Oil remains the main story. Up 9.6% on the week and now up 56% on the year. A hard number to ignore. Treasury yields moved higher too, with the 10-year jumping over 2% for the week alone.

Market Recap

Weekly Heat Map Of Stocks

Sentiment Check

Bullish sentiment fell 15%. That’s the lowest bull reading since September.

The Dow Components Update

The Bigger Picture

If you zoom out, the market is still sending some rather bullish signals.

Since March 30th, 46% of S&P 500 companies have made a new 52-week high. That number has risen from a recent 35%.

That’s a huge chunk of the index participating in this rally, not just a handful of names. That would explain why the S&P 500 is still only a few percentage points away from all-time highs.

Let’s break it down by sector and it gets even more interesting.

Energy, staples and real estate lead on the high side. Energy really stands out, zero percent of energy stocks are at lows across any single timeline. Not one. I’ll discuss energy more in a bit.

Technology tells a different story. Only 13.5% of tech stocks are at a 4-week high, but 44.6% are at 4-week lows. That’s the highest reading on the entire lows table. This is important and worth watching given how much tech drives the market, sentiment and the news headlines.

Money also continues to pour into equities at a pace that’s hard to wrap your head around. YTD equity flows are blowing away every historical comparison, running at more than double the pace of 2021 and 2025 at this same point. This year isn’t close to any other year on record.

Alphabet Just Raised The Stakes

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Everyone thinks that they know what happens next. Sports and investing are the same game that way. Nobody knows. That’s why we watch. That’s why we invest.

Eventually this bull market will end. I don't know when. You don't know when either. Nobody does. That's the point.

I’m a known bull. You know that about me by now. So take the next thousand words with whatever grain of salt that you want to take them with. But I didn’t get here on vibes.

I’m not asking you to trust my gut.

I’m asking you to trust my math.

The S&P 500 closed today at 7,509.

10,000 isn’t a headline I’m writing for clicks. It’s arithmetic. Let’s do it together.

The Gap Isn’t What You Think

From 7,509 to 10,000 is a move of 33.2%

Round numbers get treated like some distant mountain peak. Far off. Foggy. Maybe not even real. It's not. It's a percentage. So let's run it like one.

• At 8% a year, roughly the market’s long run average before dividends, you’re there in about 3.7 years

• At 10% a year, you’re there in right around 3 years

• At 12% a year, a good stretch but nothing we haven’t seen plenty of times, you’re there in about 2.5 years

That's a few years from now number, not a someday, maybe number. This is the part that gets lost every time a round number shows up in a headline. Nobody does the actual math. They just react to the zeros.

Or It Could Happen Faster Than You Think

Here’s the part that made me want to write this today instead of waiting.

The 8 to 12% math above assumes something close to average. But the S&P hasn't exactly been average lately.

Look at the last nine calendar years. Five of them, 2017, 2019, 2021, 2023, and 2024, closed with the index up more than 20%. That's better than half. Big up years haven't been some rare event you tell your grandkids about. They've basically been the house odds of late.

Run that forward instead of the long run average. Stack two years like 2023 and 2024 back to back, up 24.2% and 23.3%, and you're compounding to a 53% gain in two years. From 7,509, that clears 10,000 with room to spare. Get just one year like 2023 alone and you're sitting around 9,324, needing another 7% to finish the job, which could show up in a matter of months if the tape cooperates.

So the honest range isn’t 3 to 4 years. It’s as soon as 12 to 18 months if we get another year or two like the ones we just had, and probably no more than 4 years even if things slow back down to average.

Yes, there were bad years mixed in there too. 2018 was down. 2022 was ugly. That’s the deal. Nobody hands you the good years without the bad ones attached. It’s the price of investing.

But the person who sold in 2018 or 2022 missed every single one of the big years that came right after. That’s the actual lesson in that table, not the up years or the down years in isolation, it’s that you have to stay in the market.

We’ve Done This Dance Before

People act like round numbers are rare. They’re not. They just get closer together in percentage terms as the index gets bigger, even though the dollar gap looks scarier.

Here’s the actual history, not the vibes version.

The S&P first closed above 1,000 on February 2, 1998. It took until August 26, 2014 to close above 2,000. Sixteen and a half years for that one.

Then it started moving. 3,000 came July 12, 2019, under five years later. 4,000 came April 1, 2021, under two years after that.

Then it really started moving. 5,000 hit February 9, 2024. 6,000 hit November 11, 2024, about nine months after that. 7,000 hit in the spring of 2026, roughly a year and a half later.

1,000 to 2,000 = +100%
6,000 to 7,000 = +16.7%

Same headline. Completely different amount of work.

That’s the trick round numbers play on people, and it’s why 10,000 sounds so much scarier than up 33% from here, even though they’re the exact same thing.

This isn't a forecast. It's a probability exercise. The path won't be straight, and nobody knows the timeline. The point is simply that 10,000 requires far less than most investors assume.

What Would Actually Have To Go Wrong

I’m not going to sit here and pretend there’s no case against this. There’s always a case against this. That’s the whole first line of this post.

