Bullish on Stocks, Bearish on the Economy — The Inevitable Collision

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
But UBS raising the target on the S&P. And yeah, Futures, it looks like it's at an all-time high right now. Trump's laying out a 30-day plan to end the war in Iran.
And there's been dispute about that from Iran, saying that they haven't agreed to fully everything. It's always kind of back and forth.
They even, one of the reports came that they told Iran to just don't say anything publicly, like to anything that he says publicly, because anything that he says publicly is just propaganda for the American public. Don't worry about it. Like, don't even worry about it. And then we'll talk about the Abraham Accords. He kind of snuck that in there. He was on a conference call with Saudi Arabia, UAE, Qatar, Turkey, and they said, like he said that that's part of the agreement that everybody has to agree to the Abraham Accords. And he said, when he said that, it caught everybody off guard, nobody spoke. And he had to actually had to make a joke to get them to laugh. He was like, you know, are you still on the line? If you don't know about the Abraham Accords, that's a whole nother conversation. But there's a lot going on right now, but he's pushing that the war is over. And that has the stock market up at an all time high right now. So where are we at with this target? Where are we at with the war allegedly ending? Stocks going to the moon as a result of that? Where are we at?

**Ian** (1:29)
The war isn't over. I haven't talked to any US Intel, but I have got a couple of war sources. That's not over. So that part is manipulation. But what I will say due to rising inflation, global debt to GDP is 308 percent. The only place you can really put the market is either into business, stocks, or tech companies pre-IPO. So there has to be capital that is deployed.
My end of year target, I know UBS is, and I talked about this in the Stock Club last month, but my end of year target for the ES could go as high as 85.35.
There's no reason to short this market. I know everyone keeps looking for a short. Ben Carlson told us on Stock Club Call yesterday, everyone keeps looking to recreate Michael Burry's short, but the real trade, and I've said this before, it's not the big short, it's to ride the market up endlessly. I have ended up probably at 85.35 by end of the year. If not, by March of next year, we should hit the target whole for the long term.
Not only that, this is the greatest class. These last 10 years, these are the greatest class of tech companies we've ever seen. When you pair NVIDIA, AMD, Microsoft, OpenAI, Databricks, Anthropic, you can take any other, and I asked Ben, have you seen a class with this much quality? No. One of these companies, if you ported them back into the early 1990s, they would smash IBM in 80s and 90s. So there's no benefit. And I said it before, but all the optimists and all the bears make all the money. Like being a pessimist, you may sell books or subscriptions, but in terms of creating real wealth, you have to hold for the long term. 85, 35 is my long-term target for S&P.

**SPEAKER_3** (3:34)
I had that said last week. I said 7,900 to 8,100. I think I'm gonna lead more toward that 8,100.
If you're looking at the futures market, I think the first thing I looked at was the market was closed today, but the first thing I looked at was where's oil? Because that'll tell me how we're gonna look on to tomorrow morning. So oil, I think it was down, it got down to $90 a barrel.

**Ian** (3:56)
Yeah, it got to $89.

**SPEAKER_3** (3:58)
It's creeping up right here now. It's at $91.
But you can see how the market is responding. All the NASDAQ, the S&P, the Dow are all up on that anticipation, which is great news for the companies that we invest in. Because when you see prices go down, then you obviously start thinking about consumer spend. Consumer spends look pretty good, even with gas prices going up. I know the average price in, I think all 50 cents is now $4.
Summer month, you start to see more spending travel. So that is always good. That means that rates potentially, and I know the new Fed chair got sworn in Friday. Again, historically, that usually means that there's gonna be a down cycle at some point. We haven't seen that yet, but there's some hints that there might be some interest rate cut, and there might be some pressure to do that. So we'll see. But yeah, we're in an unprecedented time. I mean, just think about five years ago, how many companies had a market cap of a trillion?