Don't Chase This Rally | Lance Roberts

If you missed this rally, I wouldn't buy here. I would wait for a pull back to a decent level of support, work off some of the short-term overbought condition to add exposure to your portfolio. You know, it, you know, the rallies happened. It was very fast. It was very vicious. My point is is that the market is going to give you another opportunity to invest capital if you miss this rally.

Right. And what I'm taking from you is don't chase this right now.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You don't want to chase markets.

Welcome to Thoughtful Money. I'm Thoughtful Money founder and your host. Welcoming you here at the end of the week for another weekly market recap featuring my good friend, the Anglopile and portfolio manager extraordinaire, Lance Roberts. Lance, how you doing?

Okay, I'm gonna have to ask you Anglopile. I do not know that word. Uh that is somebody who is a big fan of England and all things English, British. You were just over there in the UK last week. How was the trip?

Uh I am not a fan of all things British.

Way to go. You just you just like totally, you know, insulted 4% of our audience here.

Yeah. No, no, no. I I said no. I didn't say everything British. I just said not a fan of all things British. I do not understand mushy peas. I'm not Okay, so first of all, I'm not a huge pea fan to start with, but I don't understand why you mash them up. I just I I and just serve them with fish and chips and all kinds of stuff. So, um I I'm not a big fan of mushy peas, but no, the the trip was great. Um, as I as I said before, my wife's aunt had gotten married to a British gentleman and all of his family, his kids, everybody, they still live in England. So, they had the wedding in the US and then they had the reception at a place called Lake Windermir uh, in England, which was on this really beautiful lake. They

Sounds fancy.

Yeah, it was great. And so, it's an old manor. It's like 200 years old. and everybody there was like 40 people, you know, staying in this manor and so we would have, you know, breakfast and stuff. You walk about a/4 mile into town and there's a a a marina there with boats that go out on tours on the lake and all kinds of stuff and then you there's town. So, we would just walk into town, have coffee, get a Danish, you know, whatever, kind of do some window shopping. It was very nice. The weather was beautiful the whole time. We got very lucky with the weather. It was supposed to be, you know, kind of typical UK weather and raining, but it was absolutely beautiful blue skies. Best part of this whole this whole trip was is in the backyard. So, you come out of the manor and there's this big kind of sitting area and it overlooks the lake. Well, on both sides of this lake are these what they call mountains. They're just really, really big hills. It's it the the lake is embedded inside of this kind of ravine with these hills on both sides of this lake. And the lake's very elongated. So like it's a 30-minute trip. You can get in a boat and 30 minutes away there's another town you can go to and and go visit and have lunch then take the boat ride back. So what's interesting though is is that we'll be sitting out there and about every hour to hour and 45 minutes. There will be three Euro fighters come screaming low-level flight through this ravine. This is is like Top Gun Maverick, right? Training for the mission. They would come through doing low-level flight training down this ravine across the lake. So, you get this air show the whole time we were there. It was an absolute ball. I'm I'm a military freak anyway. So, I love I think everybody else was annoyed by the sound, but

I was going to say I'm sure a lot of people are like would totally ruin the pastoral tranquility of it, but the Texan here is rooting for it.

It was great for me. I loved it. So, but yeah, it was a lot of fun. But no, it was great. We, you know, we took a train from London. We rode the train from London over to Grandanthm. We met our son there. Uh, he picked us up, drove us to Windmir. Um, and so we just spent it was mostly there to see our son and and kind of visit the the the new family that we had met before. Um, so I now have a much bigger extended family I had no idea about. So but I thought one of the funniest things is that the last night we were the Thursday night, one of the last nights we were there, they wanted to have a a dress up party, like a costume party for everybody. And so there's only probably eight Americans in this whole this whole party. and and the rest of them are all people that live in, you know, kind of in in England or in Scotland very close by.

And so everybody dressed up. There was only one person dressed up as Aussie Osborne. Everybody else was dressed up as an American character of some sort. It was the Blues Brothers. It was Top Gun Maverick and Goose, Indiana Jones. So, you know, it's funny that their favorite characters are all American. That's what

the American culture is infecting over there. Well, well, I got to ask. What did you go as?

Um, I went as me. Um, because my wife and I by the time we got there, we were so tired and all kind of stuff. We just didn't pack for a costume. So, we were the oddballs out.

All right. Well, gosh. Uh, so it sounded kind of like a Downtown Abbey experience. And you were kind of the uh, you know, the the rich American cousin transplant that came on in and infected everybody with your Americanism.

Oh, no. So, yeah. It's funny. No, they that that side of the family

sounds like they're already infected.

They're very wealthy. So, yeah, they

Yeah, I pel in comparison.

Okay. So, your your aunt married well is what you're saying.

Yes, she married very well. Yes.

All right. Um I'm just thinking you were there the American cousin there. Um the American cousin random trivia point was the play uh that Abraham Lincoln was shot at. You probably know.

Exactly.

Other than that, how was the play?

Yeah. Other than that, how was the play? All right. Well, look, other than that, um, glad you did a great trip. Uh, a lot's been going on while you've been gone. And actually, a lot is going on as we are speaking right now. So, um, forgive us folks. We're, you know, recording this, um, morning time on Friday. So, when you see this on Saturday, um, there might be a few more developments that have gone on either in the world or, uh, in the markets. But um you know hour or so before Lance and I have gotten together here uh Iran has announced that the uh straight hormuz is in their words open for completely open at this point in time. Uh markets seem to really I mean they've been warming up all week but they seem to be really believing now that there may very well be an end to this war. They've certainly priced in the end of it Lance right because we're we're at alltime highs on the S&P. Um, and I definitely want to walk through the technicals with you to see how much legs you think this this um, bounce is having in the market. Um, but there's a lot going on. I mean, we can maybe start to have a little bit of optimism here that this Iran conflict may actually have an end in sight here. And, um, uh, like I said, so far party in the market. So, I guess where do you want to start on this, Lance? Do you want to do you want to start TA? Start with the geopolitical.

I think the first place to start is is that all your your viewers need to thank me personally for going out of town because apparently when I went out of town that's what sparked the rally. So

yeah, I thought you were going to say because you were out there actually it was a clandestine uh trip to negotiate the final terms on this. It recruited you for your your your negotiating skills.

No, it's it's just funny because normally when I travel the markets crash. As soon as I try to go on vacation, something bad happens typically and and so I'm trying trying to deal with clients and everything else while I'm traveling. And this time, the market was just rallying the whole time. I was like, "This is great."

Yeah.

Well, on on that part, I mean, the markets really have been sniffing uh an end to this this conflict before the end of the conflict has has arrived here. Do you think the markets I mean we don't know for sure but I guess to my question is before you left leading up to before you left you know we've been looking at the the technicals and the markets had been below basically the 200 day moving average and you were talking about depending on how long they stay down there history shows that the you know markets then perform pretty poorly the longer it stays down and you had said if it pops above we're going to sell into strength which I believe you and Mike did do initially. What are you doing now? Is have is is are your models giving you an all clear at this point in time or are you still on the defensive?

So, no, no, we're we're actually full offense now. So, um couple things. Once you remembered when I guess it was 3 four weeks ago I wrote an article um talking about the 200 day moving average and the result of that study was basically is that if the market stays below the 200 day moving average for longer than four weeks then your forward returns over the next 369 12 months are typically negative not not drastically negative but typically negative you know 3 4%. However, if the market gets above the 200 day moving average with below that time uh less than four weeks, your forward returns are very very good. 3 months, 6 months, 9 months, 12 months are very positive and typically you're up double digits by the time you get to 12 months. We were below the 200 day moving average for 3 weeks. So when when I actually left on vacation, uh the markets popped on Monday and we started adding exposure. So, this is not this not this past Monday, the Monday before this, we started adding exposure. So, I'm sure that Mike was talking to you about our trades last week.

So, we closed out we had short hedges on our portfolio. We took those off. Um, we started adding exposure to the meggaap names because the mega cap names were the ones that were most beaten up. And it was interesting because everybody was chasing chasing value stocks in name, but those really weren't value stocks. they were very expensive uh fundamentally tech stocks have had a huge correction in valuations but the strongest rate of earnings growth and forward earnings growth is still very strong and actually being improved right now. We talked about I think the last time I you and I were together we talked about the this you know kind of phenomenon where valuations were and the markets were correcting sharply. We corrected valuations on the S&P by 18% because the P was coming down, but E the E was going up and analysts were getting very excited about this stuff. So, uh, starting really last Tuesday, um, we started increasing exposure. We bought more this week. Uh, so we're back to full target weights in our portfolio now. And, um, you know, there's going to be a a pullback here. Um, and we can talk about kind of the technicals in a minute, but there will be a pullback here to either the recent breakout to all-time highs or maybe the 50-day moving average, but that's going to be where you want to start buying the market, not selling it.

Okay. Although you said um start buying the market, you you guys actually are buying the market right now, right?

Well, no, we already bought it. Yeah.

we'll add more on a pullback, but if you missed this rally, I wouldn't buy here. I would wait for a pull back to a decent level of support, work off some of the short-term overbought condition to add exposure to your portfolio. You know, it, you know, the rallies happened. It was very fast. It was very vicious. Um, yeah, the NASDAQ's been up for 13 days in a row. That's one of the longest runs in history. Uh, the S&P put on 12 days now of back-to-back advances. That's one of the longest stretches since 1950. Ford returns from those two environments are very, very good. um 100% win rate over 12 months and 24 months in in general.

Okay. All right. Just I'm I'm sure you'd want me to say this. Um from the data you've looked at 100%. There's no guarantees in life. Doesn't mean it's going to happen this time around, but the odds look good, right?

Statistics and it and it doesn't mean that you're not going to have bumps along the way. I fully expect this summer we're going to have another 5 to 10% correction uh heading into midterm elections and then you'll have an end of the end of the year run. That's just normal statistics and how markets work uh particularly in midterm election year. So there's you're my point is is that the market is going to give you another opportunity to invest capital if you miss this rally.

Right. My and what I'm taking from you is don't chase this right now.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You don't want to chase markets that are have moved for and again you remember when we were talking two weeks ago um you know I was telling you that techn technically the markets were extremely oversold. Bearish sentiment was extremely high. investors were very offside. We had record short volume in the markets. Put options were running at like the third highest level on record. That those are all contrarian indicators. That was the the the gasoline on the logs. And all you needed was some type of catalyst. And as soon as they started talking about a peace deal, boom, this market was was positioned for a huge rally. And if you remember two weeks ago, you and I were talking and you said, "Well, if you get a peace deal, what does that mean for the markets?" I said, "Hey, we're probably going to get a 10 to 15% run." And you were like, "Really?" And I was like, "Yeah, really?" And we're up 12% now.

So, yeah. And I I want to I want to give you props there. So, I'm I'm actually looking at the the thumbnails of our recent weekly market recap videos.