Plenty could slow this down. Sticky inflation. Higher rates. AI spending disappoints. Recession. Valuations compress. Those are all real risks.

I’m not brushing any of that off. It’s all real. It’s all worth thinking about.

But none of it kills the math above. It just changes which line you land on. Even the slow, higher for longer, multiple compression path still gets you to 10,000 in well under a decade at a mediocre growth rate. The honest bear case here isn't that we never get there. It's that it takes longer than the fast case.

And that path, even the fast one, was never going to be a straight line. Remember that chart above. The S&P has averaged an intra-year drop of 14.2% going back to 1980, and it still finished positive in 35 of the last 46 years. That’s 76% of the time.

The people who miss the big years aren’t the ones who guessed wrong about the economy. They’re the ones who got off the roller coaster during one of those normal, average, 14% dips and never got back on before it turned green again.

The One Thing I’d Tell You

Stop asking whether 10,000 is realistic. It is. The math says so. The history says so.

Start asking yourself a different question instead.

Are you actually going to be in the market when it happens?

Or are you going to be the person who spent years waiting for the perfect entry? Or worse, the person who finally got shaken out during a perfectly normal dip, right before the recovery.

The market gives you reasons to sell every single year. It also finishes green in 3 out of every 4 of them anyway.

Play your own game. Buy your stocks. Let the math do what it’s done every single time before.

10,000 isn’t a prediction. It’s what happens if you just stay in the game long enough.

The only question is whether you’ll still be playing it.

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Chip stocks and AI names led the damage. The Nasdaq took the brunt of it, down 2.9%, while the Dow held up better at -0.9%. Classic rotation out of momentum, not a broad based selloff. Small caps actually shrugged it off better than the majors, with the Russell 2000 down just 0.5% and still sitting on an 18.5% YTD gain, best of the bunch.

The 10 year yield slipped, oil ripped 14.5% on the week, and Bitcoin actually gained 2.6% even as stocks sold off. Gold was the outlier, down 2% despite the equity weakness.

Market Recap

Weekly Heat Map Of Stocks

Sentiment Check

The bulls return!

Inflation’s Surprise Cooldown

Zoom out and you can see just how rare this is. A decade of monthly core inflation readings, and June actually printed negative, only the second time that’s happened since 2017. Everything else on this chart sits comfortably above zero.

Now the headline numbers. Prices rose 3.5% year over year, a sharp step down from May’s 4.2% and well under the 3.8% Wall Street was bracing for. That’s the fastest one month deceleration since April 2020. Not a typo. Strip out food and energy and core inflation landed at 2.6%, down from 2.9% in May and under the 2.8% consensus call.

Cheaper gas drove a lot of this. On a monthly basis, headline prices actually dropped 0.4%, the steepest single month decline since May 2020. Energy alone dragged the print down by nearly half a point.

But I don’t want to hand this whole print to energy. Gasoline fell almost 10% in the month and did the most damage, but a handful of other categories chipped in too, apparel, electricity, even motor vehicle insurance all came in negative.

Here’s the part that actually gets my attention. Core CPI barely budged month over month, coming in flat and missing the +0.2% estimate by a wide margin. And it wasn’t just one category dragging the number down, shelter and medical services both cooled off too. A single soft reading here or there is noise. When shelter, a number that almost never moves, starts rolling over alongside everything else, that’s a trend the Fed has to take seriously.

Markets clearly agreed, odds of a July hike backed off fast on this release. If the next couple prints confirm this isn’t a fluke, the rate conversation shifts from “how high” to “how soon do they cut.”

Did You Write Off The Mag 7?

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Lately the pile has been leaning one direction. Bearish.

I started saving them. Not because I’ve flipped. Regular readers know where I stand. I’ve had a 7,900 S&P target on the board all year and I’m still holding my Mag 7 names. But a chart shows up in my inbox often enough and it earns a second look.

So here they are. All in one place. No spin, no cherry picking to make a point. Just the data that’s been landing in my inbox, organized so you can see it the way I’ve been seeing it.

Let’s start with the one that got the most attention.

The Money Is Changing Hands

The chipmakers building the AI boom and the companies paying for it are heading in opposite directions on the one number that matters most. Cash.

Nvidia, Micron, Broadcom, and Applied Materials are on pace for a combined $430 billion in free cash flow over the next year. That’s more than triple what they generated two years ago.

Meanwhile Amazon, Alphabet, Meta, Microsoft, and Oracle are about to see their combined free cash flow go negative. First time that’s ever happened. Two years ago these same five companies were throwing off $260 billion.

The chipmakers are getting paid. The hyperscalers are the ones paying, and it’s showing up on their books.

Most of that hyperscaler spending is going right back to each other. Buying compute, leasing data centers, funding partnerships. It’s a lot of capital moving in a circle. That works great as long as the demand on the other end shows up. If it slows even a little, a lot of balance sheets get exposed at the same time.

And that spending isn’t a side story anymore. It’s holding up the whole economy.

