scan there. Yeah, exactly. I mean there, you know, there is no and again, you know, there's that's also a reason from a from the contrarian investor part of me, which I am a contrarian by nature, is that when everybody's betting on a bull market, that's a time to be a little bit more cautious. And again, we're, you know, we're taking profits, reducing risk, rebalancing. You know, we went into, you know, the all weather portfolio. We trimmed back on our gold miners a bit because they just had just this massive run here and they're very, very overbought. So, again, take a little bit of profit there. Um, you know, and just and we're holding that cash and then when things pull back, we'll certainly, you know, reallocate that money back to that sector. So, you know, but that's just that's just part of navigating the market. But when everybody is this bowled up on everything and again you try to tell somebody oh you know you shouldn't you know don't sell Oracle here it's going to keep moving up right you know you try to tell somebody take profits in Oracle or gold miners or gold or anything else they're like oh that's that's that's hogwash that's you know that's that's that's lielist don't say that you know that's but you know that's just because we're so optimistic about everything that that's also a risk to the market. Yeah. Well, and that was kind of my question earlier, which is, you know, are you seeing the signs here that the party has gone into just, you know, full-blown, you know, throw devil throw throw care of the wind mode and uh and it's time for a guy like you to be like, hey, yeah, I'm not selling out of all my positions here, but I'm I'm going to start capturing some of these gains because I don't think this can go on forever. Yeah. No, it's you know, but you know, and again, yes, the answer to that question is yes. We just had that conversation this morning is that, you know, we've got some positions in our portfolio that are up, you know, 70, 80, 90, 120. We got one position up 185%. So, you know, there's certainly some reasons to go in there and start harvesting some of these profits and we're going to do that. Timing of that is a little bit of what's coming is how we kind of time that out over the course of the next month or two. Um there are a couple of things coming up that I think are worth being aware of which is you're going to have end of the quarter rebalancing uh at the end of this month. And if you take a look at you know kind of the way things have performed lately. So for instance, if I run a small cap midcap portfolio, uh you know, which we have a model of that. If I run that kind of a model, there's stocks in that model that have risen 70% in a couple of months. That is put a lot of these managers overweight in those positions. So they're going to have to come in and sell some of those and bring those back to target weights and then they'll rebalance with the rest of the portfolio. So there's a risk as and again that's the same thing with a lot of large cap stocks, midcap, small cap, same thing with gold miners, same thing with you know basically any type of fund right now because they've all run very similarly is that the risk into the end of the month is that you're going to get some selling pressure to rebalance portfolios back to target weights as we had into October for for quarter three. The other thing the over the next two weeks is that we lose stock buybacks starting next week. So the window closes for stock buybacks next week. That's going to take another buyer out of the market through the end of October before those come back. So there's a couple of things at least worth kind of looking at over the next four to eight weeks of you know just potential short-term volatility risk where you know you get a bit of a pullback. Again not saying the markets are going to crash 20 or 30% but a 5% correction would be completely healthy. It'd be normal. could be as much as 10% back to the 200 day moving average. That'd be completely normal. But because we haven't had any volatility, because we haven't had any pullbacks lately, a 5% correction is going to feel like a 20. Right. Right. We'll be on this show and it'll be talking about, man, you know, it's like this market's just falling all apart, right? And you know, the AI trade's dead and you know, we'll be down five, six%. But that's it's going to feel that way and it's going to feel like oh my gosh, you know, the bull market's over. But that's probably not going to be the case because we at the end of the hit hit the end of this year, November, December. Hedge funds, mutual funds, pension funds, professional managers, they're all underweight equities, and they're also underperforming the major markets. So, there's likely going to be a big push in the year end to try to get performance and allocations up before that year- end reporting. All right. So, let me ask you this then. So, I think we checked in mid year and I think at that point you guys hadn't raised your price targets, your price target for the S&P for the end of the year, right? Um, even though the market had rallied really hard from the April lows because if I remember correctly, you said, you know, I don't think volatility is done yet. I think it's going to continue to be a volatile second half of the year. Um have you are you have you raised are you thinking of raising your price target uh towards year end based on what you just said there? No. Um you know because because again you know I think it's it's very kind of possible that by year end we may be a little bit higher than we are right now but and I look I could be entirely wrong right? You know this could be I mean that the forecasting business you always have that risk right now. Exactly. Right. So, you know, but I said at the beginning of this year, I said, "Hey, you know, expect a lot more volatility, lower returns." And, you know, so far we've had lower returns than we've had the last two years. We've definitely had a lot more volatility this year than we've had the last couple years. Um, but, you know, yeah, I think that, you know, potentially between now and year end, we get another little bit of a correction and then we kind of wind up about where we are now, which is not too far off of our target. So, you know, you know, we're you know, the where the market is a little bit higher than our target right now, but again, it's it's kind of irrelevant. you know, if I'm just I'm trying to produce a 6% annual rate of return over the long term. That's my goal. Um, and so, you know, you know, with the market up 10, it's up 1011 right now for the year. We get a pullback and then we rally back up. Maybe we wind this year up at, you know, 12 13% for the year. We'll see. All right. Let me ask you, uh, what might be a tough question, but can ask it anyways. Um, so you wrote a very important piece at the beginning of the year. Yep. Right. titled Curb Your Enthusiasm. Uh folks are very enthusiastic now. Um if we end up over 10%. To be honest, that's a year to be enthusiastic about. Um so are you would would you change the tune now to say, "Hey, you know, maybe you should start maybe it's okay to be somewhat enthusiastic." Well, you know, again, the purpose of that article at the beginning of the year was just saying, hey, look, ex because we've had two years of 20% returns in a row. It's unlikely that you'll have a third. And it doesn't mean it can't happen, but I said, you know, we're probably gonna have more volatility this year, which, you know, we had a 20% draw down just a couple of months ago. Everybody's forgotten about that. It's been a much more volatile year so far. Totally agree. Yep. And but yeah, nobody remembers that 20% draw down. Um it's like, ah, you know, nothing happened. I mean it felt like the world was ending to them if we went back you know four months ancient history now. Exactly. That's that's that's human psychology. But yeah no I look I think you should be enthus I think you should be optimistic about the markets. Markets are you know the underpinnings for the markets are okay. There's certainly some pockets of risk certainly some pockets of worry that I think you need to be paying attention to. But I think you, you know, as long as you're just managing your risk and managing your exposure, just not being, you know, overly optimistic and overly bullish, I think you'll be okay. Um, and again, I think we're going to see another bout of volatility for the end of the year. Volatility is very compressed right now. Uh, credit spreads are compressed, volatility is compressed. Um, you know, you you take a look, we got a kind of a a break between the VIX and the VIX, which typically leads to an uptick in volatility. So, I think you certainly have the catalyst in place for an uptick in volatility. Again, that would be coincident with a five to 10% correction somewhere. Um, and again, and again, we get to the end of the year and you look back and it's like, hey, the market was fine, but there was a whole bunch of bumps along the way. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Um, well, let's see. Let's move on here. Um, you started talking about the the latest inflation data, so um I that's next on my list here. So, um, maybe, you know, continuing a little bit with with Gobsmacked, um, you know, there's a lot of people out there who I think I've told you many times, uh, on this channel, Lance, that, um, because I interview so many people, I can see the topics where there's lots of consensus on and lots of division. And the one for the past year that's been by far the most divided has been what's going to happen with inflation, right? And um you know a lot of people uh certainly in the financial media um who have said look tariffs are tax they're inflationary we're going to have all sorts of you know secularly high inflation going forward. And the more data we get I mean the final answer isn't in yet but the more data we get is that we are not seeing a lot of price inflation being pushed through by the tariffs. Um and you already mentioned most of the data points I was going to mention. Um I actually haven't had a chance to see yet today uh the new CPI data, but it sounds like you said it came in lower than expected. Yeah. Uh expectations were.3 came in at 0.2. The year-over-year inflation rate dropped from point uh 2.9 to 2.7. Okay. So, all right. But, you know, but you know, again, I just, you know, this it's a great point that you bring up and I just wanted to point out that not everybody in the media agreed with that. There was this guy that wrote this article in November of 22nd of 2024 talking about how tariffs are likely the risk to to inflation from tariffs are likely overstated and you know we laid out all the data for that back then. So you know while while all the media has been running around pointing to oh my gosh you know tariffs can cause inflation to sore uh there's really no historical evidence that ever occurs. So again you know the the how things have actually played out was exactly kind of what we've been saying would be the case over the last year. All right. Yeah. Well, hey, if you hadn't taken the victory lap yourself, I was going to let you take I was I was going to hand you the baton to do it. Thank you. Um, no, you you you've been very consistent on that. I remember several months ago you did a detailed analysis of the Trump 1.0 administration's tariff policies and how those didn't result in inflation. And and look, you know, the final chapter isn't written yet, but um it does seem like, you know, what you have been predicting is is unfolding. And another question I've been asking