What do you get for the market that has everything? Investors got a dovish Fed turn in a steady economy, with stocks at a record, credit markets blissed out, capital investment running in torrents into the economy. What could be next, as bubble talk percolates? New column, free with email signup.

A recent shift among market pros: Framing the prospect of a runaway AI bubble with warmth rather than alarm. By most measures the wild extremes of the tech mania 25+ years ago aren’t here, and may never arrive, but are now being invoked by bullish investors rather than doomers. Weekend column…

What do you get for the market that has everything? Investors got a dovish Fed turn in a steady economy, with stocks at a record, credit markets blissed out, capital investment running in torrents into the economy. What could be next, as bubble talk percolates? New column, free with email signup.

So much criticism and dissent surrounding Fed Chair Powell these days. But when he said, "A reasonable base case is that the effects on inflation will be relatively short-lived," all can celebrate that he continues to pronounce "short-lived" correctly, with a long "i."

With Mega Tech looking a bit extended as yields/ the dollar sit at 2025 lows, the market's trying to front-run the Fed-rate-cut playbook of rotating into lower-quality small caps. (Fed days tend to have multiple feints and jukes before/after the decision, players will find something to play...)

The S&P 500 index futures tick to four sixes.. The generational low in the cash index in March of 2009 was 666.

The bull market believers have everything they think they want: An easy path to an easier Fed, gain without much pain, another AI spending wave to ride. Next stop euphoria or time for a rethink? New column. Free to read with email registration.

The bull market believers have everything they think they want: An easy path to an easier Fed, gain without much pain, another AI spending wave to ride. Next stop euphoria or time for a rethink? New column. Free to read with email registration.

The stock market’s resilience shows how hard it is to dislodge an entrenched macro narrative affirmed by longer-term asset-price trends: A Fed about to trim rates into a steady economy and a generational AI capex bonanza. Still a plausible setup? Weekend column, free to read with email signup.

The stock market’s resilience shows how hard it is to dislodge an entrenched macro narrative affirmed by longer-term asset-price trends: A Fed about to trim rates into a steady economy and a generational AI capex bonanza. Still a plausible setup? Weekend column, free to read with email signup.

A weaker-than-hoped jobs report, Nvidia rolling over, Treasury yields sliding toward the "growth scare" zone, Bitcoin flagging. Yet the market executed the silver linings playbook, rotating deftly, fixated on Fed help, leaving the S&P 500 within 1% of a record. Delusion or durability? New column.

"Shares of exchange operator CBOE pull back sharply as the Powerball jackpot's growth to $1.7 billion draws speculators away from short-dated options trades..."

Happy 10th anniversary of Disney shares' first reaching today's price. A pretty rough run, dating to the peak of the pay TV ecosystem and the glory days of superhero box-office magic. And yet, Disney's been the best of the bunch from legacy media over that span, until Fox recently edged ahead.

"Valuation is not a timing tool," everyone says as they avoid fighting the trend or the Fed. And it's hard to disagree. Maybe just a coincidence, then, that the Nasdaq 100 during this bull market keeps getting repelled at 28x forward earnings, allowing prices to reset and profits to catch up...

This observation predates broadly legalized sports betting, but the sentiment has only grown stronger with every football season since...

Another wobble to start a new month. In August the initial stumble tested a level from a couple weeks prior and created the low for the month. Maybe a bit too much to ask that it repeats so neatly in September, but can't rule it out...

A two-day round trip in the S&P 500, each day about the same range, one phantom closing drop, then a sudden closing pop. Market doing its rotational-churn thing digesting Friday's rally, held in place by impending Nvidia results, finding little in particular to reprice in the Trump-Lisa Cook flap...

Intel shares finish down 1%, and 5% off the morning high, as investors read the fine print and digest the implications of the government turning a grant made by Congress into a 10% equity stake in the company...

As I've said in years past when the population of all mutual funds and ETFs exceeded the number of stocks, raising alarm about this is a bit like worrying that there are more books than words. www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

The constant comparisons between today's AI-centric bull market and the late-'90s boom-to-bubble phase is some mix of logical, interesting and beside the point. The current extremes in market concentration, equity valuation and growth outperformance vs. value are the closest rhymes with 1995-2000.

The Street's "dispersion engine" is revving hard today. When the tape stalls and the window opens for some sort of pullback, the market in recent years first tries to escape through mechanical rotation. It sometimes works...

Market setup for the week...

The market wants a Fed rate cut, but doesn’t want to need it. Indexes at records, valuations full, crypto melting up, credit spreads drum-tight, buzzy IPOs ripping on day one. As in the old Elvis Costello song, Wall Street has “a mouthful of ‘Much obliged’ and a handful of ‘Gimme.’” New column.