AI investment, meaning software, data centers, R&D, and equipment, is now responsible for more than a quarter of US GDP growth. That’s the biggest share on record. For every four dollars the economy grows, better than a dollar of that is AI capex.

AI spending itself is running near 8% of GDP. During the Dot Com bubble, tech spending topped out around 6.5%.

The US economy has quietly become an AI spending story. If that spending slows, this stops being a stock market conversation and becomes a GDP conversation.

The Technicals Are Getting Loud

Semiconductors have led this entire market higher. They’ve also gotten extended in a way that’s only happened a handful of times in history.

Over the last 50 trading days, the Philadelphia Semiconductor Index has moved an average of 3.36% a day. Up or down, doesn’t matter, that’s just how much it’s swinging daily. The only other stretches with this much daily movement were the runup and crash of the Dot Com bubble, the depths of the Financial Crisis in 2008, and the COVID crash in 2020.

Big swings aren’t inherently bearish. But this is the company this chart keeps. Every other time we’ve seen this level of daily chop, something big was already breaking.

On top of that, semis are trading well above their own trend, at a level that’s only really been matched once before. Right at the top in 2000.

And the smart money knows it’s stretched, they’re piling in anyway. Hedge funds bought more US semiconductor stocks last week than in any week in at least three and a half years. That followed the two biggest weeks of selling since 2024. Semis now make up 10% of total hedge fund exposure, double where it was a year ago, though still shy of the 14% peak hit back in May.

Hedge funds are betting the selloff already happened and it’s over. That’s a crowded bet either way it goes.

One more worth sitting with here. Margin debt, going back to 1960, tells a strange story. It’s not the level of margin debt that’s ever marked the top. It’s the turn.

Look at 1972, 2000, 2007, 2021. In each case, margin debt growth climbed into a danger zone, then rolled over. That rollover is what lined up with the market topping out, not the high reading itself.

Right now margin debt growth is sitting at 54%, deep in that same danger zone that’s preceded every major consolidation on this chart. It hasn’t rolled over yet. History says that’s the number to watch, not the one we’re looking at today.

Valuations Have Stopped Being a Footnote

Here’s the one I keep getting sent more than any other. The Shiller PE ratio, which smooths earnings out over ten years to strip out the noise, is one tick away from taking out its all time high. Set during the Dot Com bubble.

Valuation alone has never been a great timing tool. Stocks can stay expensive for a long time before anything happens. But expensive and as expensive as the most infamous bubble in modern market history are two different conversations.

The gap between what the market is trading at today versus what it’s projected to earn next year is also about as wide as it’s ever been. Trailing PE sitting near 28x while forward PE sits closer to 21x. That spread has only been this wide twice before. The Dot Com peak, and the 2022 bear market.

A wide gap like that means the market is pricing in a lot of earnings growth that hasn’t shown up yet. Sometimes it shows up. Sometimes that’s exactly the setup for disappointment.

Households have noticed the run and piled in right alongside it. Equities as a share of total household financial assets are sitting near an all time high, tracking almost perfectly with the Shiller CAPE ratio. When everyone’s already in, there isn’t a lot of dry powder left to keep pushing prices higher.

None of this means a crash is required. Valuation isn’t a clock. But it’s worth remembering how this usually works. Valuation doesn’t matter, until suddenly it’s the only thing that matters.

If you want the chart that’s been making the rounds and giving people a genuine chill, it’s this one. It overlays the current S&P 500 on top of the 1995 through 2003 run, bubble and bust included. The two lines have tracked each other closely enough that it’s hard to unsee once you look at it.

I want to be careful here. Overlay charts are seductive and they’re not a forecast. Two lines can rhyme for a while and then completely diverge the moment you screenshot it. But it’s the kind of chart that explains why so many smart people have one eye on the exits.

The Money Flow Doesn’t Match the Story

For most of the last five years, companies have been buyers of their own stock. That’s flipped. Companies are now issuing more shares than they’re buying back for the first time in five years. Secondary offerings, IPOs, and new issuance to fund AI buildouts and acquisitions are outpacing buybacks.

For years, buybacks were a quiet source of support underneath stock prices. Fewer shares outstanding, higher earnings per share, a built in bid. That support is fading right as valuations sit near record highs. Historically, stretches of heavy net issuance have shown up right around market tops.

At the same time, the retail crowd that’s been a reliable source of buying power the last few years has pulled back hard. One month rolling retail buying across US stocks just hit its lowest level since Covid.

And this next one might be the strangest of the bunch. Consumer sentiment and the stock market used to move together. They don’t anymore. Sentiment has been sliding since 2021 while the S&P has kept grinding to new highs. The gap between how people feel and what their portfolios are doing has never been wider.

People don’t feel good about the economy. Their portfolios have never told them to feel better. That disconnect has to resolve somehow. Either sentiment catches up to the market, or the market catches up to sentiment.

The Backdrop Nobody Can Fix Quickly

Last one, and it’s less about the market and more about the ground it’s all standing on. US debt held by the public just crossed back toward levels not seen since World War Two, relative to the size of the economy.