people a lot, Lance, is um okay, uh you know, there there are I think you can make an argument for um higher like inflationary um ingredients going forward, especially as we reshore jobs to America, right? So we remove it from super cheap labor loces to to to here. Um there may be you know some some commodity um as the world competes more now for certain commodities there might be some commodity input inflation um cost of capital is is higher um things like that you can make sort of a okay I can I can understand some secular arguments for those things but at least in the near term let's say the next 6 months 12 months if there's a slowing economy you know which wins out right the the demand destruction of a slowing economy possibly a recession. Not saying we're going to go into one, but there's the potential we could if the economy slows enough and the data is showing the economy is slowing. Um, so you know, which wins out and and I know you're on the side, Lance, um, of, oh, I think the slowing economy wins out and that's one of the reasons why you guys have continued to sort of have your position, the stance that you've taken with bonds, because you expect bond yields to come down as a result. Interesting to me, not not everybody still is willing, not everybody sees it the same way. Um, but you still see it that way, right? Well, yeah. And and we actually had this conversation this morning. Uh, so when I was doing the real investment show this morning, we kind of dove into this. Inflation hadn't printed yet. So, you know, um, I do my morning show, uh, from 6:00 a.m. to 7:00 a.m. in the morning, central standard time. And so, um, economic data prints at 7:30. So, we were talking about inflation before it came out. And and this is the this is the thing that I think most econom like the vast majority of economists and people like Ray Dallio and others have completely overlooked is the construction of CPI and there's two critical points about CPI. So so again one of the push backs about CPI when we talk about inflation is like well have you been to the store lately? The cost of eggs or the cost of bread or the cost of these things have all gone up. But that's okay. Those prices can rise and that and you can certainly have inflation in that manner for if I'm if I'm trying to just make ends meet at home and my groceries go up by, you know, $100 a month, that's certainly an impact on my livelihood and my standard of living. I'm not arguing that point. But when we start talking about inflation as an aggregate indicator for the markets, it's a different ball of wax alto together. Right. And sorry to interrupt. Yeah. motor vehicle parts could go up by infinity and it wouldn't matter to the index, right? Because it's zero. It's got a zero weight. And if you'll notice, there's a couple of things in here that are are are missing, right? There's no oil prices in here, right? Oil prices are tucked into things like transportation, uh um transportation services, x public, you know, these type of used cars, new cars. That's where energy gets plugged into that mix. So you know so we don't have a a drop here for what's oil prices. So we talk about oil and say oil oil is going up. So that's inflationary. It does impact inflation but only from the standpoint that it impacts the components of CPI that are affected by the price of oil. But here's my here's my important point. There's two components in here that make up a vast majority of the CPI calculation. Owner's equivalent rent down here at the bottom, 33% of the index. Rent of primary uh residence is 9%. Add those two together, that's 42% of CPI. So what that means is is that you could have virtually everything else in the CPI index go up. And if home owners, equivalent rent, and rent of primary residence go down. And that's what we're seeing going on right now with look at the housing data. Look at the rental data. Look at the Zillow data. You just had Melody, right, talking about what's going on with the housing market. That's not inflationary. And all that imputes into 42% of the index. So everything else lodging away from home could go to the moon, but it's 2% of the index, right? Pets, you know, I I can tell you for a fact my vet bills for my two dogs have gone up, but it's 1% of the index, right? So everything else could go up, you know, sharply, but if if you have a drop in 42% of the index, inflation is going to decline. So the really the only thing you need to be paying attention to if you want to know where bond yields are headed, pay attention to homeowners equivalent rent and rent of a primary isn't residents because that's going to show you where yields are going. All right. And so on that folks, uh, for the few of you that haven't watched it, because it's been one of our most watched videos in months, um, the Melody Wright interview that Lance just mentioned, you should go watch that because, uh, if you've got the counterargument that, okay, I think actually home prices are are going to go up from here. Um, you got to have a real empirical convincing argument to counter all the data that that Melody brings to the table. And but hey, look, I I can tell you right now, I've got a So, you know, I do hard money lending for real estate. Um, it's one of my side hobbies. And I can tell you right now that these guys are chomping at the bit for yields to come down and and they're like they're just looking for the Fed to cut rates because that improves the capex rate on real estate. I'm not so sure that Fed rate cuts by themselves are going to solve the problem you've got going on with multif family and and the general housing problem right now. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe we'll see a very robust recovery if we can get mortgage rates down. But one of my arguments is as well I shouldn't say it's I'm not arguing you know the the issue with housing. I'm not saying that at all. One of my I guess I should better way to say this. One of my concerns about housing is that when rates come down enough to where people that are locked into their house can go afford a mortgage to buy a new house, you get a big dump of inventory on the market. I think that's the risk that a lot of these kind of real estate investors that are just chomping at the bit for rate cuts to go buy real estate. I think that's where they and maybe and look, I could be entirely wrong. Maybe they're right. They certainly got a lot more experience than they've got a lot more experience in it than I do. But the historical evidence is is that yeah, every time the Fed cuts rates, yields come down, real estate goes flying through the roof. It's great, right? Maybe this time is different because of what's going on with with housing in general and affordability and those type of things. All I'll say, Lance, is that Melody, who, you know, lives and breathes his stuff and and came up in her career through the mortgage lending uh part of the market, agrees with you here. Okay. Yeah, we'll see. May we may be both wrong. So, we'll see. All right. Um, so anyways, you know, I think people are an increasing number of people are starting to scratch their heads and say, "Wow, you know what? Like, maybe my base assumptions on tariffs being really inflationary were wrong." Uh, and I'm curious if enough of the market changes their mind on that, Lance, what impact, if at all, do you think that would have on the market? Well, people more bullish. What? Stock market or B or bond market? Both. Okay. So, I posted this chart this morning. So, let's talk about stock market first, then we'll talk about the bond market. Um, I posted this chart this morning on X. Um, so this is GDP versus corporate profit margins. If you'll notice, there's a very high correlation between corporate profit margins and GDP going back historically, which is exactly what you would expect, right? Because corporate profit margins are a function of supply and demand, right? I've I've got to generate revenue, offset my expenses, I wind up with my net cost, and I've got to have a lot of demand so that I can expand my margins, right? So, there's your inflation argument. If I have a really good market, I can increase my prices, expand my margin, and I get inflation in the economy. Mhm. The problem is is that do you see that big gap right now between margins and the economy? I do. That's my concern. Sorry. Biggest we've seen in this data series, which goes back 20 plus years. Yeah. And you'll notice that that back in 1415, you had a similar divergence and back in 1213, you had a similar divergence. And in both cases, they caught down to economics. The the issue is right now we have a lot of profit margin expansion because of cost cutting, labor, you know, labor hoarding, u layoffs, you know, those type of things. We're seeing a lot of temporary hires versus full-time hires, which those are cheaper. Um, AI increases in productivity, but we can increase margins by doing that for a while, but those are very limited options. I can't do that forever. I can't, you know, I can't take like for instance, we have 32 employees. I could not reduce our employees to zero and still run the business, right? It just it just won't work. So, yeah. And and by the way, if any of our employees are watching this, I'm not we're not we're not laying anybody off. We're fine. I'm just using this example. So, good qualification. Important qualification. Your jobs are fine. Don't worry about it. Um, but no, I, you know, if I could replace employees with, you know, artificial intelligence example, there's only so many of those jobs I could ultimately replace. I could replace a few and maybe increase my profit margin somewhat, but my point is there's a limit to how you can keep doing that. And if the economy keeps slowing, you're going to have a contraction in profit margins. You know, the other thing we talked about recently is that earnings estimates are way too elevated. Very optimistic. Well, we're already starting to see those estimates for Q3 and Q, we're about to start Q3 reporting. We're already seeing those estimates for Q3 and Q4 come down fairly sharply. 