Does A September Surprise Lie In Store For Stocks? | Lance Roberts

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You're about to make a trade.

**Adam Taggart** (0:32)
Which you do listen to?

**SPEAKER_4** (0:33)
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**Lance Roberts** (0:45)
We've got relative strength is weakening, markets are rising. So that's just, and generally that typically that type of action precedes larger corrections. So Monday, September the 1st, it's a holiday.
But September tends to be the weakest trading month of the year. So if this negative divergence is going to show up in the markets, it's likely going to show up in September.

**Adam Taggart** (1:10)
Welcome to Thoughtful Money. Thoughtful Money founder and your host, Adam Taggart, welcoming you here at the end of the week for another weekly market recap featuring my good friend, the portfolio manager and Swifty, Lance Roberts. Lance, how you doing?

**Lance Roberts** (1:24)
Hey, I am all on the Taylor Swift board. I, you know what? I found some amazing statistics about Taylor Swift. I had no idea. You know, we talk about this social media economy that we're in now, and everybody's social media driven. Taylor Swift has over 400 million followers on her social media platforms. That's more than the population of the entire United States.
I was like, I was like just blown away by that. Her dress that she wore for her engagement with Kelsey.

**Adam Taggart** (1:58)
A Ralph Lauren dress, that's how much.

**Lance Roberts** (2:00)
Yeah. It's sold out in like 15 minutes. Every size that they had was sold out. Just after she posted that. It's interesting because when you talk about her heiress tour that she did, we talked about the economic impact of that and that it actually boosted GDP growth.

**Adam Taggart** (2:19)
It was visible in the GDP. Yeah.

**Lance Roberts** (2:21)
It was because of everybody renting hotel rooms and buying merchandise and traveling and airfare and all that. It's going to be interesting to see how much of an economic impact we get out of this whole engagement wedding process.

**Adam Taggart** (2:37)
It's funny, I had this to ask you at some point in today's list, if we had time. But yeah, there's been, Finntwit's been hot with discussion of like, so is this going to inspire a whole bunch of copycat engagements? Then everyone's like, and pretty soon after this marriage, there's going to be a Taylor Swift baby and then is there going to be a baby boom basically caused by all these people trying to get pregnant at the same time that Taylor Swift is? So a question I was going to ask you tongue in cheek, which if we have time, we'll get to, but is like, could Taylor Swift rescue the slow economy here?

**Lance Roberts** (3:13)
Yeah, it's undoubtedly possible. Let's remember Taylor Swift's been engaged before, right?
So TMZ ran this great article.

**Adam Taggart** (3:21)
Has she really? Okay, you just passed. I've got two daughters. You've now sucked up all my Taylor Swift trivially. I didn't know she was engaged before.

**Lance Roberts** (3:28)
So yeah, her whole life story is just failed relationship after failed relationship. But TMZ ran a really good article on Monday, and it was all the odds, the betting odds that are going on right now with where's odds on bet are the wedding will be in Las Vegas, or the engagement, the bachelorette party will be in Las Vegas. Where's the wedding going to be? What's the over under on who's the maid of honor versus best man? And there's just all this, we've turned in fact, this weekend's article that I'm writing for the Bull Bear Report, Saturday's newsletter, is the fact that we've now turned the stock market into a entertainment market. And we're now betting on all kinds of stuff. For instance, like the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, which does a lot of options trading, has cut a deal with FanDuel. That opens up the whole opportunity for now for options trading against potentially, if you kind of extrapolate this out, maybe I could buy call or put options on whether or not Dallas makes it to the playoffs this year. Sorry, I have to laugh.
But you get on Reddit as an example, and there's whole Reddit boards that are up that are just memes about investing. One of the examples I'm using in the newsletter is talking about irresponsibly long micro-strategy. It's just meme after meme after meme of people that are loading up on micro-strategy stock on this whole bet, that micro-strategy is going to go to a million dollars a share or whatever the number is. Even Michael Saylor himself has been posting memes about himself to promote micro-strategy stock, which I think that borders into stock market manipulation. But we'll see what if anybody ever says anything about it. But the juxt of it is, and this is the interesting thing is that we've now, through online betting, you can bet on pretty much anything. Polymarket has just got a new investor into Polymarket. It's got a huge valuation on that company. But basically, you bet on anything.