This is a slow moving story, not a this week story. But it sets the table for everything else. Higher debt levels mean less room for the government to step in and cushion the next slowdown the way it has in the past.

Where I Land

So. Are these reasons to be bearish?

Some of them, sure. Taken together, they’re at minimum reasons to stay disciplined. Stretched valuations, fading buyback support, retail pulling back, and a market that’s leaning harder on a handful of AI names than it has in 25 years. That’s not nothing.

But I’m still not bearish. I still think the long term winners in this AI buildout are worth owning through the noise, and I laid out exactly why, along with the names I’m sticking with, in my 2nd Half Outlook last week. If you haven’t read it yet, that’s the natural next stop after this one.

I’ll keep collecting these as they land in my inbox. If the pile keeps growing, you’ll be the first to know.

👉 Read the 2nd Half Outlook here

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Only two down weeks since the start of April for the S&P 500. Two. That's how quietly this market has been grinding higher while everyone's busy arguing about tech.

Elsewhere in the market. Small caps are on a tear, with the Russell 2000 up 19.1% year to date. Oil is having a moment too, up 4.1% on the week and 23.4% YTD. Bitcoin is the lone holdout, still sitting on a 26.6% loss for the year despite the risk-on backdrop.

Market Recap

Weekly Heat Map Of Stocks

Sentiment Check

Still more bears than bulls.

Before we move into my 5 stocks for the 2nd half, a few charts worth hitting on first.

The S&P 500 has continued to hold the 50-day moving average, exactly what you want to see in a healthy uptrend.

Leave it up to my friend Ryan Detrick to come up with this great stat and chart. There have been 41 other times since 1950 that the S&P 500 gained more than 10% in a quarter. The next quarter was higher 85% of the time. The next two quarters were higher 85% of the time. And the next year was up a median of 13.4%. Momentum is real, and history says this kind of strength tends to keep going, not reverse.

On top of that, the VIX has fallen below 16, the second lowest close over the past month. It’s the lowest point since January, a fresh 120-day low. A falling VIX alongside a market grinding to new highs is about as clean a “risk on” signal as you’ll get.

Here’s the part worth watching closely though. We’re seeing new highs in energy and health care stocks. Outside of those two, there just aren’t many new highs to point to. Look at the percentage of stocks hitting 4 week and 52 week highs by sector, energy is the standout at 24% and 10%, while most other sectors are stuck in the low single digits. This rally is still narrower under the hood than the index level suggests.

That narrowness shows up in the flow data too. Sector flows in June leaned more defensive, with money moving into industrials, materials, and utilities. Meanwhile there were outflows from consumer staples, communication services, and energy. Worth noting since energy is also putting up the best new high numbers, so positioning and price action aren’t fully in sync there.

Put it together and you get a market that’s technically healthy, historically well supported after a quarter like this one, and running with low volatility, but still narrower beneath the surface than the headline numbers let on. That’s the backdrop heading into the 5 stocks I want to highlight for the second half.

5 Stocks For The 2nd Half

I’ve got three stocks I picked for 2026 that I still love. If you asked me today, they’d be the first three names on this list. No hesitation. 3 Stocks For 2026

But that’s not what this piece is about. You’ve already heard my case for those names. I want to give you five fresh picks for the second half. Names we haven’t covered together yet. Some of these will feel obvious. A couple might surprise you. All five are names I think can work between now and year end.

Let’s get into it.

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This year was no different. I got a flood of them. Investing questions, personal questions, Wisconsin questions, bourbon questions, questions I never expected to answer in a newsletter. I read every single one.

I couldn’t fit all of them in here. If yours didn’t make the cut, don’t worry. You’ll get a direct email from me with your answer. I don’t leave anyone hanging.

For the 25 that made it in, I kept nothing off limits. My worst investment year ever. The one stock I said I’d never sell and what would actually change my mind. A financial mistake I’ve never written about before. My go-to bourbon. Where my wife and I actually go on date night, a spot most of you have never heard of. What keeps me up at night about this bull market. And a rapid fire round from a reader who clearly wanted to have some fun with me.

Let’s get into it.

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The 10-year Treasury yield rose 2.1% to 4.49%. Oil slipped 0.7% to $68.78, still up 18.7% YTD. Gold jumped 2.7% to $4,187 but remains down 4.2% on the year. Bitcoin had its best week in a while, up 4.3% to $62,699, though it’s still down 28.4% YTD.

Market Recap

Weekly Heat Map Of Stocks

Sentiment Check

July Seasonality

If you like green, you love July. It’s historically the best performing month of the year for the S&P 500. Since 2005, the index has averaged a 2.5% gain in July, more than four times the average return of the other 11 months combined.

Even better: July hasn’t posted a loss in 11 straight years, the longest positive streak of any month over that stretch.

Can it make it 12 in a row?

1st Half Recap

The first half was stronger than most investors realize.

• S&P 500: +9.5% (best first half since 2024)

• Q2: +14.9% (best quarter since the 2020 rebound)

• Nasdaq: +12.8%

• Dow: +8.9% (best first half since 2021)

• Russell 2000: +21.9% (best first half since 1991)

This wasn’t just another AI rally. By the end of June, participation had broadened well past mega-cap tech, and the Russell 2000 was the real story of the half.