2026 is still elevated, but I expect to start seeing that come down as we get later into this year because again, earnings and revenue and margins and all that come from economic growth. And if the economy is slowing down and is going to continue to slow down further, which is kind of what I expect to happen as all that, you know, our pig in the python has now left the system, Elvis has left the building. Um, I think we're going to have slower economic growth and that's going to wind up closing that gap between margins and the economy and that's not going to be good for the stock market. And so, you know, tariffs are a function of that. And if tariffs can't be passed on by producers to consumers, and again, the only person that pays a tariff is the producer. So, if those producers can't pass on that tariff, that's going to start eating their margins, right? So, so then we're seeing that now. We saw that in the PPI report yesterday that that ability to pass on those tariffs is really getting squeezed and and producers are having to eat a lot more of that tariff than I think they originally intended. So from the stock market, I think it's a negative and that's why I think that there's potential risk to the market in 2026 as we get out there and we start kind of seeing reality align around earnings because remember, you know, valuations are fine where they are right now until you start challenging earnings. And I think next year we're going to start we'll start talking about a more challenging environment for earnings going forward. All right. Hey, two things before we get to bonds. One, um, Michael How, liquidity guy, liquidity guru god, uh, sort of agrees with you on that outlook. So, just wanted to connect that dot. And let me ask you this question that that, um, Stephanie Pomboy brought up yesterday or two days ago. Um and and it may you may want to include you know how this impacts bonds as well. Um she made a really great point which is that as we uh or or during the era of globalization when we pushed all of our manufacturing off onto the rest of the world. We sort of um were able to push the business cycle exposure to the business cycle off of our shores. um the booms and busts of the manufacturing cycle, all that stuff. They they felt the brunt of that. We didn't feel it nearly as much, which I think is one of the reasons why we've had so few recessions since the globalization era started compared to before. And so her point was, hey, we got to be aware that as we begin to reimpport that, we will be reimpporting exposure to the business cycle here. Yeah. And and again you when you take a look so you know I run a lot of composite indicators and one of those is the composite indicator of ISM services to ISM manufacturing and then we weight that relative to the economic makeup. And so right now that economic makeup's about 75%ish of services to 25% manufacturing. Well manufacturing is very economically sensitive, right? It's a big multiplier effect on the economy. If I manufacture something, I get a three to four dollar multiplier in the economy versus services, I get basically a one to one. It's it's a very low multiplier. So, as we start to onshore more of this manufacturing and it's it's kind of one of those, you know, things that at the end of the day, we may go, this is great. We're gonna we're going to bring jobs back to America. That's awesome. Until you start getting a much more robust economic cycle of of like you said, these booms and busts because when there's going to be a slowdown in manufacturing, that's going to have a much bigger impact. Let's just say we go to a 50/50 spread between manufacturing and services, all of a sudden that economic cycle is going to get a lot more volatile because of that input that manufacturing has on the economy, right? It punches way above its weight relative to services. Yeah. Okay. in both directions. All right. So, sounds like you concur with Stephanie. Okay. So, bonds. Oh, so so uh for for bonds, you know, again, when we kind of look at, you know, what's happening with inflation, what's happening with the economy, that's a very good bond friendly environment. And again, if we start to see a riskoff environment for stocks, it's going to look for safety and income, which will be in the bond market. The other big benefactor of bonds going forward is that there is a absolutely massive short position against both ETF bond ETFs as well as the individual treasury bonds. Commercial traders are very very short bond exposure. So, if we start getting really much below 4% on the 10-year Treasury, there's a real risk that we could see a very sharp downturn in yields, like head towards 3% pretty quickly. If we start getting into environment where economic growth is really starting to show weakness, potentially recessionary, if that begins to show up, if we begin to see credit spreads blow out, those shorts are going to have to cover and you could see a very sharp drop in yields in a very short period. Okay. Um, since I sort of pushed you to prognosticate, I'm going to do it again here. Um, how how what odds do you give a recession at some point in 2026 given what we know now? Um, predicting recessions are extremely hard for a whole variety of reasons. Um, and you know, we can have recessions and not actually have them classified as recessions. We've had those before, like 2012. Um, but a recognized recession in 2026 is probably rising. So, give it a 30% probability right now. Okay. 30% probability that in five years when we look back at the chart, 2026 will be have a gray line on it. Yeah, it's it's it's that. But again, I I think that risk could certainly go up. A lot of it's going to depend on, you know, really this economic cycle. you know, the the when you start looking at the employment data, um, you know, full-time jobs versus the the the, you know, total working population. I showed you that chart last week. Um, you start looking at, you know, things like services and manufacturing, which are barely just, you know, you know, services are barely holding on to expansion versus contraction. Manufacturing's been a contraction for a while. I think there's certainly a rising risk that 2026 2027 now you you know give me two years 2627 I think the risk of a recession rises pretty sharply. Okay. Okay. And you know as we've been saying and we will continue to track real closely folks you know the momentum on the job side is downwards and that's that's peering through a lens that is very smudged right you know the jobs data has been really really hard to have a lot of confidence in. Um, but let me let me let me say something real quick about this just because I, you know, I've said this on the show before and I just want to stay true to what I said, you know, a forecast should be. Forecasting anything that far out is is meaningless, right? You know, we're just having a conversation. You should not bank anything on that. I cannot. So, you know, a good forecast I always say is got to have you got to have a time frame. It's going, you know, we're going to have a recession by January the 1st. It's going to be a 30% correction in the markets. It'll be over by October. and you need to be buying back into the market. I'm not saying that at all. Right? I have no I do not have that kind of visibility on anything. You know, because of the economic data and the way it moves, there's no visibility on that. You know, we saw 2022 everybody expected a recession, never occurred, right? And and just I'll remind folks as you remind us all the time that you're the headlights on your operation are about look out about one to three months. Yeah. Right. And so you're saying, "Look, from what I have confidence that's going to happen in the next one to three months, that's what I'm playing for now." Yeah. Yes. I I maybe my gut tells me that in a year this could happen, but I'm not going to worry about it until it starts appearing in my headlights. Exactly. And then when it gets there, we'll adjust the portfolio. We'll sell stuff, you know, buy more bonds, whatever. But yeah, we're just not there yet. Okay. Back to stocks just for one second. Um again, going back to our theme of head scratchers here. Um I I pulled this uh from a report. says, "Despite record buybacks, the impact from stock repurchases is fading. The S&P 500 net buyback yield has declined to 2%, the lowest level in two decades outside of recession. One consequence of a declining buyback yield is less earnings per share accretion and slower earnings per share growth. Weakening buybacks also indicate less share price support from corporate demand. So, this has been a massive driver of share price appreciation, buybacks. Um, they're continuing to happen at record levels. But it's potentially Lance, are we beginning to enter an era of diminishing returns where it takes more stock buyback to get the same oomph? Yeah. I mean, it's just like, excuse me, I've been having a challenge with my voice today. I apologize. Um, no, it's the same thing we're seeing with QE as well, right? So, you know, anytime that you do something repeatedly over and over again and the environment that you're doing it in is expanding, just by sheer logic, it's going to take more and more to get the same effect. And we saw this. So, for instance, in when we did QE1, we did about a trillion dollars worth of QE and we had this massive move in the market. Each successive round of QE, it required larger amounts of QE to get the same bang for the buck. And that just makes sense, right? Because the market's getting bigger. So to move, is it just the law of large numbers or is there a sort of, you know, it builds up a resistance or it it just works. Its potency decreases over time, too. Yeah. For the same reason, right? I mean, if I if I'm dropping water into a glass, right, and you know, I'm going have to keep putting more and more water into the glass eventually to to No, no, I get that. That's the law of large numbers. I'm just asking in addition to that, is there also a the system just stops? Yeah. Yeah. No, I I I think that that the other side of that is is that also the market gets you, you know, when the market starts expecting something to occur, it starts discounting it. So, you don't get as big of a a push from that same activity because the markets already know it's there and they already it already priced it in before you've done it. So, when you do it, it reacts least. Correct. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So, I I guess my high level question here is just is there any reason to worry that one of the the big pillars, propellants of of asset prices may not do as much going forward. Yeah. Companies just write bigger and bigger buyback checks. I mean, and we've been doing that. We're going to cross well over a trillion dollars this year in buybacks for the first time ever. And that numbers just keeps increasing every year. And you know, it's interesting because there was an article out this morning, you know, and this is kind of the the same thing that happens is that when somebody starts doing something, everybody starts going, "Oh, that's working for them. I'll do that, too." Right? So, you know, Apple and Microsoft and Google, they were doing buybacks and Nvidia goes, "Oh, okay. I'll do buybacks, too." And so, everybody starts doing that. Um, it's kind of the same thing with, you know, Micro Strategy was doing the whole treasury kind of management with Bitcoin and then we've seen a lot of other companies start jumping on that train like that one I mentioned at the beginning here, QMM or whatever it is. Yeah. Yeah. And so everybody jumps on that board and and so now what we're seeing is is that there's becoming less and less effect because you're getting you're getting a dilution of the effect. Everybody's like, "Oh, yeah, yeah, everybody does that now." And it becomes more dilutive over time. So, so again, you know, yes to the answer to your question is yes. It's going to continue to take larger and larger buybacks to get the same net effect. One reason is is the market's just getting bigger. Market capitalization is going up. So to move market capitalization, it requires a bigger push of buying. Yeah. Um and we'll move on, but just reass one last time. Sounds like right now you're not worried that um buybacks as a support of the their contribution to the support of the market is not going to decrease materially enough for you to worry about this yet. Not yet. What what I what I would be more concerned about is when companies go, "Yeah, we're going to cut back on our buybacks." Right? That's when, you know, if we start seeing a reduction in the buybacks, that's where I think you really start worrying. Okay. So, sort of the corporate version of the giant mindless robot. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. Okay. Uh All right. Um let's see here. Uh I'm I'm throwing a lot of stuff out of the balloon right now just to make sure we can get to our uh end in time. Um Oh, by the way, my my interview got cancelceled, so I'm a little okay on time. Okay, good. Um, I still have a bit of a backend, but we'll we'll go as long as we can here. Um, so, uh, there's been an increasing amount of interest in stable coins and their their role that they look like they're going to play in um, supporting the US Treasury market. Um, anything happened in recent weeks that we haven't talked about yet that's on your mind about this, Lance, in terms of the influence this may have? No, no. We've actually been we've been looking at Nothing's changed. Um we actually wrote an article. I can't remember now, a month or two ago. Uh I think it was one of our daily market commentaries that we wrote that, you know, talked about, you know, how stable coins could be, you know, the next big kind of beneficiary for the bond market. Um but yeah, nothing's really changed from that standpoint. What we need to see is that adoption really start to get picked up. And we haven't seen that yet. But it is encouraging that if we start to see more of an adoption of stable coins and more usage of that through through the economic system, it could certainly be a beneficiary to our bond portfolio, which we would like very much. All right. Um, and let's see here. Um, just a headline I pulled this morning. Uh, we just had a blowout 10-year auction, lowest yield since last September's 50 basis point jumbo cut, near near record foreign demand. I I guess I put this in here again as sort of a headscratcher. Um, because there has been this narrative of nobody wants treasuries anymore. That's why central banks are all buying gold and foreigners are all angry at America and um they're not buying our our debt anymore and they're all trying to find additional ways to transact with each other. And basically, you know, the Treasury market uh is not going to be what it once was going forward. Um still seems like it's fairly healthy right now, right? Which we've been saying all along is none of those narratives are true. They're great for headlines, but those aren't true. Yep. Yeah. Even the data never supported it. We've always had good foreign demand for bonds. Uh foreign holders of bonds haven't really changed much. Um you know, people saying that fiat currencies going away is are completely wrong. That's not occurring at all. There's still 70 to 80% of all foreign transactions. So, you know, again, all these narratives are great. Generally, they're by people pushing gold uh trying to sell gold for most in most cases or trying to promote a gold fund that they run or whatever. But there's no actual basis in reality for those statements. Ju just to be clear, I hear a lot of that narrative from from not gold people as well. I mean, it's it's pretty prevalent in in a fair amount of the the media. Bucker crowd for sure. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, if you're you're betting on the end of the world, then it makes a great narrative. The problem is just the data's never supported it. And again, it's great if I'm trying to push fear, you know, to sell a product or to get clicks and views or whatever. If I'm trying to do that, then those are great narratives. But yeah, I got I got this really great email the other day from a guy and I never really thought of it till now till he mentioned it to me. He says, "Have you ever notice that in all the end of the world zombie movies, nobody's trading in gold?" And I was like, I never really thought about that until then, but yeah, you know, it's just kind of the the statement. Um but yeah I mean it's you know look there's you know going back to the very basics of everything you know owning gold is fine owning you know stocks are fine owning bonds are fine owning cash is fine you know the the the only thing that matters is is that asset creating a return on investment large enough to offset the rate the real rate of inflation so we have the same purchasing power in the future. That's all that matters at the end of the day. and worrying about things you can't control like the end of the world. Um, you know, economic collapse, economic ruin, you know, you you look at you look at the the globe today, right, as a good example. This is probably more for a rant one day, but you look Yeah, you're renting because I'm not talking about economic ruin here, but anyways, finish your I know you're not, but this is the narratives that I get a lot of, right? People say, I don't understand why you own stocks because the world's going to end. Yeah. it. You know it what's interesting I mean we tal you know there's a lot of this headline about this glo this coordinated global reset and it's all you know there's all this conspiracy of these people out there that are all getting together in this cabal and they're going to do a global reset on everything. We can't get two people in the same room to agree with each other much less get governments to agree with each other on a coordinated reset of the global environment. uh you know just you know it's just these are just ludicrous ideas and they're great for selling points or great for selling books or or you know websites whatever but you know you just have to come back to the reality of what can I control today and some of these things sure could we have a complete global reset at some point and the world absolutely come to an end and everything fell yeah maybe but it might be 300 years from now right we we can only deal with the time frame that we have today and our time frame today is to do one thing and just to make sure that our retirement is secure and that we're growing our assets at a pace to make sure we can meet our retirement goals. And how you choose to do that is up to you and it's completely fine. There's no right way wrong way to do it as long as it's work. The the only wrong way to do it is if it's not working for you. If it's not working for you, it's the wrong way to do it. If it is working for you, that's great and there's nothing wrong with it. And again, this is why we just go back to the basics of manage risk. You're going to have corrections in all asset prices. Just make sure those corrections don't ruin you because when you lose capital, getting back to even is fine, but you lose the compounded rate of return you need for retirement. And so, we've always got to factor that into our cycles and how we manage our risk. I I don't disagree with any of this. you kind of took it in a direction that I wasn't looking to go in, but those are all important points to to re-emphasize for folks. Yeah. Let me bring it back and then Yeah. Yeah. You opened a door to this question I'm going to ask next in a second. Sure. Sure. So, what I was really just trying to underscore and I I believe you feel the same way is look, if your investing thesis says I think bond yields are going to stay higher going forward, we're we're still going to have higher for longer bond yields. Um if if party if if a material party or rationale for that is because I think other countries aren't going to be interested in buying our treasuries as much you really need to potentially re-evaluate that or at least you know get data that trumps the data that Lance was just referring to. Um and we didn't pull it up this time but but I know probably a month or two ago you know we did do one Lance where you pulled up a chart of the foreign buyers for the recent auctions and we could see that there wasn't a material drop. Um, and uh, you also have to sort of ask yourself, all right, if we're going in, if the economy is slowing the way that Lance has shown us it is, um, and there is a risk of recession, not not necessarily a recession, but certainly a recession makes this even worse, there will be, you know, the question you have to ask yourself is, okay, why wouldn't there be a safety trade in the US treasuries, right? Um, and remember, if the US is flirting with recession, the rest of the world is probably in substantially worse shape at that point in time. And that foreign capital is going to seek shelter. So, you got to ask yourself, is there a better alternative today to the US Treasury, not a perfect asset, but still widely seen as sort of the safest, most liquid asset out there in the world. Yeah, maybe gold catches a little bit of a better bid this time than it has in the past. I can certainly make that argument. Y but as a guy who really likes gold, I don't think that that the Treasury bond has been supplanted as the safe haven asset of choice, especially in in a global uh slowdown. Yeah. And again, you know, when you when you look at at gold as a function and you you mentioned earlier about central banks buying gold, you got to remember that gold is a the reason that central banks buy gold is to hedge foreign reserves. So the dollar's been under pressure. That won't always be the case. The dollar will rally back at some point. just, you know, we go through these economic cycles and the dollar weakens and it gets stronger and it goes back and forth, but the dollar is trading about where it was, you know, 30, 40 years ago. So, you know, when the dollar rallies, that's going to weigh on gold because, you know, there's an there's a historical non-correlation between those assets. So, again, it's just, you know, just understand the correlations of different assets and how they work together. And so, as long as the dollar remains weak and gets weaker, and if your thesis is the dollar is going to continue to get weaker, that's fine. Just make sure you have data sub substantiate why it's going to get weaker and and some diversification your portfolio in case it doesn't. Yeah. Yeah. In case it doesn't. But just make sure that your data is is real data, not some hyperbole that's you know on the internet. Yeah. Just make sure it's it's it's valid and and again just you know so there's there's very easy and this is why we run so many correlations. If you go to simple advisor and look at you know performance analysis and all these type of things that we provide there's all these abilities where you can look at different asset classes and look at the correlations between those asset classes and how they perform historically and and it helps you give you a little bit better way to manage your asset allocation so you can hedge against risk because again that's all we have to do as investors is just I can be long an asset as long as I'm hedging it in some manner I can control that risk. Mhm. Okay. Um, and I'm gonna start just jump into other topics here real quick so we don't run too long, but you kind of open the door on this one. So, we had the SEO happen a few days ago and it's the Shanghai cooperation. I I've I'm I'm now not remembering it. I know I looked it up for another interview I was doing live. Um, but basically this was where we had kind of the leaders of everybody who's not on Team America meet Lance, right? So we had um President Xi, we had uh Putin, um we had uh you know uh Kim Jong Bil, can't remember the name of the the North Korean guy. I always forget. Um and then uh you know we had India which was sort of a little bit of the the surprise here. You know India is is they're trying to split the baby here by you know telling the US we're going to be your best partner and telling China the same thing. And it's gonna be interesting to see what happens there. But that that was that was obviously very orchestrated uh to show the to show America, hey look, we we know with your tariffs and everything, you're trying to put China in a box and keep Russia, you know, isolated. Um, hey, we're strong without you right now. Whether it's true or not, everybody can debate. Um, and I'm I'm I've got the same caution you do, Lance, especially when folks talk about the bricks and things like that, which is it's hard to get just two regular people in a room to agree on most