So, that one you're talking about um uh that thumbnail, that video was titled Markets About to Scream Higher, question mark. Um and then with Mike uh last week, uh the title was have stocks bottomed. And so you you guys were basically saying, "Hey, it is looking like this thing." You were saying, "It's looking like this thing could is coiled here potentially." And then Mike was saying, "It looks like the bottom's behind us." And what's interesting, I just want to note this is um you know, we talk about how get a lot of feedback from people who are like, "Oh, you're just so bearish all the time." We're not. And these are great examples of that. But what's so funny is those videos are watched notably less than the ones that are more concerned, right? and and I don't try to play the clickbait game or things like that, but it is so interesting that there's so many live voices that are like, "You got to be more positive. You got to bring more bulls on." And I have and when I do, people don't watch nearly as much and I'm still going to bring them on because it's the right thing to do, right? But it's just so funny that when people are kind of, you know, some people are screaming for more of when you actually give it to them, they don't want it.

Well, you know, it's just it's just the same with me, right? You know, I get a lot of, you know, you know, people that watch me here with you and then they get on my ex feed as an example and they make comments on my ex feed. It's like, "Oh, you're just a permable." I'm like, if you read our work, I mean, we've been writing articles for weeks about breaks the 200 day moving average, what the risk are, you know, what the risk is to the market right now, uh, why breath is a concern. you know, we we write a lot of stuff about risk management and and kind of more the bearish side of the market because our job is to protect capital for our clients and and and navigate these market events when they occur. But what we're also looking for, this is one of the the the the biggest challenges that's been over the LA I think I think what I'm about to say I think is the biggest problem for investors that lean into that more bearish view. Um, I've been watching a lot of people on X as an example and they're they're they're and and you interviewed a couple of these guys in particular and they're like, "Oh, this, you know, this straight of her moose closing, it's going to lead to the next financial crisis and and all this stuff." And there's no evidence to support that at all. And we've had oil crisises before these things occur. But what these what these bearish predictions of you know presume is is that this is going to remain this way indefinitely and the markets are just not even aware of what's going on. And that's a very flawed view of analysis. So if you're doing that type of analysis, it's a very flawed way to look at things because markets are not static. They're dynamic. And every day every right now this moment there are millions of people in the markets and there are bearish people and there are bullish people and they are both buying and selling in this market right now today and every second of every day these buyers and sellers are in the market and that's what's setting the price. So markets, so this whole decline that we had, concerns over Iran, the the price of oil, the the closure of the straight of Hermoose, all that, the markets were actively pricing that risk into the markets. That's why we had this valuation correction in the markets of 18%. That's why we had the decline in prices. The markets were pricing in these expectations of what that could mean for the markets, for the economy, for the Federal Reserve, all that. So as soon as that weight cleared, they then started pricing out. Oh, now with this reversing, oil's down to $80 a barrel now from a hundred. That's going to be a big relief on consumers. That's going to help earnings growth. The economy is going to help that's going to help the economy pick up here. That's going to bring down inflationary pressures. Uh that'll allow the Fed to cut rates. That's why the market's rallying because now we're pricing in what the expectation is of this. So the so the big thing and this is why you and I focus so much on technicals every week. The technicals are what is telling us what the market is saying. This is what the market's thinking. Pay attention to that. Pay if you pay less attention to these, you know, end of the world doom and gloom scenarios, you'll perform much better in your investments over time.

Well, I Okay, so a couple things. One, I I I think that's in general a truism, right? Which is that emotional narrative-based decision-m is not nearly as good as the the framework that we talk about a lot in this channel, right? Just um now that being said, uh you know, the the market is the conglomeration of all the inputs that go into it, right? So, when the market's down 18%. That's because there are some people who think the market's going to go down 90% and there's some people who think it's going to go up 40% and the market's finding middle ground. Right. That's right. When there's a buyer and a seller, everybody thinks they're right. So,

exactly. Each side thinks they're right. That's kind of where I'm going with this, which is um I think I know and individual that that you're referencing with that. Um because I think most people I've had on have it's been a spectrum. Um but um what is interesting is is you know one or two of the people who I've I've interviewed who have been more dire you know there's conversations you have on camera than there's conversations you have off camera

and um at least one person um who was quite negative about where this you know could have been going. Um I I think had a lot of faith in their sources. So they had sources which they claimed were, you know, close to the military in the military that were giving them, you know, information that was making them believe that things was were very different in in a worse way than what we were reading about in in the headlines. And um so I I just wanted to say part of the story is um it's not just beliefs per se um but it's also information sources. And Lance, I'm sure you're like me, right, where you've gotten hit from all sides from people when you make an objective comment about where the war's going. Everybody's got their choice information sources and then they're all over the map, right? So if you say something that contradicts what someone's trusted quote unquote trusted sources are telling them, you often times get blowback from them. So I think one of the lessons to come out of this is be very judicious about what sources you believe. And I would say for everybody, you know, as we talk about often, like don't just live in your echo chamber. Like actively look at other sources and if they're contradicting what what the sources you like are saying, really try to do the work to say, okay, well, look,

is is there truth in there? And is is are my sources biased or wrong in some way? And do I need to kind of, you know, evaluate or equilibrate from from where I'm my current position? and you know your research may lead you to believe no the other sources are wrong or hey my sources maybe not might might not be perfect right so the point is there is really try to do the work and that's one of the things I do on this program is I don't just bring on people who have the same opinion about everything and we're going to talk about some of this in a little bit here um really do try to to listen to a range of people I try to do a good job on this this this particular platform but I say don't just listen to this platform either listen to a whole bunch read from a whole bunch of different sources So, um, you know, keeping that open mind and really trying not to, um, get too colored, um, by a, the sources that you prefer to listen to, and b, just know that if you're on media these days, most of it's digital. There's an algorithm at work, too. So, be very mindful about what's getting pushed at you. Um, you know, I'm not necessarily saying there's a bias against it, but it is an equation that is looking at what you normally look at, and it's just trying to feed you more of it,

right? No, no, confirmation bias is the biggest problem we have. And that's why if you if you read our work, so if you follow me on X as an example, uh, sorry, on Substack at Lance Roberts or on Real Investment Advice, we publish two blogs a week. We publish a newsletter on Saturday. Mike publishes an article on Wednesday. And when we're writing, you'll always notice that we we present a bull case and a bare case. We say, "This is what's going on in the markets. Here's the bull case. Here's the bear case." because we're always trying to evaluate both sides of the argument because again, I have a lot of sources that I rely on, but the the biggest source that I rely on on a regular basis is raw data. Just give me the raw data. Let me do the analysis from that data. And and so what's really important is to your point, it's really easy to get sucked into confirmation bias. I'm only going to listen to this group of people because I think they're really smart, but they're all the same and they're all giving you the same narrative. The world's going to end. the debt collapse is coming, you know, it's the end of fiat currency, you know, whatever it is. And that leads you down a pathway of negativity. And negativity feels good, right? As as human beings, it's weird, but we love train wrecks, right? So, you know, we, you know, we we slow down to look at car wrecks. So, as we're driving down the freeway, we we'll stop to watch a train wreck. You know, we want to know what the latest plane crash is. We're bi we're inherently biased towards tragedy. and and the bearish case always sounds very intelligent and there's nothing wrong with the bare case. It is very intelligent in a lot of cases, but the markets respond differently. And this is what I'm saying. It's like it's okay to have this, you know, this fundamentally bearish case about the outlook of the world. That's okay. And eventually it may happen. Um, you know, we may have a debt crisis someday. We may have uh, you know, lose fiat currency status someday. That may that may happen. But when is the question. If it's 20 years from now and you've only got 10 years to your retirement horizon, that's a huge difference. And if you've underperformed the markets for, you know, being bearish, expecting this big event to occur, as Peter Lynwood said, more more money's been lost in preparation for a crash than during the crash itself.

Yeah.

And so again, just, you know, focus on making that's why I'm here with Adam every week. I'm not bullish. I'm not bearish. We we we manage the markets. We manage risk. That's all we do. And the markets are inherently biased to the upside 80% of the time. So we give that appropriate weight that the markets are going to look through these events and they are going to resolve these events by correcting valuations which we just had one of those events. We had one last year in April with a tax day situation and then markets are going to come back. And so we want to make sure that we're growing our client wealth. And you want to make sure you're growing your wealth. It's okay to hedge and to prepare for this end of the world event whenever it occurs,

but don't bet your whole portfolio on it.

Right. And and you just did that, right? I mean, you guys put a short you put shorts on your portfolio. I mean, not that long ago.

But you took them off because you know what you were looking for finally happened. And as I remember you saying, you know, whatever it was three, four weeks ago, you said, "I hope I lose money on this hedge because it means my major position is doing better." And of course, that's how it's played out. So all I want to the the little cod I just want to put on this is what you were saying about the importance of looking at technicals and what the market is saying. Um, you know, I'm a big fan of fundamental investing in the long run. Although, you know, any fundamentalist investors lost a lot of hair over the past couple of decades,

both.

Um, but at the end of the day, in in the present, all that matters is what the market thinks, right? And so, you can have a really good logic fundamentally, and to your point, Lance, it might actually prove out in the long run, but it doesn't matter until the market thinks it matters. And so it's really important especially when you're in an environment like the past, you know, week or so where there's still a lot of negativity in the news and in the headlines, but the market starts reacting as if things are are improving. And you really got to ask yourself at that point in time, is the market pricing in something that just the headline readers are not seeing yet? And that seems to have been the case. Now, did the markets really know that we were this close to a peace deal? Um I don't know but clearly the the collective wisdom of the market got a lot more optimistic about what seven 10 days ago right

no absolutely and and again you know this is you know again the the point that you're making and it's absolutely right is is look we just need to make our goal is to make money to grow our wealth so that we can financially be in a position to retire or to take care of our families or whatever we want to do

stay retired

stay retireed tired and you know you know all these all these things are are out there and there's there's a lot of this stuff that just kind of weighs on investors but this is why investors over time underperform markets because we wind up selling lows buying highs I mean how many how many investors were selling the bottom two weeks ago because they thought you know this was going to explode into some type of massive recessionary environment now the now the opposite of that is we're having this big rally and my feed is just filled with, oh, it's just a short covering rally. We're going to go right back down to the lows. That's possible. I'm not going to deny that's not true because it is possible. If this whole deal falls apart and tomorrow the straits closed again and we're launching missiles back into Iran, this market's going to sell off. Absolutely, 100% for sure. However, saying that, historically speaking, when the markets rallied back above the 200 day moving average in less than four weeks, you never had a death cross of the 50-day moving average crossing below the 200 day moving average. That didn't occur. The 200 day moving average is sloping higher. It's not flat or declining. That's bullish, by the way. Um the the 50-day moving average is turning back up now. That's bullish in those type environments when you have that kind of sequence of events and improving breadth which we have going on right now. We're at about 60% breath which is good. It's improving from 30% where we were. It's moving in the right direction. Today's a good broad rally in the markets is a good example on Friday here. Normally in those environments you do not get a retest of lows. You do get a pullback to support but you do not test or break the lows. So that's just part of of the risk management of this and and I'm fully we added some positions starter positions in companies that we really like have been wanting to get into. We were able to get into them a lot cheaper and I'm hoping this market gives us a pullback to where I can buy some more of those shares at even a better price. But

okay, do me a favor while you're talking. Can you pull up the S&P here just so we can get the the the technicals out of the way? Um so you're I'm curious. Does your default expectation here um it sounds like it's hey at some point there's going to be a little bit of a pullback right market as you can see here it's just had a string of great days here right classic massive Vbottom here um do you ex what would you expect it to go down to to test support would it be the 50 the 100 the 200

so good that's a great example so this colored bar on the right hand side that's a Fibonacci retracement scale right so what that looks at is the run of the market from the recent low to where we are now. And just assuming that today if the if the market ended where it is right now and tomorrow we started a correction on Monday, right? We started a correction. Um then the first pullback would basically be more or less to this string of of kind of previous highs that we were at. And that's about a 23% retracement from the peak. So on a Fibonacci basis, you're looking for a pullback to around, you know, 6841ish. So, so sorry 6941. Um, but you know, anywhere along these previous tops where the market would pull back, find support there, and then begin to rally, that would be good. Now, I don't think I I'm I don't really think that a pullback to these previous tops is going to be enough to reverse this pretty massive overbought condition we've got going on right now. So, we've had this we were very oversold two weeks ago. Look at that.