This next chart backs up what the index returns already told you. Small caps beat large caps by 12.3 percentage points in the first half, the widest first half spread since 2005. After years of large caps running away with everything, small caps finally showed up.

Here’s the industry breakdown. Semiconductors were the best performing industry in the market, up 94% YTD. Computer Hardware gained 74%. Telecom gained 49%. On the other end, Software and Service was the only major industry to finish the half in the red, down 8.3%, even after bouncing 20.6% in Q2.

This S&P 500 heat map shows exactly where the money went and where it didn't in the first half.

Here are the best performing S&P 500 stocks. SanDisk is the runaway winner, up 857%. Corning is the only name in the top 10 that isn’t a pure chip or storage play, and even that’s an AI data center bet. Nine of the top 10 best stocks in the entire S&P 500 make the physical infrastructure for AI.

These are the worst performing S&P 500 stocks. Intuit is the worst, down 61%. Accenture and Cognizant losing half their value is the market saying it thinks AI is coming for consulting headcount.

Here’s the Dow sorted by return. Caterpillar led the entire index, up 67.59%. Cisco gained 45.78%. UnitedHealth, last year’s Dow disaster, actually gained 28.52% in a real rebound. On the other end, Salesforce was the worst Dow stock, down 37.37%. Nike was next worst, down 31.22%, and Microsoft finished down 19.58%.

Here’s the view from outside the US. South Korea was the best market in the world, up 118.61%. Taiwan gained 62.38%. The US, at 9.88%, was actually below the global average. Indonesia was the worst market in the world, down 41.49%, followed by China and India. If you only watched US headlines this year, you missed one of the wildest global divergences in a long time.

Last is my favorite chart, the asset class total returns table. Small caps led all major asset classes in the first half, up 22.6%. Convertible bonds, the Nasdaq 100, and commodities all followed close behind. Bitcoin and gold were the worst performing major assets in the first half, down 31.4% and 7.0% respectively, after gold’s monster 63.7% run last year. 90% of asset classes finished the half positive. I love this table because it’s the fastest way to see the entire market’s story in one screen.

That's the recap. Now the part that actually matters, how I did against all of it, and where I think this market goes from here.

My 1st Half Performance

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I agreed with the diagnosis. I said we were in one. And I said that to pull out of it, we’d need the 30-year mortgage rate to start with a 5. Even then, I wasn’t sure that would be enough.

So here we are. Let’s check in.

The 30-year mortgage rate is sitting right around 6.5% today. A year ago it was 6.77%. Rates have drifted lower, but they never came close to that 5-handle I said we’d need. The market got a brief look at 6.09% back in February. Then it reversed. That was as good as it got.

Rates touched their low for the year, buyers got excited, and then rates climbed right back up. The refinancing index tells the same story. Every time rates dip, there’s a brief pulse of activity. Then the window closes.

Existing home sales in May came in near the highest level in nearly four years. Closed sales jumped. Inventory hit a 6-year high. Prices are at a record. On the surface, things look better.

But look at this chart, which goes all the way back to 2010.

That red line is where we are today. 3.64 million. We were at this exact level for years before the pandemic, on the way up. The market has spent three years clawing back to a level it passed through casually on the way to something much better. There has been no progress in existing single-family home sales since the fall of 2023.

Here’s the question I keep coming back to. Everyone wants to know when housing goes back to normal. Lower prices. More inventory. Rates that make the monthly payment manageable.

What if this is normal?

Read more

The S&P 500 fell 2.0% on the week, closing at 7,354. Still up 7.4% on the year. The Nasdaq had the rougher week, dropping 4.6% and hitting its lowest level in two weeks. First negative week for both indexes in three.

The Dow told a different story. Up 0.6% on the week. Three consecutive winning weeks now for the blue chips.

The Russell 2000 quietly continues to be the story nobody is talking about. Up 1.0% on the week and up 20.4% on the year. Small caps are running.

A few numbers worth noting. The 10-year Treasury yield fell to 4.37%. Oil dropped 8.3% on the week. Bitcoin is down 31.7% on the year. Gold gave back 2.9% this week and is now slightly negative on the year at -6.1%.

One rough week does not change the trend. The market is still up. The internals are still healthy. We will get into all of that below.

Market Recap

Weekly Heat Map Of Stocks

Sentiment Check

For the first time in six weeks, bulls have overtaken the bears. The sentiment shift is official. The bulls are back in charge.

The Swoon Ends, July Begins

I wrote about the June Swoon last week. It is playing out exactly as history said it would.

The painful part is almost over. Almost.

The rough patch historically hits hardest in the final third of June. That is where we are right now. The “You Are Here” arrow on that chart is not a fun place to be. But it does not last. History shows the market tends to recover into the end of the month and set up for what comes next.

What comes next is July.

July is historically the best month of the year for average stock market returns. Not top five. Not top three. Number one.