things, but uh to get countries that have uh at times been adversaries, you know, historically at at times, uh to all work in unison globally, you know, against big trading partners like the West, which you know, it's hard to exist as a country on this planet without trading with the West. Um, uh, it's a it's a big lift, but this SEO, you know, is the the most recent sort of show of, hey, you know what, guys, we don't we don't really need you if push comes to shove. So, anyways, any reflections on that? Yeah, you know, it it look, it's a show of force and and you know, it's kind of like we at the G7 summits, we've got the G20 summits and we go to have these summits and then everybody leaves and resolve nothing. It's just it's just kind of it's the same thing that we have, you know, that's going on. You know, the G7 and the G20 is basically our version of the SETO. So, it's just like, hey, we can survive without you guys, but we really need your rare earth metals and your production and your manufacturing and everything. So, you know, it it's, you know, these these are all kind of great, you know, kind of shows of of strength to say, hey, this is who we are, which is fine, but at the end of the day, they need us and we need them, and we can try to work our way around that, but you know, again, just the US economy is now very dependent on our imports from China. They're a major trading partner of the US. And so, yeah, we're trying to tariff them. We're trying to get some some fairer trade agreement set up. Um eventually I think that'll occur because it's in China's best interest as well because they buy a lot of stuff from us also. But again, that's going to take some time to work through and and again, you know, this this all really comes down to, you know, needs and demands and economic growth and and it's great to try to play a strong hand, but if you don't have the ability to sustain yourself on your own and your economy starts to fall apart, which there's some clear evidence, you know, China's struggling, Europe's struggling, uh, you know, next year GDP growth in the Euro zone is expected to be less than 1%. We're expected to be about 2% in the US. that you you can't sustain 1% growth in an economy without developing problems. This was my point. The US is flirting with a recession. The rest of the world's in worse shape. Yeah. Yeah. And and so it's so all the all this talk is great, but at the end of the day, it's going to be who needs who for what. Okay. All right. Um Okay. Another um another thing that has uh some folks in a big industry scratching their heads and kind of gossmacked. Um so the president as I understand I think has issued an executive order. I'm not entirely certain if an executive order has been issued or not on this but um on um new restrictions on um big pharma ads in mass media. Um, basically, as I understand it, it's requiring the companies to list pretty much all the side effects uh of their their drugs, which um kind of becomes prohibitive because your 30se secondond TV commercial becomes like a seven minute commercial, right? And also, as the person is listening to all this stuff, they're saying, "Maybe I don't want to try that drug." Right? Well, have you ever listened to a drug commercial and some of these other ones? Uh, well, let me put this way. I I'll let you ask why you're asking that question, but I I remember in the old older days, which were not that old, is it would end with the guy speaking at like five times, you know, oh, this is great. You're going to lose weight and get tan and everyone's going to love you. And then, right, but I don't even think they do that anymore. I I think they but yeah, they listed at the bottom. This is like when you watch these commercials and first of all by the way I'm all for this. I don't think they should be allowed in my opinion they shouldn't be allowed to advertise drugs at all. I just think I just think we we have too many people dependent in the US on a drug for every problem. Right. And just to give some backstory we we didn't allow this before. We have removed limitations. Right now, we are believed one of only two countries in the world, New Zealand being the other, that allows direct to consumer mass marketing of pharmaceutical. I think it's terrible. I think if we're going to do, you know, we need to have more commercials on how to eat right, how to exercise, how to take care of yourself, good nutrition, those type of things, because you can solve a lot of your problems just by getting off the couch and getting some exercise, going outside, getting some vitamin D. But, you know, today it's like, oh my gosh, I can't concentrate. I must have ADD, right? So, I've got to take a drug for that. and and it's just, you know, we've just infiltrated society, you know, with these commercials and that there's a drug, there's a solution for every problem and it's in the form of a drug. But if you, you know, if you watch these commercials, at the bottom it says, you know, this drug will help you get rid of, you know, uh, e eczema or whatever. And at the bottom it says, yeah, you may also experience blindness, deafness, explosive diarrhea, whatever, right? It's just all these horrible side effects. So, I'm like, why would I take that, you know? Well, and and and and with that being said, like one of the changes that's been made over the past decade or so is they only have to list some of the side effects as long as they link to a website or say go talk to your doctor. That's their get out of jail free card of like, well, you can go over to this website and read the the huge long list, right? But nobody does, right? And to the point that they're still putting, you know, they don't have to put everything, but you're still reading these horrible things, you're like, oh my god, what else does this thing do? Yeah. Yeah. This could kill you, but it'll make you feel better. You know, the depression drugs are the best because they they tell you it's like this may lead to suicidal thoughts and death, but you won't be depressed. Okay, go outside and get some sunshine. That's a good start. Um, you know, but you know, look, I I think that that so again, if I can't get rid of the the commercials altogether, at least Yeah. Have them list everything and just make it so ownorous on the companies, maybe they stop advertising, you know, and, you know, go some other route. Yeah. So, this sounds like I'm trying to make it a rant. I'm not. Um, and I'm right there with you, Lance. You know, you look at when we started loosening these regulations and they started the direct mass marketing and the percentage of Americans that, you know, are now on some drug. It's ridiculous. It's totally directly correlated. Yeah. Where I'm going with this is how big of a hit is this going to be to pharma stocks like Abby, which is one that you have ridden hard in your portfolio to date. Yeah. Yeah. It's up 4% today. So, riding it hard again today. Um, no, it look these companies have done well over time because they're going to get their drugs to market. And again, there's there's, you know, all kinds of movies about how the, you know, the the pharma companies, you know, supplement the doctors to get them to sell their drugs, you know, one drug over the other. And, you know, there's all that documentation. You know, look, healthcare companies are going to figure a way around it. So, you know, the companies that we're invested in are drugs that consumers demand, right? Botox, which is Abby, but they're they're, you know, they're bo I don't care if you advertise it or not, women are going to figure out Botox and they're going to, you know, they have they have whole Botox parties where they get together and stick each other in the face to make to make themselves look younger. That's not going to change. um you know this whole weight loss drug movement uh with Eli Liy and and those companies that's not going to change anytime soon. So whether they advertise or not those drugs are going to get sold. So that's what we look for in in particular is drugs that are on a mass market basis that have their own internal drivers and they don't ne they could get rid of all the advertising and their sales would still continue. So I agree that their sales would still continue. I think the big question is is you know by how much right and what what what is the delta because I mean these these companies are the biggest spenders on television um so that that does influence demand right so yeah maybe it grows next year but would it have grown at five times the rate if they had been able to continue that I'm basically just asking as a capital manager are you reacting to this at all or you just in a wait and see mode well first of all it's a wait and see thing to see what actually happens Um, you know, B, we manage those positions in our portfolio. We need healthcare exposure anyway because we track an index. So, we need healthcare exposure. So, we're very selective about the healthcare companies that we own. And again, we're looking at very long-term track records on these companies and how they've performed over time. Look at their fundamental balance sheets, all those type of things. So, you know, yes, if this advertising rule comes into effect and we see a substantial drop off in, you know, their sales, then we'll eliminate the companies or do something differently, you know, but again, it's that's going to have to be a wait and see type thing and and the and the stock prices will reflect it before it it comes out. So again, we'll start to see if these companies start to, you know, really ex, you know, if there's a big concern about revenue growth, the stock prices will start reflecting that concern even before the rule hits. Okay. And just in terms of any impact, I mean, you mentioned AB is up big today. Did we see any major reaction to this news or is it been shrugged off so far? So far, the healthcare sector is doing really well today. Aby's hitting an all-time high today. Um so so far just all right that doesn't sound like too worried then. Yeah, but again you know look it's it's you know one thing that you know any major sector of the market has right they've got their lobby you know healthcare has a huge lobby group tech has a huge lobby group uh discretionary companies have a huge lobbyist group so even when this rule comes in you know it's like Wall Street you can put a rule on Wall Street and you know great example of this was in 1999 Bill Clinton says we're going to cap all executive salary at a million dollars campaign is an executive more a CEO more than a million dollars a year. Wall Street goes, "Oh crap, that's a lot of money that we're not going to get from these CEOs of these companies. So, we making as much money. Let's figure out a way to to to help them make more money." And they go, "Hey, how about stock option compensation?" And, you know, then we started this whole, you know, whole deck, you know, three decades now of just stock option compensation. And now that's the majority of executive pay. It's great for Wall Street, makes them a ton of money. So the point is is that whenever they impose a rule, healthc care will figure out a way around it. They'll figure out a different way to advertise. They'll just go advertise with influencers. They'll just get a bunch of women on TikTok to go, "Oh, I took Botox today and look how great I look." Right. Okay. Although FYI, this executive order, if it is an executive order, does include influencers. It's not just But I get your point, which is, hey, they'll figure it out. They'll figure out a way. Yeah. Um All right. So, here we go. Did