Overly Bullish Investors Risk Losses Of Up To 50% This Year | Lance Roberts & Adam Taggart

**Lance Roberts** (0:00)
This is going to be a year of increased volatility, lower expected rates of return, 8% to 10% total return for the year. That includes dividends. It's probably what you should expect. And, you know, be prepared for 10, 15, even a 20% decline mid-year, possibly, based on some economic or geopolitical event, whatever it is. Markets are just extremely extended, they're overbought, exceptionally, exceptionally bullish.
They are flushed with cash, and they are just chasing markets in the most risky of areas. So, you know, we're setting up for that same type of dynamic that we saw back in 2022, where the S&P corrects 10, 15, maybe 20%, where retail investors are going to get shellacked 40 to 50% because of the unwinding of that leverage.

**Adam Taggart** (0:55)
Welcome to Thoughtful Money. I'm Thoughtful Money Founder and your host, Adam Taggart, welcoming you back at the end of another week for another weekly Market Recap, featuring my good friend, the Prodigal, Lance Roberts. Lance, how are you?

**Lance Roberts** (1:07)
I'm good, I'm very good. I don't know about Prodigal this week, I'm tired. It's been a busy week. I was in Vancouver last week, so this whole week's been catch up for following the conference.

**Adam Taggart** (1:18)
Oh, that's why I picked Prodigal. Last week, you were just too cool for school, too busy for us. You went off and did your own bright, shiny thing. Now, you're slinking back, trying to get back in our good graces.

**SPEAKER_2** (1:30)
Exactly.

**Adam Taggart** (1:31)
Anyways, good to have you back, in spite of the just avalanche of comments we had, which we had Mike Leibowitz on in your stead. And they're like, why do you have that guy Lance here? This guy Michael is so much better and smarter and better looking. But don't worry, Lance, I was defending you against all of them.

**Lance Roberts** (1:46)
Hey, listen, I see the comments, and you are more than welcome to swap me out for Michael anytime you want.

**Adam Taggart** (1:55)
No, Lance, look, you're going to get a bunch of comments here of everybody telling you how much they love you. But anyways, glad you're back.
Fair amount of things I want to talk about with you. First off, happy Valentine's Day to you and to your wonderful, lovely wife, who I got to meet the other week when you guys generously took me out to dinner. But I hope you're treating her well this evening.

**Lance Roberts** (2:17)
Yeah, well, so it was funny. So she's been traveling all week. So she got a promotion at work. She's got a new job. So she was traveling up to Dallas all week. And she came home late Thursday night.
So we're recording this Friday morning. So she got home late last night. And she comes in and she says, look, honey. She says, you know, I love you. We've been married forever. And let's just not do anything for Valentine's Day. Don't buy me thing for Valentine's Day. We'll go to dinner on Saturday. But I haven't had a chance to do anything because of travel. And I'm like, okay, honey, no problem. I certainly understand that. No worries. Well, the problem is I'd already gone, bought a big bouquet of flowers and a bunch of her favorite snacks and had put together this whole thing for her. So this morning when she got up, but we get up about 4, 4.3 in the morning. And so she came out to get her coffee. All this stuff was sitting there. She's like, I told you not to do that. I'm late, I already did it. And I figured it was a trap anyway, it would be one of those things that if I didn't do it, she'd be like, I have like two years. So I remember that Valentine's Day, you didn't buy me anything.
I think you're better safe than sorry.

**Adam Taggart** (3:28)
So, well, you're a good man. And you're setting the bar and comfortably high for the slacker husbands like myself, who are several steps behind you. But anyways, everybody watching, you'll be watching this, what, the day after Valentine's Day. So I hope you all have wonderful times with those that you care about in your life. The other quick announcement is, I'll keep this very brief. I'll give more details at the end. But the Thoughtful Money Spring Online Conference is coming up pretty fast now. We're about a month away from it. As a reminder, it's Saturday, March 15th. We've been having the steady drumbeat of new big names that we've been adding to the roster. This week's big name is John Thorndyke, who is one of Jeremy Grantham's lieutenants over at GMO. And yes, everybody, I tried my best to get Jeremy. He's a very hard guy to get. Was not able to get him, but was again able to get one of his top lieutenants. So yet just another fantastic name they were adding to the roster. So if you have not yet signed up for the conference, you can go do so now over at thoughtfulmoney.com/conference. All right, Lance, there's fair amount to talk about here. Very quickly, I got a chance to talk with Michael about this last week, but we've had some new inflation data come out. Markets had a little hiccup when it came out. They've gotten over that pretty quickly. But the sentiment is still that we're going to be in stickier for longer. We've seen consumer inflation expectations spike, even though that's very dependent upon what political party you're affiliated with.