Downtown Josh Brown

So the more the equity market goes up, you guys know, like momentum usually begets momentum, which is not to say it's 100 percent of the time.

But it is to say that if you bet on that, if you want to take the other side of stocks going up.

You have to accept the fact that it's a lower likelihood, not a higher likelihood, and you know something that the stocks don't know.

Second, same thing for valuations.

There's no quartile difference in terms of the odds of an equity market advance.

Coming into the year, for me, what has been different since 2022 is the equity market is just persistently fearful.

You can measure it in valuation spreads on a rolling measure of the VIX, right?

I mean, during the tariff tantrum.

You know, you saw the VIX spike to 50.

I think during this tantrum, we saw it spike to 30.

When you sort of roll it out through time, when you look at the fear in the equity market that has been persistent relative to the fear in the credit market, that's where you start to get this linear relationship that you potentially want to take the other side.

And the market has more likelihood to climb the wall of worry.

Yeah, so the 15% down sort of confirmed that whole thing.

That would have been scary.

Well, that's exactly.

So when people say like, what could be the problem?

Something like that.

Where you see very little fear in the equity market or a bubble like that in terms of that price advance or something like that looks more like that.

And good economic times, top quartile, you know, GDP growth, which we're still grinding it out at like two, two and a half.

And we'll see where earnings growth ends up.