you hear about the NASA announcement yesterday? Is this like two men walk into a bar? No. Is there a joke behind this or There isn't. No, no, no, there isn't. Uh, yesterday was a crazy day for reasons we're going to talk about in the rant. Um, but um, they actually made a press announcement saying that we've found the strongest evidence to date of potential life on Mars, life off of Earth. Um, wait, wait, life on Mars or just life off Earth? Well, life on Mars, but that's life off Earth, right? So, but life off Earth, but specifically on Mars. So, so there's people that So, they're saying that there's actually some living organism on Mars. So, they're they're basically saying, and I I I don't have the um the article in front of me here, but um that they found some microbial uh evidence that seems to be only possible through a biological process. And so they um and so NASA said I was watching the news uh report yesterday. NASA said look we we we we kind of didn't believe this and so we gave it to a bunch of external scientists and said look you look at this and you tell us what you think and I guess they've spent the past year studying it. They've come back and they've said hey look like biology seems the most likely answer to this question here. So, it's not a definitive uh declaration yet. Um, and I think they're saying to be definitive, they need This was taken by I think the Perseverance uh probe that's out there, rover that's out there. I'm reading as you're talking I'm reading the article. You're reading it. Yeah. So, I think they're saying we're not going to know for sure until we bring this back uh to Earth and study it in in an Earth lab. But um but right now they're saying, "Hey, you know, we might have just found life offside of outside of Earth." Now, I really threw it in here. Go ahead. Yeah. Just to be clear though, it's it's microscopic life. It's I don't you know Oh, yeah. It's not little green men. Yeah. Yeah. It's not little green men. It's just there might have been bacteria at one time on Mars, right? And this was in, you know, this was in our former river seabed where they hope they might have the greatest probability of finding something like this. I really just put it in because of the whole gobsmack thing, Lance, which is just I think it's great. Yeah. I mean, I'm I'm still I'm still focused on this whole uh Atlas, you know, uh A1 or whatever it is. 31 that's hurling through, you know, space. This they think might be an alien probe. Yeah. Yeah. Might be an alien probe. So, I'm I'm more interested on that one. Well, the timing would be really interesting because um not to get too off track and nerdy, but um as I understand it, there's a um there there's an equation for like life in the universe called the Drake equation. And um you know one of the inputs in it is is the likelihood of of life emerging um you know anywhere in the universe and the universe is so massively big. It it is a little hubristic to think that life could only you know evolve on our one little planet. Um but um so that's a really key indicator right which is what what's the variable you put in there for the probability of life. If we're finding if we end up confirming that there once was life on, you know, the next planet over from ours, I think you got to really bump up that probability uh factor of of that variable of of the the potential for life uh in the universe. Um so that would be really interesting. The other thing that's interesting uh in that equation is I guess they they said the biggest factor in that equation is the length at which a um sensient civilization persists. like you know let's take humans you know if if we persist for you know billions of years from now well then the the universe is probably teeming with life right if if if a sensient being can can last that long but if you end up kind of destroying yourself in one way shape or form or your sun goes supernova whatever and it's and it's measured in a much smaller period of time let's say thousands of years then we're probably alone in the universe right now so it really depends on that length so anyways kind kind of interesting that that that unknown object is coming here right now, Lance. At the same time, we we find potential evidence of life on Mars because if if if it was proven to be real evidence, then like yeah, the odds of that thing being like an, you know, an extraterrestrial probe probably go way up because we would we would much more likely encounter an alien species through its technology first versus actually meeting little green men, right? because of the limits of traveling at light speed and stuff like that, you know, you you do what we did with Voyager. You just send it out and then maybe, you know, hundreds of millennia later it passes by, you know, someone's planet. Yeah. You know, it's one of my favorite lines from a movie is uh from Contact with Jodie Foster. You really fun movie. Great movie. Yeah. And one of the lines in that movie that always really stuck with me was is that, you know, when you think about all the billions upon billions of stars that are out there that potentially have, you know, billions and billions of planets surrounding those stars, if we're the only life form in all of that, it would be an awful waste of space. Yeah, awful waste of space. And I wonder, I should have looked this up beforehand, but um how many stars are in our galaxy? It's probably billions, I think. Yeah, but type in if you can. So, billions. So, it's a waste of space just in the Milky Way galaxy. Yeah. And then you realize the Milky Way galaxy is one of billions of galaxies that are out there, right? Exactly. Yeah. I mean, and it's just it's, you know, you know, it's it's just one of those things. There are 100 to 400 billion stars just in the Milky Way galaxy. Just in the Milky Way alone. Yeah. That's just one of those stars potentially has planets surrounding them. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Just Okay. So, anyways, fun. Not really related to the markets. Um, okay. Trades, Lance, have you guys made many trades over the past week? No, we're probably gonna do something next week. Um, we're getting a couple of setups. One, we want, you know, we sold Apple previously just because revenue growth is really slowing for that company and we talked about maybe swapping it for Meta. We're kind of getting a decent setup for Meta. Um, you know, we'll we may pull that trigger next week on a starter position for that one. I'd love to see it pull back some more uh so I can add to it. I know you've been waiting to buy more for a long time. Yeah. Yeah. So, just it's just one of those things just trying to time a decent entry point. Just being patient with that one. Um, then the other side of that is really we're going to take profits in again trying to rebalance some of these thematic models that have had just huge surges. You know, we've got a couple of positions of small midcap stocks as an example. They're up 50 60% since August the 1st. It's just, you know, they're they're way outside of their normal position sizes. So, we're just going to trim those back to weight. Okay. Okay. Uh but basically doing their the rebalancing and then watching meta closely to see if it gives you an entry point. Yeah. So we may do that next week but yeah no trades this week so far. Okay. And I mean all things continue to go pretty well, right? Good year for Yeah. Uh yeah. Our portfolio just hit a new all-time high today. So it's, you know, performance is doing well. It's tracking the market very closely this year, which it shouldn't be because of the bond waiting. And we have 12% cash in the equity model. Um, so even though we have 12% cash and fixed income, it's actually tracking the benchmark pretty the S&P pretty closely this year. So, uh, knock on wood, so far performance has been really good. So, I saw a comment the other day that that that's really relevant to that point, Lance, which is someone said, "Hey, I heard Lance say that he was, you know, tracking the market. So, why don't I just own the market? Why don't I just own an S&P 500 fund?" And I think the answer is is yeah, you could do that. But Lance is doing it this year at a much lower risk profile. Yeah. Right. Yeah. And you know, returns are great right up until the risk part kicks in. Right. Yeah. And and that's and one of the reasons that we're tracking the market so closely this year is because when the markets were down 20% in April, we were down four. So I don't have to have that rate of return out of the portfolio that you when you spent time getting back and but just owning the index getting back to where we are now. I was already there ahead of you because you we never had that draw down to to recover from. Right. Right. And this this all goes to folks why you know it's so important to really be clear on your goals and your risk tolerance and all that type of stuff. Yeah. Absolutely. But I think I think all things being equal, you know, most folks would say, "Look, if I can get similar returns with less risk, why wouldn't I always take that, right?" And of course, there's no guarantees, folks. Lance is going to have some bad years, you know, ahead of Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there's years we're going to underperform. And look, my and you should not invest with us if you expect to track the market every year. Um, if you're expecting to to just track the index every year, then just go buy an S&P index fund. You'll track it. My goal is to get 80% of the upside in a given year. So if the market's up 10, I'll be up eight. But if the market's down 10% in a year, my goal is to be down two. So we we look to get 80% of the upside, 20% of the downside. And what that allows us to do over time is to generate a consistent rate of return in portfolios to meet financial walls. My I could care less what the market does. My goal is to protect capital and grow it over time. Okay. Right. All right. Um, well, look, in in wrapping up here, um, this is a tough one to keep concise, and I'm just going to try to force it to be concise. Um, I'll give you a yes or no answer. Yeah. Um, well, I'll I'll do my little part, and then I'll I'll hand the baton to you. Um, so, you know, yesterday was was quite a sad day. We had the assassination of a um of a a young political activist. I know the best way to describe Charlie Kirk. Um, and uh, I'm not going to talk about Charlie. Very uh, polarizing guy. A lot of supporters, a lot of people who who, you know, really didn't like, you know, the things that he talked about. Um, and uh, reason why I'm bringing it up here is, um, when I saw that happen, it was, it was one of those moments, uh, you know, sort of like an assassination of RFK or JFK or, you know, one of those moments, you know, you're going to be, you know, you'll remember where you were and why it happened. Um and uh the sadness that that the heaviness that I felt yesterday was really for the country which was um you know we're we're we're this is not who we are. We are better than this. Um and uh I I'll talk in just a moment about uh the importance of of free speech and the role it sort of played in all this. But, you know, as my was trying to get on top of of my reaction to it, I I began thinking, um, wow, like this whole concept of the fourth turning, um, if you if you understand that framework and you believe that we're in one, it is quickly becoming reality here versus an academic concept that we can bat around that's kind of interesting to talk about. And you know, in addition to the assassination yesterday, you look at the attempts on the president, you know, during