Is The Pain In Stocks Over? Did The Bounce Just Arrive? | Michael Lebowitz

**Michael Lebowitz** (0:00)
We do think there's a bounce coming today, you know, maybe day one of the bounce, and it may be only three or four days. But it may very much be that we get back up to near 6,000 on the S&P 500

**Adam Taggart** (0:21)
Welcome to Thoughtful Money. I'm Thoughtful Money Founder and your host, Adam Taggart, welcoming you back here at the end of another week. It's a good week because instead of Lance Roberts, this week we have the unflappable portfolio manager, Michael Lebowitz. How are you, Michael?

**Michael Lebowitz** (0:35)
I'm doing great, thank you.

**Adam Taggart** (0:36)
Yeah, all right. Well, look, I used unflappable for two reasons. One, because you are a very even keeled guy. You bring a lot of calmness, even when the markets are as volatile as they've been the past couple of weeks. I thought it was a good week for an unflappable host here because I think a lot of folks are feeling the sting of the past couple of days in the markets. So we'll get into just a second, folks, about what the markets have been up to. If you are watching this video when it launches, the morning it launches, Saturday morning, in real time, I will actually be running Thoughtful Money's spring online conference. And if you're watching this, this probably means you chose not to join the conference. But if you decide you still want to jump in, you still can. You can do that by going and buying your ticket at thoughtfulmoney.com/conference, and then you'll get sent directly into the live event. If you're watching this afterwards and are saying, shoot, I really wish I'd caught that event, don't worry. All the replay videos from the event should be available starting the day after this video goes live, so Sunday. And if you want to buy the replays, all the presentations, all the live Q&A's, you can do so at that same URL, thoughtfulmoney.com/conference.
All right, Michael, look, with that out of the way, basically, the question I have for you this week is, what the heck just happened? We saw a lot of market cap vaporize, trillions and trillions of market cap vaporize. The day we're talking, Friday, the market looks like it's bouncing, and everyone's been asking, when is the tradeable bottom in? So what the heck just happened, and is a tradeable bottom in?

**Michael Lebowitz** (2:19)
So, not sure if it's a tradeable bottom. A tradeable bottom, yes. I'm not sure if it's a bottom. What I would character, one thing Lance and I came to, came on our own conclusions, but late last year to the same conclusion, that 2025 was likely to be a roller coaster.
Up and down, up and down, but a roller coaster always starts and ends at the same point. So, you get these nauseating drops and these thrilling rises, and you basically go nowhere. And so far, we're down a little. We're down, you know, what is it, 10%? We're 10% from the highs.

**Adam Taggart** (3:01)
Yeah, as of yesterday, we were in correction territory, yeah.

**Michael Lebowitz** (3:04)
Yeah. You know, today, we're up 2%, or whatever it is, as of Friday, midday, or so. But the point is that we are in a very uncertain political environment, not economic environment yet. Now, obviously, politics play a big role in the economy. But, you know, we have a president that is every five minutes coming up with a new tariff, taking away a tariff, saying something different. I don't care about the stock market anymore. I want to get bond yields lower. And I think it's really tough for a market that likes certainty. They want to know what's happening. Companies want to know if they can spend money. And because of the uncertainty, you create anxiety, angst among investors. Corporations are a little tied up. They're a little handcuffed because they, you know, some of them don't know what to do because they're waiting to see how all of this plays out. So I think what the markets have kind of morphed into over the last six weeks, four weeks, whatever it's been, is what I would call a risk on, risk off market on an asset class level.
So risk on, that means buy. So high beta, growth, crypto. Those are the things that do the best in the risk on market. Risk off, buy bonds, sell those high beta names. They got hit the worst.
And accordingly, because it's kind of this bipolar risk on, risk off, binary, not bipolar, binary type market, assets are getting bought and sold, whether it's risk on or risk off. So when was CPI? Wednesday, Tuesday, whenever it was. A client said, why are bonds trading off? That was a good CPI number. And it was, it was lower than expectations. Because at the time, it was a risk on kind of day. And bonds are in a risk off category. And we've just seen that where you have to kind of, if you want to understand the market, forget about fundamentals for the next 10 minutes, and just focus on what's in vogue, what's not in vogue. And they're just moving in opposite directions. And doesn't necessarily make sense, but that's what's going on. And you just have to, this is why technicals are so important to us, because it helps us keep a more level head, as opposed to falling for the emotions and the gut instincts to trade the market. We let, you know, let the technicals just guide you, and it's not blind, but, you know, you have enough gages that it's like a pilot, an airplane pilot flying through a cloud. They don't know where they are, but they trust their instrument panel. And in markets like this, we have to rely a lot more heavily on that instrument panel than we may otherwise.