Joe Rennison

Yeah, you're right.

People certainly did come into this year expecting markets to be more of a guardrail than they have been.

But...

You know, when investors are actually confronted with the landscape in front of them, they have to consider the good and the bad.

Companies are earning.

We've had double-digit earnings growth in the first quarter and in the second quarter, and we're looking like we might get it in the third quarter as well as we go into earnings season now.

And...

You know, when you consider the attack on Fed independence, when you consider some of the more extreme policies that have kind of come out from this administration, when you consider all these things, do you think NVIDIA or Google or Apple, these big companies, are not going to be making a lot of money in five years or two years?

Mm-hmm.

I think they're probably going to be doing all right.

And I don't often have opinions.

That's pretty much the mildest opinion I think anyone can have.

And so, you know, sometimes it's just answering a different question than the one investors are asking of it.

And that's kind of why we are where we are.

Yeah, I mean, I speak to a lot of investors who have talked about how they've evolved their investment process a little bit this year, learning somewhat from the first Trump term, but then also just trying to really, as you said, filter out the noise.

What's real?

You know, if Joe Biden had tweeted something that resembled a policy announcement one random afternoon, then markets would have responded to it and they'd have reacted very quickly because they'd have taken it seriously.

We don't have that level of reaction function now because there is a sense that…

And I do not mean this with any kind of value judgment attached to it, but the sense, at least among investors, is that this administration says and does a lot of stuff that doesn't actually happen, that changes the next day.

And so I think investors have...