uh the campaign, the fact that we have, you know, National Guard being deployed into our cities, we had the broad daylight uh assassination of the CEO of United Healthcare. Uh we had the firebombings of the Tesla dealerships. Um we've had a number of really racially charged murders being thrown around in the media of late. We've had a new rash of school shootings. I mean, Lance, uh, I know you were alive, but you were real young. Uh, but this to me feels a lot like what the late60s seemed to have been. Um, and that wasn't even a forth turning, right? Uh, but but you know, my understanding is being alive that time, it really did feel like the world was was in a very tenuous place of the country of of potentially spinning out of control. Um, which kind of makes me shudder that if you know if if Neil How is right and the way that fourth turnings go and the fact that you know they kind of accelerate towards the end uh makes me shudder at what future upheaval may be lying ahead of us here. Um so you know processing it as best I can. Uh here's here's what I think I think that uh what I hope we take away from this as a society and individuals is two kind of key messages. Um, one is that we we must do better. And I think we've gotten to a place here as a culture where um it increasing for an increasing number of people um uh violence is being chosen as a valid response to ideas. That idea I don't like. It's challenging me. That's giving me the permission to to actually use physical violence in response to that. And I think we need to just uh come back to our principles and say no that's that's not that's not the way it should be. There's a reason why the first amendment is the first amendment. And um uh you know it's it's uh we have been through times like this as a people and we have pulled ourselves together eventually and just laid down the law like this. And we we have to do that I think. Um and we have to do it kind of collectively. all sides have to say, "Hey, look, we can really disagree and really dislike the thoughts that that the people who disagree with me have." Um, but we have to respect their ability to to to have those opinions. Um, and we have to demand that of our leaders like, hey, you get to get on top of this. Um, and we have to demand it of ourselves uh in our own interactions with with with people. And I was kind of poor analogy, but I was sort of trying to talk this through with my wife the other day, yesterday, and I was making the analogy of a um an oil you ever seen an oil well on fire, Lance? Yeah. It's like a blowtorrch, right? Yeah. I live in Texas. Of course, I live in Texas. Exactly. Yeah. And it it it uh it really surprised me when I learned that a pretty common way to put out um oil, you know, oil wells that are burning, at least it used to be. I don't know if it's still used today. Um, but it's dynamite. Yep. And I was like, God, that sounds like the worst idea ever. But what it was was famous for that. Yeah. It it it when the dynamite explodes, it exhausts all the oxygen, you know, basically in a sphere around uh the well. And um when it does that, the flames go out, right? And then you just have a gusher of oil and they know how to tap that thing off, right? And I think as a society that we really need to look at doing that, which is just to say, hey, look, this is something, you know, we're going to have just a zero tolerance for. We just got to, you know, starve it of its oxygen. Just not allow this to happen when it can. Um, so, you know, exactly what conservatives have been trying to do now for Let's not make the Just help me. I I don't No, I'm just I'm just saying this is this is what you're talking about is exactly the whole kind of what's led us up to this point is that we had this whole very fringe side that was, you know, spewing a lot of hate online and doing all that and you're just going to generate this type of environment when that occurs. And this is just the consequences of of what we did over the last four or five years of allowing that to happen. I I I agree and I really want to try to not make this partisan and I know it's not partisan. It's just it's just facts. No, it's it's facts and and but yes to to the extent I'm trying to walk a tight rope here because I know I'm talking to people who have very different opinions on both sides about all this. I'm trying to find things that we can find common ground. And I agree. When you demonize the other side, you make it a lot easier for somebody, you know, law of large numbers, right? You say that person is evil, right? If half the country thinks the way that you do, law of large numbers, there's this small kind of unbalanced fringe that says, "Oh, well, look, I'll be a good person if I go kill that evil person." Right. So, and what we see repeatedly is with all of these people when we get them, there's mental instability. there's some, you know, some other mental, you know, some other problem in the background that's that's always fostered to this point. But again, to what you're what your point you're making and what you're right is is that you we've got to go back to our core principles and our core principles of being good people and, you know, having freedom of speech and being able to discuss ideas and all these things that used to be the case. I used to do political talk for 10 years and I quit doing political talk because you could not have a discussion with somebody about politics any longer because it just immediately you would present the facts and they would have immediately just start screaming and yelling and you know just pointing fingers and calling you names and all this type of stuff and it's like we can't even have a conversation about politics on a rational basis. It's okay for you to disagree with me just like you can disagree with me on stocks or bonds or whatever. It's okay to disagree. Just bring facts and you know we write articles every week. Here's you know this is what's going on in the markets. Here's all the data that backs up our analysis. You can argue with that as long as you can bring substantive data to discount those facts. But we've stopped doing that over the last really 15 years. And we just started yelling and screaming at each other. and you go on, you know, and then we started blocking people online because we didn't like what their view was. And if they we didn't agree with their outlook, we just call them evil or mean or whatever, you know, started calling people Nazis for no reason. You know, you just got to go back some level of sanity and say, can we have a rational discussion? It's okay for you to disagree with me. And this was the one thing about Charlie Kerr. He just presented facts. He he openly debated people. He gave people an open form. Hey, come debate me. and college kids would show up and they would say, "This is my opinion." And he would say, "Well, here's the facts." And, you know, he would just present facts. He didn't he didn't demonize them. He didn't argue with them. He just presented the facts of the argument and let them really kind of resolve kind of back themselves into their own corner in most cases because they didn't have the facts to back up the argument. They were told these things that weren't true and they believed them, you know, viciously, but they didn't have any facts to back up that data. He had all the facts and the data that he that he argued with and people didn't like that. But that's okay. That's what this whole country was founded on was the ability to have these discussions, to have freedom of speech, to talk to each other as human beings and say it's okay. I have I look I have family members. My cousin Dwayne who lives in Utah as liberal as he can be. We disagree on virtually everything, but he's one of my best friends. And we we have conversations, we talk, we have, you know, we laugh, we joke with each other, we we argue with each other over certain topics. I present my case, he presents his case. He's always wrong. But, you know, but we're great friends. We can have that conversation. Why can't we have that with everybody? So, I I agree with everything you're saying. This is why I'm a huge fan of national service would be just if if not only I think it's a good thing for the country and it's a good thing for us just character-wise, but because it would get us working and living closely for at least, you know, some part of our lives with people from all stripes, all different backgrounds. And we would learn that, hey, despite the differences of opinion, we all very much share in many cases the same values. And you know and we learn from differences of opinion. Absolutely. I mean we talk about you know diversity being a strength. Well, yeah. I mean, like, one of the key things about being a critical thinker is having your thought process challenged by other forms of of thinking and then determining over time what you think is the best, which which again know that, you know, look, you and I disagree on a lot of stuff. But that's always one of the things I've always valued about our relationship is that you present these ideas, then I go write an article proving you're wrong, but it makes me go work and do the analysis to prove that. And so I so I learned I'm just teasing you. Um but you know but it does you know you present these ideas I go that's a great idea let me go dig into that and then I have to go pull all that data and and build the charts and build the graphs and it teaches me about you know these various aspects and if we would spend more time doing that as people uh we'd be in a lot better position. Well, and that's one of the things that made me so sad about yesterday was that um you know, Charlie Kirk and again, I'm I'm not here to tell you whether he was a great guy or not great guy, but he was doing what we need more of, right, which is open debate, right? Which is, hey, we all don't think the same, you know, let's talk it out. uh and uh I I I don't know a ton about him, but you know, I know that at his uh his college appearances, you know, he would say, "Look, and if you disagree with me, please come to the front of the line. I don't want to be talking to people who agree with me and everything. I want us to try to collectively try to hash out what we think the truth is so that we can both learn from this." Right? And um uh you know, the fact that we you know, sadly, I think it's going to place a chilling effect on this kind of open discourse and learning with each other for a period of time. And that's what I'm saying is like our reaction to that has to be kind of allergic like no, we're not going to let that happen. In fact, we're going to do more of this going forward. So, um, yeah, I'll I'll I'll I'll I'll say I thought he was an amazing individual. This kid was 31 years old, never graduated college, built this entire business, American Turning Point, on his own, had a had a beautiful wife, two kids, great family guy. But what amazed me about him was is that he had an amazing ability to tap facts. He was very well read, very understood. He understood very I mean you could ask him a question on virtually anything whether it was philosophy or politics or or religion. And you know he could quote you scripture from the Bible from the from the Tran to you know to Buddhist you know it was amazing how much knowledge that that young gentleman had at at 31 years of age and just and not to have a college degree he was just absolutely a phenomenal individual very very smart and just as a human being it's it's a tragic loss of life. All right. And and again, whatever your your position is of him, I think we can all agree that