And recent history backs it up. The Nasdaq has been the standout performer in July over the last 21 years. The S&P 500 and Dow have delivered consistent gains as well. Even in midterm years, July ranks among the strongest months on the calendar.

The June Swoon is almost over. July is right around the corner. Seasonality is about to flip from headwind to tailwind.

Mag 7 Selloff Justified?

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And right now, all three are getting absolutely crushed.

Netflix. Meta. Microsoft.

Between them they represent trillions in market cap, billions of daily users, and a combined ownership stake in just about every retirement account in America. If you own an index fund, you own all three. If you’re an active investor, there’s a good chance at least one of them is sitting in your portfolio right now, bleeding red.

So let’s talk about it. How bad is it? What’s driving the pain? And most importantly, is there anything worth buying here?

How bad is it?

Bad. All three are in bear market territory or close to it. Netflix is down 45% from its all-time high. Microsoft is down 31%. Meta is down 29%. And those are from peaks set less than a year ago. These aren’t decade old drawdowns. This damage is fresh.

Meanwhile the Nasdaq is up nearly 19% over the same period that Meta has been cut by 13%. That’s a 32-point gap. That’s not underperformance. That’s a completely different conversation.

Microsoft has now underperformed the QQQ for 11 straight months. Its monthly RSI relative to the Nasdaq is the most oversold it has ever been. Ever. As in, going back further than most of your brokerage accounts have existed.

And Netflix is currently in the midst of the worst losing stretch in its 24-year history, down 9 of the last 10 months. It is now in its second largest drawdown of the last decade, trailing only the 2022 collapse when the entire growth universe was getting repriced from zero.

These numbers matter. Not to make you feel bad. But because the degree of the selloff is actually the starting point for figuring out whether any of this is worth buying.

Read more

The Nasdaq led the way, up 2.7% on the week, with the Russell 2000 not far behind at 2.0%. The S&P 500 and Dow both gained 1.4%, keeping the broader market’s year to date gains intact at 9.6% and 7.3% respectively.

Oil was the standout move of the week, falling 9.8% even as the index remains up over 32% on the year. The 10 year held relatively steady, down slightly to 4.45%.

Bitcoin continues to struggle, down another 4.2% on the week and now off 28.1% year to date, still tracking as the cleanest read on risk appetite we have. Gold was modestly lower as well, down 1.0% on the week and negative for the year, an odd look for a traditional safe haven given everything else going on in the macro backdrop right now.

Market Recap

Weekly Heat Map Of Stocks

Asset Class Returns

Strength Begets Strength

For the first time this year, Technology is the best performing sector in the S&P 500 year to date. After months of the AI trade getting picked apart and second guessed, the group that started this whole bull run is back on top.

The breadth underneath that move is just as encouraging. 64.2% of S&P 500 stocks are now trading above their 200 day moving average, the most since early March. This isn’t a market being carried by a handful of names anymore, more stocks are actually participating.

Zoom out to the index level and the picture gets even cleaner. Every major index, the S&P 500, the Dow, the Nasdaq, the Russell 2000, all of them, sits above both its 50 day and 200 day moving average right now. Every one of those moving averages is also rising. That’s about as textbook a definition of a healthy uptrend as you’ll find.

None of this means the path higher is guaranteed or that pullbacks are off the table. But strength confirming strength, with broad participation and rising trend lines across the board, is the kind of setup that tends to get the benefit of the doubt until something breaks it.

A Sentiment Check

Here’s where it gets interesting. Despite a historic bull run and fresh all time highs, individual investors have now been net bearish for five straight weeks running. That’s an odd combination, stocks ripping higher while the average retail investor keeps telling pollsters they expect the opposite.

There are signs that’s starting to crack. The AAII bull bear spread narrowed to -2.8 this week, with bulls bouncing to a one month high of 36.6% and bears slipping to 39.4%. Still net negative, but the momentum looks like it’s shifting.

At this point in the cycle, I don’t know many people who are still genuinely bearish. That contrarian instinct is worth sitting with. When persistent bearishness shows up at all time highs, it usually means one of two things, either there’s real risk the crowd is seeing that the price action hasn’t caught up to yet, or sentiment is just lagging and about to flip, which is often a setup for more upside, not less.

The behavioral data backs up the idea that people are holding back, not piling in. Retail single stock net buying has fallen to its lowest level on a rolling basis since Covid. Retail cash allocation is sitting at extremely low levels again too, which on the surface sounds bullish, since nobody wants to hold cash, but is usually exactly the environment where having some becomes valuable.

And then there’s valuation. A broad composite of measures, P/E, price to book, EV/EBITDA, return on equity, and others, now sits at the 99th percentile. Stocks are priced about as close to perfection as they’ve ever been.

None of this is a call to sell everything or panic. It’s a reminder to hold the trend with both hands and a little humility. Follow the trend, but don’t fall in love with it.

The Generals Aren’t Leading Anymore

For years the playbook was simple. Buy the Magnificent 7, ride the AI wave, and let everything else fight for scraps. That playbook just broke.

