Matt Frankel

You look at some of the places where jobs are pretty good.

Healthcare looks like it's still generally adding some workers.

Leisure and hospitality not doing bad.

But where we are seeing decreases is right where you expect them to be, and that is entry-level tech jobs.

I think that AI does have something to do with that, for sure.

But I do think that some perspective is important here.

So unemployment rates remain well within the historical average for the last 20 years.

And so I don't want to make light of anyone losing their job.

And I don't want to just wave my hands at the significant spike in layoffs in January.

But nothing yet screams to me that the economy is in trouble.

It would take a few more months like January for me to really start to say, okay, there's a trend that we really need to pay attention to here.

It's a good question, Tyler.

I think it would have to be case by case.

As Fools, I think that there's good reason to be perennially optimistic about the stock market in general.

Almost 100% of the time, if not 100%, we are looking for, what can we invest in today?

What's a good opportunity right now?

But individual stocks, I could flip to bearish on some economic data.

It's possible.

I try to build an investment thesis that takes into account that the economy does regularly go up and it does regularly contract.

I want to build an investment thesis that looks through the economic cycles and isn't going to break just because the economy goes through its normal contractions or its normal slowdowns.