Time To Be "Tactically Bearish" Stocks? | Lance Roberts & Adam Taggart

**Lance Roberts** (0:00)
The drivers that support economic growth and earnings are slowing down. And, you know, that's why, and I will give you your headline for the week. You're always trying to dig up some bearish headline out of me, because I'm going to give it to you. That's why we're turning more tactically bearish this year on stocks, is because of what's happening. See, he's already writing it down.

**Adam Taggart** (0:21)
I love it when you do my work for me.

**Lance Roberts** (0:22)
And that doesn't mean markets are going to crash, but I am certainly much more concerned about where markets are trading in the short term because of really coming back to the basis of it all, which is valuations.

**Adam Taggart** (0:44)
Welcome to Thoughtful Money. I'm Thoughtful Money Founder and your host, Adam Taggart, welcoming you back here at the end of another week with my good and lupine friend, Portfolio Manager Lance Roberts. Lance, how you doing?

**Lance Roberts** (0:56)
I don't have lupus. I don't know.

**Adam Taggart** (1:00)
So lupine means wolf-like, and that adjective will make more sense as we get to today's rant. But all right, Lance, lots going on this week. I kind of lost track trying to pull together topics for today's Market Recap for the week. But maybe we can just start real quickly with two things. One, I see you wearing a sweater, which is not normal for you, and that's because you guys are having a pretty big cold snap there in Texas, right? And lots of the other eastern part of the country.

**Lance Roberts** (1:35)
It is. And so at my house, I refuse to run heat during the winter. So it's a little chilly in my house today. So that's just part of the part of the concept. My kids are like, turn on the heat. I'm like, put on sweat clothes. You're wearing a hoodie all the time anyway.

**Adam Taggart** (1:51)
So as older dads, that's just baked into our genetics, right? Don't touch the thermostat, just put on a sweater. And sadly, you're having a very different experience than people living in the southern part of my state, southern California. I do want to just start with a recognition of the horrific losses that are going on down there, property-wise, but also loss of life. It's really interesting, Lance. There's a lot of anger brewing here in California. And look, I've been through something very similar. We had our fires up here a few years ago for a number of years up here in Northern California. I'm sad to see my southern brethren getting it now.
But a lot of frustration as to the conditions that have led to this much destruction. There's fingers getting pointed, and many of them for very good reason. Whether it was poor fire management, whether it was defunding of resources that were supposed to go to either staffing the fire department or investing in better infrastructure. And we're hearing all sorts of stories. And it's still fog of war going on right now, but stories of the fire hydrant systems running out of water, equipment that had been there, that's been shipped off to other parts of the world now. The mayor of LA was actually out of the country when this hit, and people were wondering, well, how come you're not actually here? So what's kind of interesting about this is California run by Gavin Newsom, who is being talked about as maybe the main contender.
To challenge the Republicans in the next presidential election. Early on, a lot of fingers being pointed his way, he'll probably end up making it through fine the way that most politicians do. But maybe not. And the reason why I'm mentioning this is, I just did a quick search of changes in heads of state of major countries. And just in the past year or less, and it's a long list, right? Here in the US., Biden is now leaving, Trump is coming in, Congress has now flipped Republican in both houses. We have Justin Trudeau, who just announced that he's going to be stepping down as Prime Minister. Highly likely that when they hold elections in Canada, it's going to be the Conservative Party that goes in. Mexico has a new president. There are big threats going on right now to the ruling regimes in France and Germany. Italy, Maloney went in there not that long ago. South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Japan over the past year have all replaced their head of states. Argentina with Malay. UK, Keir Starmer is new there, and he's even under pressure this early on in his regime, and he might eventually get replaced. Iran has a new president. Syria doesn't even have a government right now. The point is, there's a whole new set of players on the chessboard. I mean, really, with the exception of Putin and Xi, it's all new players. And the reason why I mention this is, there's a lot of things that I think people, a year or two ago, thought that could never happen, or that's just not the way the winds are blowing. Winds of change are now blowing through the world globally. And it may open the doors for lots of different things than we expected, and that may have some market implications down the road, and we can talk about that. But I just wanted to note the fact that there is almost a complete changing of the guard going on right now.