Very overbought. Yes. It's been a huge rally and and and I'm gonna I'm gonna show you a little bit longer picture of this here in just a second because it's interesting what's going on.

Okay. Hey, and I just want to interject because um you know I like to uh I like to get my digs on in on you when I can.

Um I also want to, you know, call you out when you're you're right. Um back there at that low, right, the RSI low down there, oversold reading. That pretty much was when we put out that video where you had said markets could scream higher from here. And I think it is hard to describe what they've done as anything other than screaming higher.

Yeah. And and look, I'll be honest. You know, I told you 10 to 15% that was off the cuff at the moment. I I hadn't really thought that through at all. So that was a little bit I really didn't expect a rally of this magnitude. Um it's been pretty it's been really amazing. Again, this is one of the strongest rallies in such a short compressed time frame. We haven't seen a rally like this since the the bottom in 2020 in March of 2020 when the Fed came in with $120 billion a month in QE and the government started sending out stimulus checks.

Is that is that true? Because I feel like the the rally off the liberation day lows was pretty face ripping, too.

It was um but it wasn't nearly as sharp here. Let me let me see. Here's the rally off the the lows. It took it took basically about a month to get to new highs, but it was also a deeper decline to be fair. This was a 20% decline.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. So,

it had a lot further to go for sure. Um, but you know, it was a pretty sharp rally. Um, but again, if you just look at the angle of ascent, it's actually steeper right now.

Okay. But they're both real steep. Hey, real quick. So, if you look on the liberation day rally there, um there is what I believe is called a breakaway gap.

Yes. Right here.

Right there. And it seems like we have the same thing going on in this rally. True.

Yeah. And and two things, too. And so, going back to what I was saying a second ago about people that are predicting this is just a short covering rally. We're going to fade back to the lows. Um kind of a difference. This purple line, this is the 20-day moving average. That 20-day moving average stayed below the 20 and the and and the 50 for a good period of time before it actually recovered back after liberation day. Again, deeper decline. Got to keep that in mind. But once it once the 20 crossed above the 200 day moving average, it stayed above it the rest of the time. And we're crossing above that 200 day moving average right now.

Okay.

So again, just now again, that doesn't mean we're not going to get a pullback. And I I suspect that we're going to get a pull back to the black line, which is basically the 100 day moving average. That's going to be first real Tesla support. The 50 days is right below it. So, there's a cluster of support right here. And I think a pullback to that level um would certainly be should be expected. And of course, when that happens, the media is going to say, see, it was all a short covering rally. The bare market's back, blah, blah, blah. No, that's just going to be a pullback to work off this overbought condition. And I was going to show you this here in a second. remember we were talking for about a month and a half uh about this negative divergence in relative strength. The market was going up and relative strength was falling. Um you had this negative trend in relative strength that we've completely taken out now. So this is the first time that relative strength has been above 70 since going back to September of last year.

Yeah.

So

which isn't shocking only because we've been stuck in this trading range since basically the end of September and now we're finally broken out above it. Right.

Exactly. But that's very bullish by the way.

Yeah.

So that of that downtrend and and relative strength is is very bullish.

Okay. So lots that could happen here and there's still non-market developments that need to be um finalized one way or the other. But it sounds like your default expectation here, Lance, is yeah, we'll probably get a short-term pullback in the near term, but that um this is the start of a new bull trend and that um

I would say yes.

no, no, no. Disagree, disagree. This is not the start of a new bull trend. We didn't break the bull trend, right? This is just a continuation of

Okay. Sorry. The resumption of the bull trend.

No, no, that's that's a very important distinction. you know uh October 2022 we had a 25% correction in the markets we had broken the bullish trend right so that when we bottom in October 22 that was the start of a new bullish trend this is just a continuation so there is a there so there is a distinction that I think is important to for people

okay important distinction but but rubber meets the road

I you your default expectation is higher prices ahead after this

correct

likely near-term pullback now obviously that could change, right? Things worsen in Iran, you know, like

something else happens.

Yeah. Or something else happens. But, um, and that's why I said we kind of have to see what happens with some of these non-market uncertainties that are still out there. But, um, you it sounds like you are, you've already started, you know, reloading. Um, you'll load back up even further if you get this pullback. Um, positioning for a nice continuation of of the run and higher prices from here. You're nodding as I'm saying all this.

Yeah.

Yeah. Absolutely. Okay. All right. So, you know, good news then for investors uh who are looking for future gains ahead from here. Um and if you are completely So, let me ask you this, Lance. For somebody who

uh was concerned about what was going on with the war and really went to cash and hunkered down, right? When went full risk off, what would your advice to them be right now?

Um I would start I would So, let's say let's just pick a number. Uh, if I had $100,000 in cash right now, um, what would I do with it? I would take I I would think about it in either, you know, six months or a year, however fast you want to go. And I would take that fraction. So, let's say you want to get allocated back to the markets over the next six months. Take one six of your money and buy stuff today. I would I would look for companies that have had a big correction recently coming off support. Um, if you're buying individual equities, if you're just buying an S&P 500 ETF. That's fine. But if you're looking for individual companies, buy companies with strong earnings growth, have strong earnings expectations. We're right in the midst of earning season right now. So, we're about to get a a buttload of earnings coming out. So, there's going to be some opportunity over the next two weeks for companies to come out, report good earnings, but maybe the stock sells off a little bit because, you know, their outlook was a smidge weaker than expected or whatever. use those pullbacks as an opportunity to add to some stocks that you want to own. And then just every month for the next six months, just repeat that process. Once you're in, once you have money invested in companies, it's easy to buy more. And so as you get money invested, just kind of keep adding to it until you get your portfolio reallocated. This is one of the most important lessons that investors should learn. You should never go to 100% cash because you run into this problem. It's like, I was really worried about this event, so I went to 100% cash. Now the problem is is how do I get back in? That's it's it's that's more challenging than getting out. Getting out is easy. Getting back in is really hard. So once you get this is why we never go to 100% cash ever. We'll hedge, we'll reduce our we'll sell equities, we'll raise cash, but we never go to 100% cash because of this inherent problem. It's much easier once you have a portfolio allocated and say I've got say I've got my my portfolio built. I've got my 20 25 stocks I want to own. Well, when risk comes up, you trim some of those back. You take profits, you raise some cash levels, maybe add some fixed income in to hedge with, you know, whatever you want to do, but never go to zero because then once the market begins to correct, it's it's much easier at that point to take capital and just buy stocks back that you already own. You know, I already own Microsoft, I just add to it. I own Google, I add to it. You know, whatever stocks you own, you just add back to them as you get opportunities. And so it's it's much easier to navigate markets over time by just, you know, I was explaining this to my wife the other day. I was like, she's like, I really don't understand, you know, I've listened to your show in the morning and I don't understand, you know, the 20-day moving average and all this. Why do you do all that? And I said, well, think about it this way. You drive like a bat out of hell. So when you know when you're in your car and you're driving 80 miles an hour down the freeway, you you're not really worried about anything, right? Because you feel like you're in control of the of the situation. And I said, 'Well, you just don't drive 80 miles an hour. If you start to see flashing yellow lights ahead or you're crossing over the the hill of the freeway and you see some, you know, some police lights down the road a bit, you you or or brake lights coming on, you tap on the brake and you start to slow down a little bit. Maybe you think about exiting the lane you're in to get in a different lane. But you're you're mentally adjusting for risk when you're driving your car all the time. And it's the same thing in a portfolio. just just adjust for risk by tapping on the brakes, adding a little bit of gas, changing your allocation a bit if you need to. Um, you know, if you're really overweight, one sector that's underperforming, maybe add some of another sector that's performing better. But just manage the risk. You know, manage your drive as you're going and you'll get to your destination safely. But, you know, trying to stop the car, get out, wait for the traffic to clear, then get back in your car and go, it just doesn't really work out really well.

Yeah. Um, although I gotta say, Lance, I'm not sure that's what your wife meant when she says she doesn't understand you. I think she was talking about a few other things.

probably. But that's a whole different

That's a whole different story. Yeah, exactly.

Well, we'll have to do that show one day with our wives, but yeah,

I don't know. I think that would be um uh we get few words in edgewise and uh I think it would be uh yeah, it would be a lopsided beating. I think that we would both take from them. Um all right, so let me um Let let me talk about the road ahead from here. Um so uh we we we've got the S&P you know at alltime highs now it's what somewhere around

7150 or something like that, uh, around the time we're talking. Um, again, the markets have been sniffing out, uh, good news. Oil, oil, oil had come down a bit, but it was still pretty elevated. But oil is actually now getting pretty whacked, that, that they were talking here.

So, let me pull up this chart here of, um, WTI futures. And you can see here, Lance, how it spiked with the war. Um, but now it's coming down and, um, it actually got in the 70s, uh, today. It's right in the low 80s at the moment we're talking here. Um, but oil is really starting to correct here, um, as one, you know, would expect it to. Um, and obviously, you know, the president had been saying all throughout this conflict, "Hey, as soon as this thing's done, oil is going to drop like a rock, right?" We'll see how low it goes. But, but the dropping is certainly in process right now. Um, if indeed the war ends, uh, if there's a peace deal in the next, you know, week or two, um, would you expect oil to to basically get back down to where it was pre-war pretty quickly, or would you think it might stay elevated for other reasons?

