Ted Oakley: Wall Street Is Running Investors Off A Cliff

**Ted Oakley** (0:00)
You know, I call this a lemming markets. They're lemming markets. I've seen them before, where they're like lemmings, you know, they all go after each other, each other, then they all fall off the cliff and die in the water. That's what happens, you know, with the lemmings. And what happens in these situations is that, and I can give you these numbers, by the way, but I can show you where you can make a direct five-year, five-fifteen, or 20% gain in the S&P.
And then, in the sixth year, I have a 50% down, and you give every bit of it up. Every bit of it. In other words, you've got six years that you can make any money.

**Adam Taggart** (0:43)
Welcome to Thoughtful Money. I'm its founder and your host, Adam Taggart. After experiencing one of the most violent recovery rallies in history over the past two months, stocks suddenly find themselves struggling to hold on to their new record highs.
Is this just a pause before a string of massive new tech IPOs, like SpaceX, OpenAI and Anthropic, launch the markets back into the stratosphere? Or are these classic late stage signs that the long bull market is nearly played out? To discuss, we've got the good fortune of welcoming back to the program high net worth financial advisor, Ted Oakley, managing partner and founder of Oxbow Advisors. Ted, thanks so much for joining us today.

**Ted Oakley** (1:25)
Good to see you, Adam.

**Adam Taggart** (1:27)
Great to see you, Ted. It's always a total pleasure having you on the program. And just for compliance reasons, I need to be clear just at the beginning, Thoughtful Money has a number of endorsed financial advisors, which Oxbow Advisors is one. But I have a fair amount of my own personal money with you guys, and I just need to be transparent about that from the get-go. But I'm a very happy client, I'm happy to say. All right, Ted, that out of the way, a lot to talk about. And we get a bunch of specific questions. But if we can, just because it's been a little while since you've been on the program, let me start with this more general question.
What is your current assessment of the economy and the financial markets at this state?

**Ted Oakley** (2:13)
Well, Adam, economically, you see some weakness. I mean, you haven't gotten any more out of housing, but just generally economically, we hadn't seen the signs of at least a current recession right this minute. So from that standpoint, but from a market standpoint, whatever news comes out of Washington every other day is when you get a rally or a decline. And I think people switched from chasing Mag-7 to chasing the semiconductors, which is by the way, always live by the sword, die by the sword group of stocks.
But that's sort of what's happened. They chased them, they got really, that's really what ran the market in here. The last few weeks has been these semiconductors, and they got overpriced. Again, they do it all the time.
And so I think people are in the chasing mood. I've never seen probably in my time in the business, and I've been around a lot of hot IPOs, but never seen anything like the people that are interested in SpaceX, and probably will be the other two, but then you got Google on top of their offering, and now Meta is going to bring one. So these are the kinds of things. It doesn't happen overnight, but those are the kinds of signs you look for toward the end, because what happens is you just breed all this greed, and there's a lot of greed out there right now. So they're really pushing. So I think people need to keep that in mind.

**Adam Taggart** (3:53)
All right. And that was sort of the spirit in my introduction here, where we get a lot of investor enthusiasm in the market, a lot of speculation.
And a question I've been finding myself asking people of late, and I think you already answered it for me, is, you know, is this the insiders kind of getting out while the getting is still good, right? Which is, that tends to be something you see in these late-stage bull markets where companies say, hey, look, we're not sure how much longer it's going to be this good. So before the window closes, let's all rush to market to try to get out.

**Ted Oakley** (4:31)
Well, that's what happens. I mean, anytime you get late-state, when the IPOs really pick up these public offerings, that's when you know that it's easy to sell them. See, if it's hard to sell them, they don't pick up. If you look at hard times, you know, you don't bring any IPOs because they can't sell them. But when it gets real easy to sell, that's when you have a lot of IPOs, and they're real easy to sell right now. They'll get this one done, and they'll have the other two behind it, and they'll be going crazy to try to buy that.