The market wants a Fed rate cut, but doesn’t want to need it. Indexes at records, valuations full, crypto melting up, credit spreads drum-tight, buzzy IPOs ripping on day one. As in the old Elvis Costello song, Wall Street has “a mouthful of ‘Much obliged’ and a handful of ‘Gimme.’” New column.

The line breached after two days defending it...

The trading gremlins and bots still trying to make this line mean something so far today....

Textbook ghost-in-the-machine, fill-the-gap stuff happening here for now...

Just a day ago, the man publicly ranted about his regret for having taken a Treasury Secretary's advice in nominating a market-friendly, institutionalist Fed chair, maybe unsurprising he's not eager to repeat that move...

Nailed it...

Excited to start reading this excavation of '80s New York by my old friend Jon Mahler. For those of us who remember that time here, it's been hard to escape the way the characters and fights and media culture and preoccupations of those days still animate today's reality, for better and worse...

Where Wall Street starts the week...

Weekend column and thread on how the market continues to sidestep macro, policy and seasonal concerns…

A week after a brutal payroll report that hinted at a tapped consumer and trapped Federal Reserve, stocks are back near records, volatility at ebb tide and some are calling off the August hurricane watch. Time to hit the beach or board the windows? New CNBC column, free to read with email signup.

"We can drive it home with one headlight..."

The tactical investment-advisor crowd represented by NAAIM took equity exposure back toward the top of the range in the latest week.

In the two months since Circle Internet Group's (CRCL) IPO, the stock's average daily price move has exceeded 8%. Which, of course, is not enough juice for some traders (and ETF peddlers). Faintly ironic that it's a "stablecoin" company...

How long will we remain in the "Everybody wins" phase of the AI buildout? Microsoft and Meta are shoveling so much cash into capex as their stock prices rise that their forward free-cash-flow yields have fallen below 2%. Nvidia, collecting much of that capex spend, now yields more in FCF terms...

This, from 11 days ago, was not wrong, but it surely captured a ripening consensus priced into markets that "this might not hurt much after all..."

Quick update, the #MysteryBroker says he went to a short-term Sell today on the S&P 500, details when available... bsky.app/profile/mich...

Hard to tell if the market's tired, bored or simply resting when it gets into these slow-mo grind phases. "Boring is bullish" in markets, all else equal, though this plausibly looks like a rally approaching a near-term apogee. Some of the wild frothy stuff cooling. Earnings reactions net negative.

The Dow's annualized total return since this picture was taken is exactly 10%, just as we knew it would be. But did we know that three-button suits would never come back into style again?

Speculative stampedes into the racy, gamy parts of the market have accelerated. Time to "fear the froth" heading into a seasonally tougher month with plenty of good news priced in? Or is it the kind of “rational recklessness” that helps energize a bull market? New column, free with email signup.

Just as the speculative froth emerges, purveyors of prudence start tut-tutting those buying the junk and reviving the memes. But given the force of the market rally and societal mood, should we expect different? A risk to the broader market, or “just the right amount of wrong?” Weekend column.

Speculative stampedes into the racy, gamy parts of the market have accelerated. Time to "fear the froth" heading into a seasonally tougher month with plenty of good news priced in? Or is it the kind of “rational recklessness” that helps energize a bull market? New column, free with email signup.

Still a split market, wild lottery-ticket meme nonsense raging while vanilla investors show little euphoria and core indexes are maybe a little stretched but in an orderly rotational uptrend. We’re in a different spot from mid-2020 in many ways but these observations from then might be relevant…

Erratic flows from the adrenaline junkies, options-buying stampedes, headlong short squeezes, whippy mean-reversion action. Like clockwork once a strong multi-month rally ripens. Biggest YTD winners in the S&P 500 getting clipped, in what has so far been a benign pause in the main indexes...

This crypto ratio stuff is like asserting that Matchbox 20 is properly worth exactly four Maroon 5's, even though the numbers have no substantive relationship to anything in the real word or to one another.

As midsummer sets in and the trauma of the springtime sell-off fades, the markets are whispering, “Relax.” Tariffs? Same threats, new deadline. Fed? Rate cut in sight even with blissed-out financial conditions. Will markets soon go looking for something to fret about again? New column.

As midsummer sets in and the trauma of the springtime sell-off fades, the markets are whispering, “Relax.” Tariffs? Same threats, new deadline. Fed? Rate cut in sight even with blissed-out financial conditions. Will markets soon go looking for something to fret about again? New column.

Let's hear from any surviving members of the "All gaps get filled" hive looking for Nvidia to go back and tag $30.61 from May 2023 before they can trust this move...