>> Um, it, there's a couple factors that are going to come back into play here. Um, if everything is, if we're able to get production back online and solve some of the bottlenecks that have occurred over the course of the last month pretty quickly, um, then you should see probably oil get back down into the 60s, maybe low 70s. If, if, if things stay, if that bottleneck is more restrictive, you're probably going to be mid-70s for a while.

>> And so,

>> But that's not that bad, right? I mean, isn't that kind of the sweet spot for the industry? Isn't that where everybody likes it to be?

>> Well, no, that's, see, that's the interesting thing, right? So, can you pull your, your chart back up real quick?

>> Yeah, sure.

>> Um, that's the interesting thing is, is that, um, I was just talking to an oil and gas driller this past week and it's interesting. Oil, you, you would think at these high oil prices, right, everybody'd be just going like, "Man, I'm going to go drill wells like crazy." That's not the case. It's actually not good because all the cost of the drilling goes up massively when oil prices spike like this. So the opportunity to go out and pop a new well and drill it really isn't that good.

>> So, sorry to interrupt, but I think the big reason why, correct me if I'm wrong, so what you're saying isn't isn't wrong, but is the forward futures contracts for oil, the further you went out, they weren't moving right. So, the oil industry didn't trust today's high prices because they're like, "I'm not going to go out and and put all this work in to explore and drill or produce extra because in three, four months the markets are pricing the oil is going to be back pretty much down where it was and I'm not going to be making a lot of profit for that additional cost."

>> No, that's, that's what you, you jumped the gun on me. That's,

>> I'm sorry.

>> Because, because at, at those high oil prices, oil producers are incented to go sell their inventory, right? I'm getting $100 a barrel. Boom. I'm going to sell everything I got. So,

>> Right.

>> I got it in storage where it took me, it was $50 bucks for me to pull that out of the ground, right? I get to sell it for 2x.

>> Yeah. Right.

>> So, so now, so, yes, we get back down to the 60s and 70s. That's a great sweet spot. They can produce, they can drill, they can, they can make money. Everybody makes money. Gasoline prices will come down, but not back to where they were before. They never do. So, you know, we get used to that. So, prices are going to stay elevated for a while on gas. Um, but no, but look, I, the futures market has been pretty good about predicting where oil prices are going to be and, and, you know, by mid-year and we'll probably get back down to that level. Supply comes up, you're going to get a little bit depressed in prices and, and again, you know, I, I listened to the interview that you had with Doomberg a while back and, and a lot of his comments were right. I don't know if we get back down. You know, his, from my takeaway and you can correct me if I'm wrong, is that he was really expecting a big oversupply of oil and it was going to drop oil prices down potentially into the 30s, 40s. There's certainly an argument for that. I'm not sure if I, I think we may settle in the 40s, 50s ultimately because there is,

>> Just to be clear, he, he, for his outlook is sort of a double whammy. It is, um, uh, there will be increased production, right? So those flows are going to come on and, and, uh, first straight opens, all that oil from the, the Gulf comes back out as well, in addition to other people increasing their sales, right? I mean, every net oil exporter has been increasing what it's been selling. It might be pulling from reserves like you were saying, but they definitely had a huge incentive to sell more.

>> But he also was anticipating, um, an economic slowdown caused from the oil price shock, which is still a TBD. And that's one of the questions I want to get to pretty soon with you as to whether there might be some knock-on effects. But, but, but just to be clear, Duneberg's case was that one-two punch.

>> Gotcha. Okay. Well, that's why I'm, I'm thinking 40, 50, maybe mid-50s as, as, but that would coincide with an economic slowdown. I think to get into the, and again, this is just my opinion, and I'm not arguing Bloomberg either because, you know, I, I don't have a disagreement with this view. I think to get down to 30, 40, you need a recession, and I'm, I'm not sure we're going to get to a recession. I think we're going to see a slowdown though from this oil price spike.

>> Um, okay. So, uh, do I want to go there right now? Yeah, why not? Let's go to that right now. So, um, again, let's hope that everything, there is a peace deal.

>> Real quick, I'm sorry, I asked you to bring the chart up of your Finn real quick.

>> Yeah.

>> I, I wanted you to change the symbol. Uh, just in your, in your, in your search bar at the top right there, put in XLE.

>> Uh, up, up the left corner, uh, right under the Finn Viz logo.

>> Oh, right there. Okay, great.

>> Type in XLE. Perfect. Yeah.

>> Yeah. So, this is the energy ETF, right? And it's had this massive run, uh, really since the beginning of 2026 on this whole idea of economic reflation and we're going to have this big reflation trade in the economy. Boom. You know, strong economic growth that was going to lead to bigger demand for oil prices. Then, of course, you had the, the continuation of that move higher with the onset of the Iran crisis. But if you're long energy stocks, you know, we were talking a couple of months ago, a couple of weeks ago that we were trimming our energy stocks in our portfolio and taking profits because the reversal of that spike is going to be pretty significant. I mean, it would be very easy to see XLE back down into the kind of the,

>> Range.

>> Yeah, the low, the high 40s, low 50s. That would not be surprising.

>> Okay. Well, it's, it's mid-50s right now, so it doesn't have that long to go until it's in the low 50s.

>> Um, so, yeah. Okay. So, um, excuse me. Um,

>> Back to, back to where you want to go to next.

>> Yeah, that's fine. I just want to note that we have been talking around here about getting into energy because it looked, um, really depressed and it looked like the sector might be positioned to to do well. And I, I had Rick Rule on who talked about why he was so excited about, you know, the longer term future of oil. Nobody was pricing in the war at that point in time, but the stocks had taken off in, in advance of the war, as you can tell here. I mean, the war didn't start until about here. Um, so,

>> That's that reflation trade we were talking about.

>> Yeah, that was the reflation trade. So anyways, um, this is the war premium which is now gone, right?

>> Um, but I'm curious, Lance, the, well, so the, the reflation trade, right? Um, is there still a good argument for that? And, and there might be, and I want to talk with you about that in a minute, but, but before we get there, let's, let's address the thing we were talking about earlier. So, um,

>> There's been an oil price shock, right? So, just like with higher interest rates, you generally say there's a lag effect that's going to manifest in the economy. Um, an oil price shock should manifest a lot faster in the economy than a, than an interest rate hike. But is, is there some sort of, um, economic slowdown that is making its way to us through time because of these higher oil prices?

>> Yes. And, and that's, that's why, you know, this reflation trade, I think, is at risk. So, if you, if you pull back up that chart of XLE, that's why I think,

>> I'm sorry, I keep pulling it down too early.

>> No, no, it's fine. You don't need to pull it up because I think people saw it. But, you know, that's why I think you can get down into that 46, 47 range on XLE. Um, because if you have an economic slowdown, that's going to reduce demand within the economy. And we already, look, we're already seeing savings rates for the average consumer drop. You're seeing, um, you know, you've seen delinquency rates rise on credit cards.

>> That's the whole K-shaped economy thing we've been talking about, but it hasn't mattered, right? The top half of the K has overpowered the lower half.

>> Correct. And, and, but, but again, that's going to get reflected back into oil and gas demand. And that's why I think that energy, kind of XLE, and particularly the energy stock complex is an ETF. Now, look, there's going to be some companies that do better than others. Always the case. Um, but I do think you get a pullback here to, to where the econ, the economic balance comes back into effect.

>> Okay. So, help me figure this out then. So, we just talked a little while ago about you thinking, okay, maybe a short-term pullback in the markets, but then higher prices ahead, right? The resumption of the bull trend. But now we're talking about an economic slowdown in here. So, what, what does the, when do you think this happens and what does the world look like in terms of the economy and the markets? Does the economy get dragged down for long enough for the markets to have to roll over at some point this year due to this price shock?

>> Well, so the, that's a great question and that's the only thing that matters, which is, what if the economy slows down or we have a recession? What are we actually talking about, right? And, and this is, I think this is the disconnect that happens a lot between people that are very macro-focused and the markets. And there's this, a little bit of a disconnect. There's like, okay, you know, this event, I'm, I'm a macro guy, so this event is going to cause the US economy to go into a recession. Okay? That's the argument. Well, then you look at the markets and go, "Okay, well, what does that mean for the markets?" All it means for the markets is, is what does that mean for forward earnings estimates? Because the markets forward earnings.

>> So, whatever event you're looking at, if we, so right now, Goldman Sachs expects that year-end earnings for the S&P 500 be $39 a share. Um, earnings for small and midcap growth companies, which are the most affected by the way by economic slowdowns and advances, are expected to grow earnings at 49% this year. Now, that's down from 60% earlier, like in January, they were at 60% growth, that's now fallen to 49%. So, if the market begins to really be concerned about forward earnings estimates, and this is why I said I think later this summer, um, potentially we could see another 10 to 15% decline potentially going into the midterm elections, that would also align with whatever kind of oil, whatever impact this oil spike is going to have. I think it's going to start show up in in summer and,

>> Okay. And that, that was kind of where one of the questions ahead for you is, is that prediction that you made? Was that more because of the oil price shock and its ramifications or was that more,

>> Kind of the general uncertainty you have going into a midterm election?

>> I, I think it's both. Uh, first of all, so again, that those aren't really disconnected, right? So, if I'm going into an election, how do people vote? Do they actually, do people actually vote for the person that's going into office or do they vote for how they feel in their pocketbook? If, if the guy in office,

>> It's always number two. And so that depends on whether they vote for the guy or not.

>> We could be running President Reagan right now for office if we could dig him back up and do a weekend of Bernie's thing and it wouldn't matter. He wouldn't win if the economy's in the tank. And so the, these two things are going to be very closely correlated. So, if this oil spike translates into an economic slowdown that weighs on the consumer, there's almost a guarantee historically speaking that the, the Republicans are going to lose either the House, the Senate, or both.

>> Sure. So, let me put my Lance Roberts tent on then, which is, hey, but the market knows all this. It has priced it in. So, you would argue right now the market is not pricing in an aftershock from the or or it has priced in an aftershock, but it's it's small, you know, so small that we're at all-time highs now.

>> Well, that's what it thinks right now. But again, the market is fickle. The market can change its mind as well. So, as the data shows up, if all of a sudden the market says, "Oh, I was wrong about the impact, the size, that impact,"

>> You're going to get another 5, 10, 15% correction in the markets. Again, that wouldn't be surprising at all.

>> Right. And so, just to be clear, and I'm just trying to clarify for viewers here, your, your professional gut is telling you that the market may not be fully pricing in the aftershock here because you're thinking, "Yeah, we probably will get a 10 to 15% correction mid, mid-summer."

>> Right. But I could be wrong.