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They had a gain. A real one. They felt smart. They moved on. Then they watched it keep going.

Maybe it was yours.

This is not a story about one stock. It’s the most common and most expensive mistake in investing. And almost nobody talks about it honestly because doing so requires admitting how often we get in our own way.

Here is the question I never hear anyone ask before they sell.

Where does that money go?

If you sell, you have to do something with the proceeds. You have to find something better. Something that will outperform what you just walked away from. And now you have to be right twice. Once on the sell. Once on the buy. Most people only think about the first part.

There is always a reason to sell

As I write this today, there are plenty of reasons to be nervous. There always are. Next week there will be different ones. The week after that, more still.

There has never been a moment in market history where the headlines were clean and the path forward was obvious. Go back to 1928 and work your way forward. Every single year had something scary. Wars. Recessions. Political chaos. Rate hikes. Pandemics. Every single year someone had a compelling reason to get out.

None of it mattered over the long term if you just stayed invested.

The market is sitting near all-time highs right now. That makes a lot of people nervous. It feels like the wrong time to hold. But consider this.

After an all-time high, the S&P 500 made another all-time high 93% of the time within the next month. 99% of the time within the next year. All-time highs are not warnings. They are what healthy markets do.

Selling because the market is at a high is not a strategy. It’s fear dressed up as logic.

There is a difference between investing and trading

This matters and most people blur the line.

Trading is short-term. It is reactive. It responds to price movements, news cycles, and what someone on TV said this morning. There is nothing wrong with trading if that is what you are doing intentionally.

Investing is different. Investing means you own a piece of a business. You bought it because you believe in where that business is going over years, not weeks. The daily price movement is noise. The quarterly earnings call is signal.

When you sell a great business because the stock is up, you are trading. You are letting the price tell you what to do instead of the business.

Index funds never do this. The S&P 500 does not panic. It does not lock in gains. It does not second guess itself at all-time highs. It just owns great businesses and gets out of the way. That is a big part of why it is so hard to beat.

I learned this the hard way

In 2008 during the GFC, I bought Microsoft. It doubled. I sold every share. I had read that when a stock doubles you lock in your gains and move on. It felt like the right thing to do.

It was one of the worst investing decisions I ever made.

I was 23 years old and still learning. But the lesson cost me more than money. It cost me years of compounding I will never get back.

The next time I did it differently

When I bought Apple in 2014 I remembered that Microsoft mistake. Apple doubled. I held. It doubled again. I still own it today.

When I bought Nvidia in January 2022, after it had been cut in half, I applied the same lesson. It has since made a historic run. I have not sold a single share.

None of that was easy. Every one of those positions had moments where selling felt like the rational move. The market was down. The headlines were bad. The drawdowns they experienced were very real. Someone had a very convincing reason to get out.

But I kept coming back to the same question. If I sell, then what? What am I buying instead? Am I genuinely confident that new position outperforms what I just walked away from?

Most of the time I could not answer that. And that told me everything.

Are you scared to sell, or scared to hold?

Here is something worth sitting with. Sometimes selling is the right call. I am not saying hold everything forever regardless of what changes.

But there is a difference between selling because something has genuinely changed and selling because you are uncomfortable. One is discipline. The other is emotion with a rational sounding explanation attached to it.

Ask yourself this before you sell anything. Has the reason I bought this stock changed? Is the business worse than it was? Or am I just nervous because the price moved or because a headline scared me?

If nothing has changed in the business, you are probably about to make a mistake.

Your time horizon matters more than almost anything else here. My time horizon for this money is different from yours. Different from my parents. There is no universal right answer. But the question you should be asking is not “should I sell because it is up?” It is “does this still belong in my portfolio given why I bought it and how long I plan to hold it?”

So when would I actually sell? Not because of a price target. Not because of a percentage gain. Only a handful of things would make me pull the trigger. The story changes. Management does something that breaks my trust. The original reason I bought it no longer exists. Or something else earns that spot in my portfolio with higher conviction.

That is the whole framework. If none of those conditions are met, sitting on your hands is usually the right move.

Want to see exactly what I own and how I am applying this framework right now? Every Saturday morning I publish my Investing Update for paid subscribers, including a full breakdown of my current portfolio, what I am watching, and what I am thinking. Join them here.

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The Nasdaq added 0.7% to 25,889. The Dow climbed 0.9% to 51,202. But the real story this week was small caps. The Russell 2000 ripped 3.9%, now up 17.7% on the year and starting to close the gap with its larger siblings.

The catalyst? Reports that the US and Iran are closing in on an interim peace deal. Markets hate uncertainty, and a de-escalation in the Middle East removes one of the bigger tail risks investors have been pricing in.

You can see it in oil. Crude dropped 6.9% on the week to $84.29. Still up a wild 45.5% year to date, but that single week move tells you how much geopolitical risk premium was baked into the price.

Gold slipped 2.2% to $4,240, still negative on the year at -3.0%. The 10-year Treasury yield ticked down 1.1% to 4.49%. Bitcoin held its ground, up 1.1% to 63,758, though it remains down 27.1% on the year.