uh you know, killing a young father uh for you know, views, his views is is a something that hopefully we can all agree as a society is is not acceptable. That is not something that we want here. That that's a tragedy and that we should do everything we can to try to not have that be repeated in the future. So, here's where here's where I'm go with all this, which is um look, uh you know, this ties together a whole bunch of dots that I feel like have been building. And a big one was the interview I did with um Greg Lucian, the coddling of the American mind, which is, you know, when you uh overprotect uh your people from uh adversity in life and challenges. Um they they don't develop the mature mindset that says, "Okay, you know what? these things aren't existential threats to me and I can learn that people have different ideas and I can be challenged and I can still, you know, come out okay with that and I can determine I can self-determine and all that type of stuff. Um the much later in life you're still reacting to this stuff as if it's a physical threat to you. That's why we've talked about college campuses, right? The demands for safe spaces and the cancel culture and that professor said something that I didn't agree with. He's got to be fired, right? All that type of stuff. Um, I think we're starting to kind of feast on the banquet of consequences from all of that here. And look, I get it. You know, there's there's a lot of people hurting uh in this country in a lot of different ways. Um, it's also still, in my opinion, you know, best country in the world and lots of opportunity here for people. Um, but you know, at the base level, Lance, you know, desperate people act desperately. And so I don't want to ignore the fact that you know there isn't a lot of work that we can still do amongst society. And so look um this is a big reason actually why I created thoughtful money which was um if I can help more people feel less financially desperate maybe even help them get to a state of financial prosperity like that's a force for good in the world. that that starts lessening the pressures that people feel and feeling like they have to lash out or do something really really desperate out there. Now, is thoughtful money by itself going to solve all the problems in the world? No, no, no, not at all. But my point is is like when I talk about how we need to step up and say, look, uh, we just can't accept this. Um, like that's I'm going to make two commitments here. That's my first commitment, which is, you know, I'll keep doing this for as long as, you know, I'm able to and folks are willing to watch this channel. Um, you know, I feel like that's a role that I can play at a mass scale, right? Um, which is I can try to help more people get onto a better financial track and give them more opportunities in life and they will hopefully feel less suffering and less desperation to go do something really kind of batshit crazy like we just saw yesterday. Um, Secondly, and and so my ask to all of you would be to say like, hey, you know, how what what role can you play? What what what could you possibly do here? And not all of us can can act on a on a on a more mass level. On a personal level, I was feeling really frustrated yesterday um again just about this and how it was making me feel about the direction of the country. And so I was trying to think um well, what can I do? And I was I was I was uh reflecting on uh the this quote Charles McKay uh the guy that wrote the book the extraordinary popular delusions and the madness of crowds. Um he had a great quote in there and he said men it has been men it has been well said think in herds. It will be seen that they go mad in herds while they only recover their senses slowly one by one. Right? And I think at a time like this where the herd is kind of going crazy, um, we have to remember that the way that in which we're going to get through this is to try to help people one by one kind of get to a better a better place and then collectively we can carry ourselves to a better place. So I I I I initially wasn't going to share this because I don't like to kind of make a commitment before I've actually done it. I don't like to make a promise. I like to actually do it and then tell you I've done it. Um, but I was trying to think, okay, so what what what role can I play on an individual level uh that could help out here as no matter how small it might be and as folks know I just recently moved to Nevada. Um, so I decided, you know, well, why don't why don't I just, you know, I've got my own kids. Honestly, I I I I don't feel like I give them enough time given all the work, you know, my crazy work schedule and stuff, but um you know, I basically said, look, why don't why don't one thing I can do is I can try to make the difference in the life of of one less fortunate person out there. And so I reached out to the um Big Brothers Big Sisters organization of uh Northern Nevada and filled out an application and hopefully we'll be matched with some deserving you know kid from a underprivileged background and try to make a difference at least in one person's life going forward and then you know collectively if if if that inspires more people to go do something similar and I don't mean go work with the same organization but I mean just look in your community and say hey what might be I I be able to do to kind of help build common ground, help make things just a little bit better, especially for those who are maybe under pressure. Um, you know, that may be our part of collectively helping the herd regain its senses one by one from here and hopefully avoiding, you know, when it gets dark at night and I really have fears about where the fourth turning could go, you know, hopefully avoiding those types of outcomes. So, anyways, Lance, that's my rant for the day. No, I think that's great. and and uh I've done Big Brothers Big Sisters before and I think that's an awesome organization. Um in fact, I haven't done it a long time, but now that my kids are out of the house, maybe that would be something to look back into as well. Well, I mean, that's right. When we're empty nesters, we got a little bit more bandwidth, right? Yeah. So, yeah, I think that's great. Yeah. All right. Well, look, we'll we'll we'll end it there. Um and, uh we've had some pretty heavy rants recently. I I I it hasn't been planned and I sure wish we didn't have the reasons for, you know, why we picked this one for today. Um hopefully we get to some lighter ones going forward, Lance. Um but um uh you know, again, for turning wise, folks, if you're not familiar what I mean by that term, go check out the interviews I've done with Neil How. Um it's a you know, I think it's a very important framework, especially for the time we're living in. Um and, uh I'll have Neil back on again relatively soon, folks. So I'm sure you know he's got a lot to say about uh you know sort of the acceleration of all these crazy developments that I've just talked about. But uh the most important thing is that we get through it all together and hopefully you know thoughtful Monday be one of the ways in which you know those of us who collectively participate in these uh these videos can try to get through it all with each other's support. All right, with that being said, if um you think the best way to regain any sanity you've been losing is to continue to watch Lance Roberts on this channel week in and week out from here on out, please let them know that by hitting the like button and then clicking on the subscribe button below as well as that little bell icon right next to it. Um, if you would like to get some help from a professional financial adviser in trying to figure out how to navigate your wealth through the road ahead, especially if it follows the course that Lance has outlined for us here that he thinks might be the likeliest path. um highly recommend that most people watching this video get that help from a good professional financial adviser, but particularly one that understands and takes into account the macro issues that we talk about on this channel. If you've got a good one who's doing that for you, great. Stick with them. If not, then consider talking to one of the financial adviserss that Thoughtful Money endorses. These are the firms you see with me on this channel week in and week out. Uh perhaps you might even want to talk to Lance and his team there at RAA. So to reach out to them, just fill out the very short form at thoughtfulmoney.com and the firms will be in touch with you quickly thereafter. Um lastly, just a reminder that ThoughtfulMoney's fall online conference is coming up fast. Uh it's just a little over a month away at this point, Saturday, October 18th. Don't worry if you can't watch live. Everybody who registers will get sent uh a replay video of the entire event, all the presentations, all the live Q&As's. Um, and um, we are still offering it at the low early bird price discount, the lowest discount we're able to offer for this conference. So, I want to make sure as many people get that lowest price as possible. So, if you haven't bought your ticket yet, go to thoughtfulmoney.com/conference and buy it now. And if you are a premium subscriber to our Substack, don't forget to check out uh, your email inbox, look for the code I've sent you that you can use to get an additional $50 off of that conference. The faculty continues to come along just great. It looks like it's going to be our best uh faculty ever and from a timeliness standpoint seemed like it's going to be the most timely one we've ever done. Uh all right, Lance, as usual, my friend, so great uh seeing you talking with you. Um y real quick, uh hope everything's going as best can be hoped at home for you. Yeah. Yeah. Um and so by the way, we forgot to tell people that we recorded this on Thursday. Uh you're right. We totally forgot that. I'm sorry at the beginning. Yeah. Yeah. And that's because tomorrow is my wife's first chemo treatment. So, we're going to go uh we've got to go a lot of prep work today and but the the big journey starts tomorrow. So, but that's why we were a day early and so some of the data is still filtering through for this week and so we'll catch up next Friday and get it get up to date on everything. Okay. Um well, look, best of wishes for you and and especially for your wife going through that, Lance. And uh while I'm sure um you know, it's a journey uh you'd rather not be on. Uh it's great to hear that that she is getting the swift help that she needs. Yeah. Oh, no. We're we're look, we're we're we, you know, just have been overwhelmed by the number of thoughts and prayers and wishes from, you know, your viewers, you know, people that follow me as well. We've just been completely overwhelmed with that. That's that's been fantastic. But look, we're very optimistic. We believe in our faith and we're walking our faith and we believe that, you know, the outcome of this will be what it needs to be. And so, we're just taking this one day at a time. All right. Well, lots of love, uh, support and prayers from everybody here, Lance. And, um, yeah, go go do everything you need to do. We'll see you next week when you come back. Um, if you got to attend other things as well, don't worry. We'll get Mike or some other one to fill in. Yeah, we're we're good. So, no, I'll definitely be here next Friday. All right, but we're all behind you guys a thousand%. All right. Um, all right. And with that, everybody else, thanks so much for watching.

Is Worry Dead? Nearly All Assets Are Rising Now | Lance Roberts

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