Markets Are Back At An All-Time High & Speculation Is Out of Control | Lance Roberts

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**Lance Roberts** (0:55)
The one thing that worries me though is that there is so much speculation by retail investors in the markets. Call option volume on S&P 500 is at record levels. And we're not talking about record levels by a smidge. We're talking about record levels that nobody's ever even seen before.

**Adam Taggart** (1:17)
Welcome to Thoughtful Money. I'm Thoughtful Money Founder and your host, Adam Taggart, welcoming you here at the end of another week for another weekly Market Recap featuring my good friend, the ebullient portfolio manager, Lance Roberts. Lance, how are you doing?

**Lance Roberts** (1:30)
I'm doing great. I have no idea what that word means.

**Adam Taggart** (1:35)
Yeah, ebullient just means excited, cheerful, uplifted, right? Which I think is a good set of adjectives for the market right now. Stocks are feeling very ebullient. So, let's just dive right into that, Lance.
Is there a breakout in progress here? We just made new highs. Are we cracking higher here, you think? You're on?

**Lance Roberts** (1:59)
So, now, of course, you and I are visiting here. It's early on a Friday morning. It's 9.55 Houston time. So, markets have been open about an hour and a half or so, so far. But as we're speaking right now, we're sitting at all-time highs on the S&P. The NASDAQ actually set new all-time highs a couple of days ago. So, considering they both have very similar holdings, Apple, Microsoft, Google, Nvidia, top 10 holdings, the NASDAQ has been dragging the S&P up with it. So, but no, bullish wise, we've got breakouts across the board above resistance. We need to hold this through Friday. So, by the end of the day, if the market sells off and we're back, we're down for the day somewhat, any at all, we actually finish right at all time highs on Thursday. So, if we're down 10 basis points by today, we want to broken out. But as of we speak right now, if we finish the market positive today, we will broken out on the S&P 500 to new all time highs.

**Adam Taggart** (3:00)
Okay. And when I say breakout, I don't necessarily mean just a new all time high, but you have been saying for a good while in the program, stocks short term over extended, expect a pull back here. You still thinking that or you thinking now given the technical action, hey, maybe that's negated now and stocks got room to run.

**Lance Roberts** (3:19)
No, no, we actually had to pull back. It wasn't much of one, but we actually did pull back. If you kind of look at a chart, about a week and a half ago, the market had been rallying off support, and then we actually pulled back to support at about 59.66, based along that support for a couple of days, tested the 20-day moving average, and then really kind of following, talk about how fast narratives change, right? Over the weekend, last weekend, we're all talking about World War III because we bombed the nuclear facilities in Iran. I write a whole article on the fly Sunday talking about, okay, here's what's happening in Iran. This is the conflict worry, blah, blah, blah. And it was over Monday afternoon. So that article was completely outdated by 3 o'clock on Monday afternoon.

**Adam Taggart** (4:12)
But the market didn't even care. The market opened up.

**Lance Roberts** (4:17)
Yeah, exactly. And so we had this whole big narrative about World War III, and this was going to be terrible for markets, and that was over as fast as it started. But no, that's the whole point, is that by Monday afternoon, markets had rallied sharply, and we just rallied the rest of the week, and have been running up to new all-time highs. Every narrative that's been talked about recently, tariffs, debts and deficits, World War III, inflation, the Fed, all those narratives have basically just crumbled as markets are looking right through it, because none of those are affecting earnings outlooks. And actual earning outlooks are improving right now for the S&P 500