Record Margin Debt: "The Blow-up Is Going To Be Spectacular" | Lance Roberts

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No, stop. Or not.
We are outgunned and we are outmanned, but we have each other.

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FX is the Bear, the final season.

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**Lance Roberts** (0:59)
We are punching record levels of margin debt. And again, like I said, these are people that are buying on margin leveraged ETFs or options on leveraged ETFs on margin.
So the blow up is going to be spectacular at some point. We're going to look back at this and go, oh yeah, that was obvious.

**Adam Taggart** (1:22)
Welcome to Thoughtful Money. I'm Thoughtful Money Founder and your host, Adam Taggart, welcoming you back at the end of the week for another weekly Market Recap featuring my good friend, the rootin tootin six-gun shootin portfolio manager, Lance Roberts. Lance, how you doin?

**Lance Roberts** (1:36)
I'm doin fantastic. It's more semi-automatics than revolvers these days.

**Adam Taggart** (1:40)
Well, I was gonna ask, can you tell who went to the rodeo last night?

**Lance Roberts** (1:45)
I saw your X-post on that. Did you have a good time?

**Adam Taggart** (1:48)
I had a phenomenal time. It was great. And actually, I'm gonna talk about it in the rant if we've got time today.
So I'll punt on giving the details for that for a little bit. But it was a great, great time.

**Lance Roberts** (2:00)
I saw one of the respondents to your tweet. He had his feet propped up with his square-toed boots on. I'm like, that dude is not from Texas.

**Adam Taggart** (2:11)
Well, yeah, okay, folks, we'll get to that in just a little bit. Sharp-eyed folks might be seeing I'm wearing a new jacket today.
The jacket I normally wear, folks, long-term viewers may remember. It's got a special story behind it. It's the jacket that I wore as a young junior investment banking analyst back in the early 90s on Wall Street when I started my career there.
I had to wear it on Wall Street's terms back then, which is the reason why I wear it now. I wear it now on my terms for Thoughtful Money.
It's an older jacket, so it started getting a little bit worse for wear. Liner was starting to come out. Also, I have dropped a little bit of weight on my fitness transformation program following Lance's lead, and it needed to be taken in. I brought it to a tailor. It is getting trust up at the moment. It's going to take a little while, Lance, because I totally didn't think about it when I went in there, but it's wedding season. I guess the tailors are crushed during this point of time. So we're going to have a new jacket here, folks, as a stand-in for a couple of weeks, but the old one will be coming back. All right. So Lance, lots to talk about with you this week. Let me start with this question. I'm trying to figure it out. Is breadth improving or worsening in the market? And the main reason why I asked this is I look at the equal weight S&P, that seems to be doing just fine, but I look at the MAG-7, which have driven the market for so long, right? And we've talked forever about how, at many, many times, it was the only thing that was driving the market forward. These are the stocks that the passive flows of the giant mindless robot feeds every month.
These things have actually been sucking wind, and not just the MAG-7, but the other stocks that have been white hot over recent years, like Palantir and whatnot. I'm trying to figure out, gosh, if those stocks are doing well, but the market is still pretty much hitting all-time highs, what's going on here? Is the rest of the market finally pulling its weight, or is everything now just crowded into an even narrower AI trade, the semis, etc., and is the market increasingly dancing on the head of a narrowing pin? What's the right answer here?