>> Well, of course. I'm just, that's why I said gut, right? We're, we're,

>> Yeah. I, you know, I, I think there's, I think there's a risk. And but again, what, what we need to pay attention to is the market because the market can change its mind. Um, as you, as you saw just a couple weeks ago, I mean, like that, we're down 10% in the market. Um, you know, so and then boom, just like that, two weeks were up to all-time highs. I mean, so the market can change its mind very,

>> Very. The market can. And everything you're saying is right, but there's a little bit of a difference where the market was reacting to new data with the, um, with the war, right? Um, whereas I think we have a lot of the data for the oil price shock, like, like analysts can do the math. They know how high oil went. They know the impact that had on country X, Y, or Z, or whatnot. So, you know, unless there's something new that's a surprise in the future, um, you know, they, they've already run the numbers more or less.

>> They, they've run the numbers and they have adjusted earnings to some degree, not a lot. And so the question is, is have they adjusted earnings enough? Because they only lowered estimates for the first quarter, right? We, they haven't lowered estimates for the second and third quarter. So, they're not really, I don't, I don't think that Wall Street is pricing in the impact of the oil shock yet on the earnings. Now, look, they're not going to start cutting estimates until after we finish this quarter. So, about two weeks from now, they'll start looking at Q2, Q3, Q4, and they'll probably start bringing those estimates down in anticipation of what this impact might be. So, again, how drastically they bring down those estimates is going to have a very big impact on what the price of the market does.

>> Okay. So, I want to talk about, um, reflexivity here. Um, so, what, what's interesting is, um, we could spend a lot of time on this. I don't want to, cuz I want to get some other points. But I was reading an article the other day and, and, and this is simplistic, but I think there's, there's some truth in the logic here, which is essentially, why didn't the lag effect arrive in the economy that you and I thought was going to happen from the higher interest rates in 2022? Right?

>> Pardon me?

>> There's too much money in the system.

>> Yeah, well, okay. So, where did it come from? But I think the answer to this was, it, you know, this is multifactorial, but, but kind of the main reason this guy said it was because of the reverse repo program. And we talked about this, but the reverse repo program just had so much damn money in it that as it was drained to offset the higher interest rates, it pretty much, it, it pretty much negated them for the most part. And that, that's a huge reason why we didn't tip into the recession that everybody thought was was inevitable from hiking interest rates the most violently we had ever done before in this country, at least in terms of the speed. Um, and so, in this case, there might be a similar reflexivity of, um, going on in the markets. And I don't know, folks, so take all this with a huge grain of salt. But, you know, the world said, "Oh my gosh, I can't get access to the oil that's in the, in the Gulf." Well, a lot of other countries like America said, "Well, we'll sell it to you, right?" And so countries were still able to largely get the oil they needed to run their economies. Yes, it was more expensive. That is going to hurt some economies here, but other economies are, you know, doing a lot better as a result of that, right? It's, it's a net flow of, of, uh, of revenue into them. And so, it may not be this singular shock going through the world economy. It might be a series of, well, this country's down, but this country's up. And it might kind of negate itself or partially negate itself the way in which the reverse repo program offset, uh, the higher interest rates. And I think it's going to be fascinating to see now is like, how many countries, you know, we talked about Saudi Arabia building a pipeline, right? It'll be interesting to see how many countries look at this straight and go, "You know, we always knew that was a risk, but we didn't realize how big of a risk that was. We're going to have a backup plan."

>> I have been making this point a lot recently. So, Lance, I guarantee I'm going to give my personal guarantee on this, that whatever the percent of the world's oil is that's done, done through the Persian Gulf going forward, it's going to be lower than 20%.

>> Yeah.

>> The world is going to say, basically, "You know what? It was cheap. It was, you know, whatever. But, and I'll still buy from there going forward, but I'm just not going to buy as much. I'm going to have to source from other places just to have some more resilience in my oil supply going forward." I think Iran, they, I don't think they kill, I, I think, well, if the peace deal gets struck on what they're talking about right now, I don't think as Iran has killed its golden goose, but I think it has permanently injured its golden goose.

>> Right. Yeah. It's, it's definitely a one-legged goose.

>> There we go. Or it's just going to lay fewer eggs going forward than it did before. However we want to murder that analogy.

>> Look, I, it's just, I think, I think this is going to be the most fascinating aspect to watch post this event is how all this plays out. And I, I think there's going to be a lot of things that occur that, that there were so many people that were so, so set that Iran, you know, a couple weeks ago was like, "Oh, Iran can control the strait. Nobody can control that but them. Blah, blah, blah." And we're finding out that's not really the case. And then, as you, as you're saying, I think a lot of people are going to start figuring out workarounds. And it's going to greatly change the dynamic of that dependence. And that's going to really change the way the future oil market looks as well. So, I, I think it's going to be exciting to watch and I think there's going to be some really great opportunities to invest in that.

>> Well, that'll be really interesting. And I've asked people, you know, where, where do you think the opportunities are in the Gulf? And they don't necessarily think it's in, um, the, the big producers, per se, but it's a lot of the midstream stuff.

>> Yep.

>> Yeah. Um, so, uh, at the risk of, of sounding too egoistic, um, I'm, I'm, I'm going to pat myself on the back a little bit here, too. Um, and folks, there's, there's a good degree of luck in here, but regular viewers of this channel have known that that for, I don't know, three plus weeks now, um, I had really begun asking the question about why don't we just essentially create a naval blockade of the Persian Gulf, rather than going in there, rather than the issues of Carg Island and boots on the ground, why don't we just sit outside the Gulf in the Arabian Sea, which is where our Navy is already parked, and just interdict, um, Iranian oil and, and essentially that's what's going on right now. Um, and it seems to have been the final boot on the neck that is getting Iran to go to the, uh, the negotiating table, and, and hopefully strike a peace deal with us. Um, so, uh, it'll be interesting to see what happens from here. But, um, that does seem to have been, it seems to be a validating of just the wonder I had of like, "Why are we not doing this?" And maybe the answer to that was that was the plan all along, and we just had to degrade Iran's ballistic capabilities enough before we felt comfortable doing that. Um, and I could totally understand that logic. Um, but let's, let's just lean back for a second here, Lance. Um, uh, let's assume a deal gets struck here. Uh, you know, what are the knock-on effects coming out of this? And we don't know the exact terms of what that peace deal would be yet. But, but if we can assume it's Iran gives up its nuclear, its enriched uranium, which in today's headlines seems to be very much the US's number one requirement of this deal, uh, that Iran agrees to not, um, uh, overbuild its ballistic missile capacity because, as I understand it, that was really kind of the trigger of all of this, was that Iran was essentially, um, acceleratingly pursuing what I call a porcupine strategy, which was, we're going to build up our, our ballistic capabilities so much that no one's going to be able to attack us to, to, to compromise our enrichment program. And the US basically said, "Hey, if, if, if they get beyond a certain level of, of, of ballistic defenses, that might be true. And if we're ever going to stop the enrichment program, we got to do it now before they get to that critical level." Um, and look, I, I know I'm going to get flamed in the comments by people who say, you know, Adam, you're totally swallowing, you know, what the administration's telling us. That wasn't the case at all. But as best I understand, this is the rationale that's been put out there. So, if Iran, um, you know, it sounds like what we're saying is, is look, Iran will stop bombing you, and we will give you back, I think they're saying right now, $20 billion in frozen assets, but there's going to be conditions on what you can spend that $20 billion on. You can't just go and basically, you know, buy a whole bunch of missiles with it, right? You're going to have to use it for the good of your country. Uh, you know, rebuilding your infrastructure, that type of stuff. So, again, we don't know if this is going to get agreed to, but let's just assume it does for a moment, Lance. So, if this conflict ends with America basically saying, "We have demonstrably set back Iran's nuclear program. We have agreements in place with enforcement that that give us as much confidence as we can right now that Iran isn't going to be pursuing nuclear, uh, weapons for the next couple decades at least. Um, they're not going to arm themselves to the teeth ballistically, you know, whatever. Um, and we have this reflexive, um, response from the rest of the world that's probably going to say, "Look, I'm not going to buy all my oil from the Gulf anymore. And America, you're one of the guys who's open for business. I'm going to buy more from you." And presumably, presumably Iran is a little bit less of a threat in the world. I'm sure there's going to be restrictions in here about you can't spend that money on funding Hezbollah and the Houthis and stuff like that. Do you expect a material kind of new peacetime premium to come into the global economy and perhaps the markets after this?

>> Honestly, I have no idea. Um, but it, you know, I think if you can remove the threat of a further conflict, right? You know, and I'm not saying, look, that, you know, however this, this peace deal works out, if, if, if it just basically puts Iran kind of on the back burner for right now and it's not an immediate threat, things go back to normal. Yeah, I think the markets are going to trade at a premium that because you've removed a geopolitical risk.

>> I was going to say that's not going back to normal. That's going back to better than normal.

>> Well, exactly. And what, what I just mean, yeah, you're, you're, yes, you are correct. But yes, and I do think at that point the markets are going to trade at a premium on that simply because you've removed that underlying risk to the markets. But again, you know, this was the, the, the interesting thing is when you think about, you know, what happened with the Strait of Hormuz and all that was like oil prices spike. Okay. But if you really kind of start to step back and look at the markets, there were a lot of companies that really, big companies in particular, they benefited from that spike in oil prices. Um, but how did the spike in oil prices, how is that going to affect say Meta's earnings or Google's earnings, which those are primarily ad-based revenues to a large degree. Um, you know, yeah,

>> Not at all. Right.

>> Or at least very little, right? And, and, you know, this is the thing when the market sells off, you know, we were just selling off everything because of this risk. And as, as a good investor, what our job is to step back and say, "Okay, what's really going to be the impact of that on?" And this is why we bought Microsoft, uh, last Tuesday, because when you look at this, Microsoft's been under a huge amount of pressure, trading at a big discount to valuations and extremely oversold, and that was, I was like, you know, as soon as they get some resolution here, Microsoft's going to scream. They're going to do very well. They've had a huge run since then. But, you know, those are the type of things as a good investor to, to try to, you know, set the headlines are great, but macro doesn't drive the market, and what our job as investors is to step into the market and say, "Okay, who, who wins, who loses, and let's make some bets." And that's, and that's, that's what we do as in managing the portfolio.

>> Yeah. Um, yeah, I made a note to myself, I think two weeks ago talking to you and then last week talking to Michael Li, and I, I see her in my notes here, buy Microsoft, and I didn't, I just got busy and I just pulled up the chart as you were looking, you were talking, I was like, "Oh, geez, well, missed that one."

>> No, it, you're, it's going to pull back. You'll have another opportunity. Buy it next time.

>> Okay. Yeah, if we get, get your thing. Um, all right. So, uh, let me ask you this, Lance. So, I want to talk to you about the reflexive, sorry, the, um, the reflation trade,

>> Where, you know, you said earlier, h it's, it's under threat right now. It doesn't, I don't hear you saying it's not going to happen, but you, you see it's got some challenges to it, especially if there's some ramifications from the oil price spike still to drop from here. But, let me ask you this. Um, there are, well, okay, so first off, the, there's a video launching tomorrow after this one, the day after this one releases, with Craig Fuller, and he's the CEO of FreightWaves. Um, you know, his company is, I think, the largest out there that tracks, um, uh, all sorts of transportation data, right? What's happening with trucks, what's happening with trains, what's happening with shipping. And, um, you may remember I interviewed him in early November last year, and he was pretty despondent. Um, he was, you know, talking about how, how flows had really fallen off. Um, uh, but was, was very sort of depressed about the way in which the administration was handling the communication of tariffs. Right? This was all still in the post Liberation Day shockwave of like, nobody knows what tariffs are going to be, right? And so a lot of companies were, were delaying their capital expenditures because they didn't know what they were going to be paying for tariffs. Um, man, Lance, he could not be singing a different tune more than he is now. Um, he is incredibly bullish about the economy of real things, which when I talked to him back in early November, he was like, "We're essentially in a recession in the economy of real things." Um, so he said, it was funny. He said, like, Adam, like two weeks after I talked to you in November, it was like everything sort of turned on a dime. And I think that's because a lot of the tariff policies were getting clarified and we were starting to strike trade deals with these other countries. And so a lot of that uncertainty was getting removed and the flows that had been delayed were now starting to really flow. And, um, he says this is a manufacturing boom. That's what's sort of at the center of this. It's America's making things again. Um, which is part of the intended policy of the administration. And, um, he said, look, you know, unless you are importing to America, he's like, if you are bringing things here on ship, um, it's still pretty weak, and the war is impacting that part. But he said, um, from a, from a, you know, trucking and railway type of thing, shipping things from the center of America out to the rest of the world, things are booming. He sees the momentum continuing to build and he said that actually the war is kind of helping right now. He said a lot of manu, American manufacturers, they're not really that exposed to the price of oil because like 80% of manufacturing in the US is powered by gas, and those prices haven't gone up nearly as much. Um, and, uh, anyway, so I mean, folks, if you want to hear some real bullishness on the US economy, listen to this interview tomorrow with Craig. Now, Craig was, was, was careful to say, look, I'm not talking about the entire US GDP. I'm just talking about the part of the world that I look at, which is the industrial part. But he said that is doing really well and he expects it to continue building from here. So that would lend, you know, definitely some, some wind to the back of the reflation trade from here. Um, we are seeing retail spending pick up. So even despite the higher oil prices, you know, people were worried that the higher oil prices were going to eat up all of the, the tax refunds, the record tax refunds that people are getting, but it seems like on a net basis, tax refunds are, are propagating. You're raising your finger, so I'll let you interject here.

>> Just be careful with the retail sales data. It's up because the way we measure retail sales is that we just measure it in dollars spent. So, if I go buy gasoline at the store and I spend twice as much for gasoline, it registers as more spending. Real retail sales are expected to actually decline this, this month. So, on an inflation-adjusted basis. So again, just be careful with the with the nominal data because,

>> Okay, I was talking to an analyst, I forget who it was the other day. They seem to be thinking that it was on a net basis, even in terms of unit sales and stuff, that it was up, but you seem to think it was,

>> No, no. We haven't got the numbers yet. I will not be surprised. You just had a 0.9% jump in CPI. So, you subtract 0.9% out of your retail sales increase, right? I think you get a small negative print, .1, .2 too on real retail sales for the month. We'll see.

>> Okay. Well, let's earmark that and let's look into that next, next month.

>> The point though, is, is that a lot of that, you, you really have to look at retail sales on terms of a real basis, not nominal, because when you have an oil spike, it really kind of skews the data.

>> See, I, I totally get that. So, let's, let's look at it with a fine magnifying glass when we get the numbers next week. Um, but, but the point being here essentially is that, um, there, there still seems to be some of the tailwinds that the administration was telling us they were, you know, expecting from what they did over the past year to really start propelling this economy. So, I think, I think the, the question here is, especially given what Craig is saying about the industrial economy, is what is going to derail that? What is, what is going to get in the way of the reflation trade? And, and I guess, let me ask my big question, then I'll let you run here, which is, folks, I'm not saying this is going to happen. This is not a partisan comment. It's just a, um, thought exercise here with Lance. But, Lance, what if Trump sticks the landing here?

>> Right? So, couple weeks ago, people were like, "The president's, you know, hurdling us into World War II." What if we end with, "Hey, we got Iran's enriched uranium. They're a diminished threat going forward. Oil prices have come down. The tailwinds from everything we did are now starting to propel the economy forward." Is there the potential, and they've always before the war, they've been promising the golden age of America arrives this year. Is, is there potential here that by the time that guy, that person goes to the ballot box in November, the Iran war and its concerns are ancient history, and they're looking at the jobs market around them, saying, "Ah, starting to feel a little bit better about my prospects." I don't necessarily want to say they're feeling like they're earning more money yet, but maybe that could be happening. Um, could, could this jiu-jitsu from, "Oh my god, the Republicans are going to lose both houses of Congress," as you were just saying, to, "Oh my god, they did it."

>> Yep. It's very possible. Um, you know, my concern is is that again, just from the reflation standpoint, is that the, the companies most, there's, there's two, there's two points on this. The first is, is that small and midcap companies are the most susceptible to changes in supply and demand within the economy. Large cap, you know, an Apple, a Google, you know, those type of, those type of companies, if the consumer slows down a little bit, it's not really going to affect the earnings that much. But a small and midcap company that is much more sensitive to that, that's going to show up in the earnings very quickly. So, if we do have an economic slowdown because of the oil price spike, if we do have some retrenchment, not a recession, just a retrenchment of spending because I ran out of money, um, that's going to impact the earnings of these smaller midcap companies. And that's why we're already seeing the estimates come down. Again, we were expecting 60% growth in January. We're down to 49% now. That last year they grew at 5%. Just to put that perspective,

>> Right? Yeah.

>> Uh, so there's a good bit of gap there in terms of bringing this down. The other side of this equation is that a lot of this industrial manufacturing boom is data centers.

>> We're spending a lot of money building out data centers. What if a lot of these planned data centers maybe get put on the back burner for six months or a year because,

>> Revenues slow down a bit because of the oil price spike or there's some other concerns that pop up, maybe a contraction from, uh, consumption due to that oil price spike that starts to impact some of the large cap earnings, and they just say, "All they have to do is just say, 'Hey, I'm gonna, I'm gonna push this data center from 2025 to 2026.'" That's a big chunk of that manufacturing boom that's going on for the Caterpillars and, and people moving the dirt, those type of things.

>> Sure. Are we seeing any of that yet?

>> Um, not yet, but again, I'm just saying these are the risks.

>> Yep.

>> Yeah. So, you know, look, we have, we have exposure to data centers. We own companies that, you know, work in the cooling business. They, uh, work on the, the infrastructure side of the business in our portfolios because, look, that's where, that's where it's happening. We want to be part of that. But I'm just, I want to keep a real candid view on the risks that are there for that, for that sector.

>> And look, I'm all for the reflation trade. If it goes, I'm going to make money. I, I, I'm more concerned about. So, here, let me back that up. I'm, my portfolio is built for the reflation trade. So, as long as that works, I don't have to do anything. My job right now is to analyze all the reasons why that may not work out.

>> Got it. But that, that's actually really helpful, though. But, but right now, your default is that the reflation trade is on because that's how your portfolio is positioned.

>> Correct.

>> Okay. That, that's actually really important information, I think, for folks to know here. Yeah.

>> Um, okay. So, um, so obviously, folks, you know, we'll, we'll be looking at this. Lance, it sounds like we'll be looking at, um, you know, the Russell and the small caps, um, closely to see if they start indicating any, any real weakness here. And as you said, they've come down, uh, earnings estimates for them have come down, but that's to be expected during a period of war like we had here, right? So the key thing is going to be how, how well, if at all, uh, do those earning estimates start recovering here if we indeed get a peace deal. And let me ask you this, just on the peace deal, do you expect that to be a sell the news event? Like, maybe that's when the pullback happens.

>> Maybe. Yeah. I mean, you know, again, there's been a lot of run into that. So, that could very much be a buy the rumor, sell the news type situation.

>> Yeah.

>> And again, that would give you that, I look,

>> Because let's be clear, people are buying the rumor right now. This war is not over.

>> We are going to have a pullback in this market, right? It's, I, I will go out on a limb and I will say, we will not retest lows, but we are going to have a pullback 100% guaranteed to, to some level of support. Probably the 50-day moving average, maybe the 100-day moving average. Somewhere in there there's a level of support. Market's going to find that previous resistance, turn it back into support. That'll be your buying opportunity. But that's absolutely going to happen. Now, I don't think we'll retest lows, but we're definitely going to have a pullback. And so, yeah, anything that happens in the next week or, and again, that pullback could happen next week. Um, you know, earnings disappointments could be the catalyst. You know, we kind of get this news flow behind us, we're going to start looking at earnings. So, if the mega cap earnings come in weak, as an example, that's going to give you a pullback in the market. I mean, so there's a lot of of things, but to your point, yeah, you know, we'll look back and go, "Yeah, let's buy the rumor, sell the news." But, you know, again, I think that's going to be a buying opportunity going forward until we have whatever next event's going to occur.

>> Okay. And just compliance note, folks. Um, Lance said 100% guarantee. Can't guarantee anything 100%, but he thinks there's very high probability.

>> Oh, jeez. We brought,

>> All right. Well, look, um, everybody's favorite pin that's been in the headlines recently, private credit. Any news on that front worth talking about this week? Um, you know, I wrote an article on private credit maybe two weeks ago talking about why private credit isn't the next financial crisis. And we went through, we went through that whole analysis here that,

>> Yeah. It's, it's basically like a tenth the size of what the subprime market was, right?

>> Yeah.

>> 1.7 trillion versus 62. Um, so it's, it's much smaller than that. It's, it's very, it's very, very small. Um, but, m the reason I just said that is Michael Liwitch just posted another article about it yesterday on our website. Uh, so if you go to realinvestmentadvice.com, he just posted another article. It's a kind of a two-part piece. He's going through and doing the analysis back to 2008. Um, you know, but the bottom line is, no, nothing else has occurred. Um, we're still seeing, you know, funds gate their redemptions, which they should be doing as we talked about before. Um, that doesn't mean that the loans are all going bad. I think there's going to be a really good opportunity for investors to pick up, uh, business development corporations that have gotten really hit hard here because just a lot of panic selling of just kind of kind of,

>> I, I am hearing a lot of that. Just to, just to, and, you know, folks, if you didn't watch, folks, watch the video earlier this week. I did with Yon Vanek with his Q2 outlook. Um, uh, he, a quarter ago, had mentioned that the BDCs, he liked the vehicle, but they were selling off. Um, and it wasn't necessarily the time to buy them, but keep your eye on it. This time around, he was like, "These things are selling at really stupid discounts." And importantly, what he looked at is he's like, "These things are priced as if I can't remember off the top of my head, folks, but, you know, it's like they're priced as if like 20 or 40, like for 20% defaults of their portfolio, right?" And he, and he actually had the default rates and he said they're actually still pretty much in historic alignment. And I'm doing this from memory. I, I'm probably wrong, but I want to say like three or 4%

>> Defaults, right?

>> So, he's like, unless we see a huge increase in defaults, these things are trading at a, at a, you know, really historically apparent discount.

>> Yeah. No, absolutely. Um, you know, and also too, if you look at a lot of these loans, they're overcollateralized. So, unlike subprime loans, which are undercollateralized in a lot of cases, um, you know, a lot of these are overcollateralized loans. So, so again, you know, the bottom line is that, no, this isn't going to be a financial crisis. Could it cause some stress? Yes. Banks don't have a lot of exposure to them. They have a very, very small leverage exposure to these, to these private equity funds, the private credit funds. So, you know,

A lot of that risk is really overblown, and I think the market's starting to already see through a lot of that.

Okay. I don't want to be dismissive of the risk of private equity to parts of the financial. Trillion. It's not small.

Yeah. Yeah. And there are people I interview who are more worried about it than you, Lance, and Stephanie Pomboy. We just talked about this a few days ago. Um, but I am really not hearing that much from people like you and experts I talk to that this is the next subprime. So I just want to, and not saying that it couldn't metastasize into that, folks, but right now, we are not yet seeing that type of risk.

And again, there's just the subprime crisis. A lot of people don't understand what we were doing during the subprime crisis because we were taking a mortgage and we were doing a derivative off that mortgage. Then we were doing derivatives off that derivative and derivatives off that derivative. Uh, and it just went on and on and on and on. I mean, we took a $2 trillion subprime market and turned it into $62 trillion. And that's not happening with private credit.

Yeah. And that being said, and I think you agree with me on this, we don't know what's being done, what's been done in private credit, right? Because it's not regulated. So, there probably is a material amount of just bad loans that are out there that shouldn't have been made. We just don't know how big that was and whether they managed the risk of the rest of their portfolios well. Only time will tell.

But to your point, the size of it, even if it goes real bad, isn't, as we understand it, near the size that things were back during the subprime crisis. Well, also, remember, look, most of the people in private credit, we talked about this before, but most people in private credit are accredited investors or people with high net worth, you know? So, I've got a portfolio of $100 million. I've got $20 million in private credit. It doesn't end me, right? Subprime crisis, we were giving mortgages to people that had no money, right? There was no way they could pay that mortgage. They had no job. Um, so we affected, you know, the difference is that if the $1.7 trillion went to zero in the economy, it's mostly high-net-worth institutions. They can absorb it. They'll write off the losses. They'll move on with life. This isn't where we're going to wipe out the bottom 50% of the economy because they were all invested in private credit. It's just a very different environment than what we had with housing.

Yeah. Okay. Um, so right now, you're not too worried about what's going on there. You and your partners there are watching it closely. Um, but you're not taking a lot of action in your portfolio based off of this. Although I'm curious, are you buying any of these BDCs?

Um, I'm actually about to launch a portfolio for it.

So, um, maybe.

Okay. But, so, so I'm sorry. This is not just an index you're tracking, but this is actually something a portfolio that capital will go into. I'm actually constructing a portfolio that will generate a much higher dividend yield than the market but will provide some performance relative to the market. Won't provide market performance, but some performance over time. Uh, it's a very interesting model. Um, so hopefully I'll have something on that in the next few weeks.

Okay. So essentially this is a sleeve at RAA that if you're an RAA client, you can say, yeah, give me.

Yeah. Yeah. I have a lot of clients. They're like, I really just want on my portfolio.

So, just, I've been, this is kind of giving you an opportunity to build an income portfolio that if you just want income, you're not so worried about, you just need enough growth to offset inflation, and you're really looking for an income stream.

It's something that might fit that bill.

All right, great. Um, so folks, let me know because what you're talking about is very much in the territory of Steven Bavaria's Income Factory. Um, and he has BDCs as, you know, one of the many different asset class types that he has in there. I did reach out to him about this a few weeks ago to see how things were going. And he was like, "Yeah, prices are down in these things." But he's like, "The income's uninterrupted, and that's my bag. That's what I do this for is the income. Don't really worry so much about the market price." Um, and obviously, Lance, if there is the potential for price recovery in a lot of these BDC ETFs that are out there, where you potentially get the best of both worlds, right? You get the above-average yield, but you also get some price appreciation here. So, if this is of any interest to you folks, this might be a particularly good time to look at this. And just to echo Stephen, you know, he invests in these funds like the BlackRock's of the world and whatnot, where he's like, "Look, I only invest with the managers who have a great track record in the space, but are really big." And so therefore, they can get the best deals, um, and they've got a great track record of managing risk here. So, you know, there's not a lot of existential risk in the ETF. Um, you've got diversification working in your favor as well. So, yeah, I mean, if they're trading at a discount, this might be a really interesting time to look at this. So, folks, if you'd like me to bring Stephen on in the next couple of weeks and just kind of get his specific feedback on this, let me know in the comments section. If there's enough interest, I'll reach out to Stephen.

Um, all right, Lance. Um, I'm going to take it to a non-financial topic. Um, unless there's anything else that's really burning brightly on your radar that you feel you've got to tell people about.

Can't think of anything. I think everything.

Um, so we haven't really talked about this much. Um, but it's been cool to watch, which has been the Artemis 2 program.

Um, it is really something. I mean, it's just cool in general, right? The space race. I'm sure for the boomers that are watching who can remember actually watching the Apollo program live when they were kids, and you're raising your hand. Um, I was too young. Um, but it always blew my mind that we hadn't been back to the moon since I was one year old.

Right? I mean, I'm going to turn 55 this summer. I, to me, that's just a real disappointment, right? I mean, I'm sure your generation, Lance, that was watching live, was like, "Oh my goodness, this is happening in the late 60s, early 70s. Surely by the time the 90s get here or the new millennium gets here, we're going to have a daily shuttle to the moon and we're going to have space cars and all that type of stuff, right?" And we really don't remember the.

Just dropped the ball on it, right? I mean, we.

Yeah.

Um.

So it's exciting to see, um, you know, I would say the US, uh, reclaim the lead here on off-world exploration. And I personally am just really excited about what could happen, um, if we do return to the moon and actually eventually create a moon colony there, and all the things that opens up for additional space exploration and headed to Mars and all that stuff. But just all the innovation that will come out of that, right? There's so much innovation that came out of the space race that benefited us commercially and quality of life afterwards. There's just all sorts of good reasons to do this. And it's just, you know, there's something about just sort of the potential of the human species, right, to become extra planetary and to learn more about the cosmos and all that stuff that's wrapped up in all this. And it, again, like I said, it's cool to see the US reclaim this lead, but also it's one of those things that I think just unites, should unite us as a species, right? Where we can just look back and say, this is really pretty amazing what humans are capable of. And when you see, you know, they took the latest shots of the moon, of the Earth from the moon, right? And it's that whole pale blue dot, right? Where you're like, you know, it's sort of the lifeboat, like where it's like we only have this one planet. It's incredibly unique and precious to us. Why are we busy fighting with each other, right? Why are we busy doing all the stupid things that humans do to each other where, you know what, why would we endanger screwing up this amazing gift that we have? And as part of that too, like we only have this one amazing gift. So let's get extra planetary in case either we do something stupid or something out of our control happens like an asteroid slams into the Earth or whatever, right? We should just be united in leaning into our amazing ability to do incredible things and get out there and start, um, you know, getting into the rest of the cosmos.

We had that, right? We've had that before when we came back when Johnny came home from World War II. We, you know, everybody looks back at that age of the country and they go, "Wow, what an amazing period that was." I mean, you had this massive boost of innovation. Um, we were having state fairs where we were talking about the future and flying cars and all these types of things.

World fairs, although those predated the war, but okay, go on.

Sorry, but yeah, but, you know, the point was is that everybody was united there. When we came back from World War II, everybody was united in moving the country forward, recovering from World War II. We were the manufacturing epicenter of the entire world. Uh, we had explosive economic growth. Wages were rising. Interest rates were rising. Inflation was going up. It was, it was the perfect environment for the country, right? I mean, and it's a shame, you know, I was just, uh, you know, watching my X feed as a good example. Um, there's this wonderful event that happened with Artemis. And again, it brought me back to being a kid sitting around, you know, with the rabbit ears trying to get the foil on the rabbit ear, get the picture to come in, all that.

And it just, it took me back to all that. What an amazing feat that was. You have to remember when we sent Apollo to the moon, they did that with the memory of a TI calculator. You know, they were building this thing with a slide rule.

I think less, to be honest.

So, it's just, it's just amazing that we did it back then. It's even more amazing we can do it now. And again, you know, I look at my X feed and there's people like going, "Oh, this is, you know, this is stupid. It's fake. You know, why are we doing this?" Blah, blah, blah. And just finding some reason to hate on this great human achievement. And to your point, if we could figure out how to stop being so divided where we look, you know, it doesn't matter what President Trump does, he could cure cancer tomorrow and the people that hate him are going to hate him anyway, right? But instead of spending all of our time worrying about that and fighting about that, do you know what amazing things we could do if we could just all pull together and move in the same direction at one time? You know, you want to cure poverty, you want to cure, you know, whatever ills there are in America. We could do it. We could do it fast. We just all have to get on the same page. And we're just spending so much of our time hating everybody else. And, you know, because we're miserable, right? We're not happy. So, if I'm not happy, nobody else is going to be happy. You know, we just keep actually sending ourselves backwards. And we miss the value of this wonderful achievement that just got done. And, you know, some of the things that occurred on that trip were just absolutely fascinating.

They were. And I want to talk about one in just a second. But you raised an important point, too, which is, you know, the point I was making, which is it's amazing what our species can do. And, you know, kind of the all, hey, everybody, can't we just get along type of thing, um, internationally. But you're making a really good point, too, of domestically. You know, we're about as divided as we've ever been, at least since probably like the Civil War. Um, and it just creates so much, it's like an energy suck, right? It's just all this potential productivity that could be happening, but we're just infighting, right? And, um, and I understand a lot of the reasons for it, and I don't want to spiral off into this, but, um, as I think about it, there probably are some foreign actors that are intentionally stirring up the internal friction inside America just because it slows America's progress down, right? Um, but to your point, Lance, you know, I guess if there's an ask out of this rant, it's like, try to pick your head up from the daily divisions, folks, and look at the amazing things that we can do and that we are doing, and maybe try to just devote a little bit more of your attention and focus on those things, um, to just give a little bit more wind to their sails, because there is so much amazing potential out there. Um, so go ahead.

Real quick, Adam, you know, do you know that people that are optimists live 15% longer than people who aren't? So the point about that is, if you just want to increase your lifestyle, learn to be happy, right?

Yeah. Oh, absolutely. No, stop. Stop worrying about stuff you can't control. Stop walking around with a big, big ass chip on your shoulder, hating everybody around you. Look, I don't like people. I don't go outside. There's people outside. I don't go outside. But, you know, the point is, is just, you know, learn to be happy, and your whole life will be better. If you're more optimistic, your life will work out better. If you're pessimistic, you draw negativity to you. If you're optimistic, you draw optimism to you. So, pick the lifestyle that you want and learn to be to live in that lifestyle. If you like being miserable all the time, that's what you're going to attract. And, you know, I don't know why you want to live that way, but that's up to you. But if you want to have a happy, healthy lifestyle, learn to be optimistic, learn to be happy, and draw that energy to you because you'll have that type of environment around you. You cultivate your environment. So, if you don't like your environment, look at the people you hang around with. Look at the things you do. Look at the things that you draw to you through social media. If you don't like your environment, that's the place to start.

So, let me add to that. So, first off, there's the old Native American adage or whatever. Um, you know, you've got two wolves in you, and which wolf wins is the one that you feed, right? So, to your point, Lance, it's you basically become what you put your energies into. And look, I don't know if this is real or not, but I was watching a TV show the other day that John Ham, your friends and neighbors, won.

It's a fun one. And he was talking to his sister, and his sister has some mental health issues, and basically he was kind of looking out for her, and she's taking on some responsibility that he's worried are going to be too much for her and maybe cause her to relapse. And she basically tells him, "Well, hey, look, you know, there was this Harvard study or something like this where they had these two collections of rats." And on one cage of rats, it said, "These are super smart rats." And on another cage of rats, it said, "These are the dumbest rats ever." And then they brought in students to run these rats through mazes and had the students basically rate the rats. And apparently, the rats that were in the cage that were labeled the stupidest rats ever performed much worse on the experiments. And her point was like, the rats were random rats. They were the same rats in both cases, but the students had an expectation of the rats to be failures, and therefore the rats then became failures. And so to your point about like what you choose to focus on and direct your energies to, that's totally right. The layer I want to add on top of that is your expectations of others, right? So if you think, okay, well, that guy thinks differently than me on this topic, and so therefore that guy must be an idiot, an ignoramus, a bad person, whatever, you're projecting a lot onto that person, and that's probably going to determine the destiny of your relationship with them. So my point is, is maybe try to readjust a little bit and go forth in the world with a little bit more optimism about other people and our ability to interact and find common ground and stuff like that. And I do think, I don't know if that Harvard study was real or if they just made it up for the episode, but I think there is truth in that, which is if you go into something with a preconceived idea, you are definitely increasing your odds of getting that experience that you've got the preconception for. Right? So, shift your preconceptions to be a little bit more optimistic, a little bit more let's collaborate versus fight. Back if you do watch the show Friends and Neighbors, I highly encourage you not to pursue his career path.

Well, it's not working out that well for him right now if you're up to the latest episode.

Um, all right. So, back to Artemis just for a second. Um, so there was a great moment that happened there, Lance. I don't know if you saw it, but it was the one where the mission commander, where they named some newfound features on the moon after, I think, both their ship or whatever, but also after his wife who had died of cancer. And I didn't know any of that. And it's funny, I watched this happen live. Totally moving where he names the crater or whatever it was after his wife who passed away. And at the time, I didn't even know it was his wife. He didn't say, "My wife," he said, "Wife of whatever the guy's name is, and mother of these kids." I thought it was like a teammate of theirs or something who had died, but it turned out to be his wife. And he did it, and then all his crewmates come and give him a big hug. And it's just this wonderful moment of humanity. And I actually was so moved by it, I recorded it and then I sent it out on X. And initially, it didn't get a lot of response. And I was like, "Come on, people. Like, how could you not respond well to this? Don't you have a heart?" But again, to me, it was, I don't know how many miles away they were, but I know it's hundreds of thousands of miles away from the Earth, pretty much headed towards the dark side of the moon, farther away from the Earth than any human had ever been, and they still had this ability to demonstrate the best of humanity in the midst of all that. It was amazing. So, anyway, did you see that?

I saw it and yeah, that was very moving. And again, that's about this. The stuff that happened on that voyage was just amazing. And people are just, you know, when I look on X and people are knocking it down and trying to find some reason to degrade it, call it fake, whatever, I'm just like, what's wrong with you?

Yeah, I'm with you. It's like we don't get that many wins where we can find something that 100% of the people should agree on, right? Like that's pretty awesome, right?

Yes.

All right. Well, look, folks, you know, like my ask from here is just, you know, leave this video today with a little bit more intent to, you know, appreciate what humans are capable of and maybe help invite people to become their best selves and in the process, try to be your best self as well.

Um, all right, Lance. Well, I think that's about it for the week. Um, anything else we should talk about before we bring this thing to a close?

I think we've done a good rant and I think we covered the market pretty well. And I think next week, we could definitely see a bit of a pullback. So, you know, kind of look for your opportunities. Pick wisely.

Pick wisely. Okay. All right, folks. Well, so if you want some help in picking wisely, highly recommend that you get that from a good professional financial advisor. Importantly, one that takes into account the macro and market issues that not just Lance and I talk about in this channel, but all the experts and I talk about. If you don't have a good advisor who's doing that for you, consider talking to one of the ones that Thoughtful Money endorses. Perhaps you might want to talk to Lance himself and the team there at RAA. So, to set up a discussion, just fill out the very short form at thoughtfulmoney.com and the firms will be in touch with you right away.

Please do me a favor, folks. Hit the like button if you haven't already, and also click on the subscribe button below, as well as that little bell icon right next to it. Lance, I want to invite you to join me in celebrating the fact that we just passed 175,000 subscribers on this channel. It's been a real journey so far. That couldn't have happened at all without you, the viewers here subscribing. I mean, theoretically, it's or literally, it's just a count of how many of you have subscribed. But if you haven't yet, please, please do subscribe now because we want to get to 200,000 as quickly as we can. The more subscribers we have, the more basically YouTube gives attention to this channel and these videos and shares them with the world.

Lance, you know this, but I had run a previous channel before here that you were on with me, and we got that one up to 300,000 subscribers and then had to start over from zero when we founded Thoughtful Money. And I thought I founded Thoughtful Money a little over two and a half years ago, or about two and a half years ago. And it's been a lot of work to rebuild it, but it's been more fun than it ever was. And so again, huge thanks to you for being part of that.

Well, and if you'll remember, when you transitioned over, you were terrified. It's like, you know, what if I can't do this? What if I can't build back? I was like, you can do this. It's going to be great. You know, I was definitely in your corner for this. So, I'm very proud of you. I think it's great what you've done, and I hope to see you continue to build it.

Well, thank you. And you definitely were. Again, I just want to give props where props are due here. Yes, I was worried. Oh my gosh, I captured lightning in a bottle. Am I going to be able to do that again? Very, very grateful to everybody who came over with me.

Completely rational to have that fear.

Every time.

Yeah, it was. But what really helped me get through that fear was the huge support and emotional propping up that, you know, a few key people like you did, Lance. So you were very important in that.

Um, so anyways, folks, if you haven't subscribed, long story short, if you haven't subscribed, please subscribe here. And last thing, if you're watching this the day that this video is premiering, it is the same day as Rick Rule's Copper Boot Camp. Um, and I don't know if you, for those that didn't watch the video I released earlier this week with Rick, lots of reasons to be very optimistic about where both the price of copper is headed in the next couple of years, but how the mining companies in that sector will do. And, um, if you still have time to actually watch that boot camp live, because it really just started, I think pretty much right around the time this video is ending. Um, and even if you can't watch it today, if you go and register for it still, you'll get all the replay videos of the event, which you're going to need to watch anyway. As Rick said, it's like an eight-hour event. He's like, you're going to have to watch these videos a couple of times to get all the information and get it to sync in. So, anyways, if you want to take advantage of that copper boot camp, just go to thoughtfulmoney.com/copper and you can sign up for it.

Um, all right, my friend Lance, look forward to seeing you next week. Glad to have you back on the continent again after your English travels.

Yep. So, Italy's next. That's this summer. So.

All right. Look at you becoming a world traveler. That is great. And I suspect and hope that a lot of this traveling, it sounds like there was sort of a wedding or something involved this last time around, but it's just that you're prioritizing taking some more time to enjoy life and smell the roses with your wife, given her wonderful news in terms of her health recovery.

Yeah, it is very much now realizing the, and again, this was a very valuable lesson. And unfortunately, we learn valuable lessons at the worst of times, potentially. But the lesson is that you do need to enjoy your life while you have the ability to do it. And, you know, just work like you and me, you know, we're, you and I are both just workaholics. We work a lot. You know, we're constantly grinding to grow our businesses. And that's all admirable. Nothing wrong with that. That's how you build wealth in the capitalist system. That's fantastic. But you also, I had a friend of mine tell me this yesterday. He's like, "Lance, you got to learn to spend some of it." And so.

And so that's the goal. Um, for as long as I have my wife with me, we're going to start spending more time together and enjoy.

Well, that is, I'm going to say that is going to be a long time, and I wish you guys lots of new happy memories as part of that. Um, so we were wrapping up, but real quick, a question here for the audience. Folks, if you'd like to maybe have me and Lance talk one of these in one of these videos going forward about exactly what Lance just mentioned, which is the importance of investing. It's a high priority. We do it because we want to set up a better, more prosperous future for us and our family and the people that we love. But it's a journey, and it's a journey that you don't know how much time you have on it, right? Hopefully, you've got a lot of time ahead of you, but the proverbial bus could hit you tomorrow, right? And so, um, yes, you want to be building your capital more and more as time goes on, but Lance, I presume you also want to be taking time to spend some of it along the way to make sure that if luck's just not in your favor and you've got less time than you think, you're at least getting living done along the way.

Exactly. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, I talk about Thoughtful Money's mission is to help you fund your life goals. That's what I'm trying to do is to increase your odds to do the things in life you want to do.

But you don't want to have them all in the future. You want to have some of those goals here in the present.

That's what we call scooping. We call that bucket scooping within our firm. So when we're doing financial planning, we set up all these kind of life goals, and then when the portfolio does really well, we scoop a goal that was in the future, we move it up. We do it now. Want to remodel your kitchen? We had a great return last year. We're doing that this year. You want to travel? We so we set up these buckets, and then as those buckets come due, we scoop those, move those forward to make sure you can fund these experiences, but still not deter from your financial plan.

All right. So, yeah, folks, if you'd like to see a more detailed discussion about this and kind of the mindset and the behaviors to adopt in it that Lance and his firm recommend, let me know in the comments section. If demand is high enough, we'll integrate that into a future video here.

All right, Lance, my friend. Well, look, yeah, get out of here and go have some fun with your wife.

Absolutely. See you next week.

All right, everybody else. Thanks so much for watching.