Market Recap

Weekly Heat Map Of Stocks

I Read The Data, Not The Headlines

Every week it’s something new. Tariffs, Iran, inflation, the Fed, recession odds, take your pick. The headlines change, but the questions don’t. Are we at the top? Is this the pullback that finally sticks?

Here’s the thing. I don’t trade headlines. I watch the data underneath them. And right now, the data is telling a much calmer story than the noise would have you believe.

Breadth Is Quietly Improving

While the S&P 500 was tracking toward its second straight weekly decline, something interesting was happening beneath the surface. The percentage of stocks trading above their 20-day and 50-day moving averages actually improved over the past couple weeks. At the same time, NYSE new lows have been declining, a sign that capital is rotating into areas of the market that had been lagging.

The takeaway. The index was wobbling, but the foundation underneath it was getting stronger, not weaker. 60% of S&P 500 stocks are above their 200-day moving average. Not a screaming buy signal on its own, but solid.

The Pattern Still Works

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By the time the close hit, your timeline was on fire. The bubble is bursting. The crash has begun. This is 1999 all over again.

I’ve heard it all before. So have you.

Here’s what I actually think is happening. And why almost nobody wants to believe it.

It’s the earnings, stupid.

The stock market doesn’t go up for no reason. It never has. It may feel random day to day. Week to week it can feel like pure chaos. But zoom out and stocks follow one thing. Earnings. Always have. Always will.

Right now, earnings are not just good. They’re historically great.

S&P 500 profit margins hit 15.6% in Q1 2026. An all-time record. Not close to a record. The record.

For every dollar of revenue American companies bring in, they’re keeping more of it than at any point in modern history. More than the dot-com boom. More than the pre-financial crisis peak. More than any period in the last two decades. That’s not a fluke. That’s what great businesses do over time. They get more efficient. They get more profitable. AI is turbocharging that trend right now.

And it’s spreading.

Everyone wants to make this a Magnificent 7 story. Like the other 493 companies are just along for the ride. Look at that chart. The rest of the S&P 500 is projected to grow earnings 18% in 2026. This isn’t a 7 company market anymore. The whole team is playing well.

S&P 500 forward earnings just hit a record $364.79 per share. The 2027 consensus sits at $395.95. Analysts keep raising estimates. Not cutting them. Raising them. That’s companies beating expectations and raising guidance quarter after quarter. The market is watching that happen in real time. That’s why it keeps going up.

Tariff fears didn’t break this. Rate fears didn’t break this. Estimates went up anyway. Every quarter. The market isn’t delusional. It’s doing exactly what it’s supposed to do. It’s pricing in a very profitable future.

The AI buildout is just getting started.

I’ve said this before and I’ll keep saying it until the data tells me otherwise.

The capex being poured into AI infrastructure right now is generational. We’re not talking about money chasing an idea. We’re talking about the most profitable companies in the world spending aggressively on a technology that is already showing up in margins. Already. In the first or second inning.

The internet took years before productivity gains showed up in the numbers. AI is moving faster. The results are landing sooner. And the companies spending the most are the ones already seeing it in their margins.

This isn’t hype. This is the most profitable companies in American history doubling down on the next wave of growth. That’s what a real bull market looks like from the inside.

New highs cause more new highs.

Here’s the thing that trips people up more than anything else.

All-time highs feel dangerous. They feel like the top. Like you’ve missed it. Like something bad is about to happen. That feeling is completely natural. It’s also completely wrong.

There is a reason new highs keep happening. The S&P 500 has closed at an all-time high over a thousand times in its near-seventy year history. What came next?

Another all-time high. Within the next week, 81% of the time. Within the next month, 93% of the time. Within the next year, 99% of the time.

New highs don’t kill bull markets. Deteriorating fundamentals kill bull markets. Look at the charts above. Tell me where you see deteriorating fundamentals. I don’t see them either.

About Friday.

The S&P 500 fell 2.6%. Semiconductors got crushed. A trillion dollars in market cap evaporated in a single session. The bears came out swinging.

A strong jobs report spooked the market on rate cut timing. That’s the whole story. A strong labor market means employed consumers with paychecks. That’s not bearish. That’s good for earnings. The market panicked over Fed calendar math and sold everything in sight.

It’s happened before. Here’s what happened next.

Since this bull market began, there have been 13 other days with a drop of at least 2%. Four trading days later, the market was higher 11 of those 13 times. Median gain of 1.2%. Dip buyers have been rewarded in this bull run. Consistently. Repeatedly. Panic sellers have not.

Where we actually are.

The red line is us. This bull market started in October 2022. Look at where we sit relative to every other major bull run that lasted more than 1,000 days. We are still early. The 1990s bull ran for over a decade. The post-2009 bull ran for eleven years.

Nobody rang a bell at the top of those either. Nobody told you it was safe to buy. It never feels safe. That’s the whole game.

You’re never going to be handed a comfortable moment to be fully invested. The news will always be scary. There will always be a reason to wait. There is always a reason to sell. The people who waited in 2023 because it felt too uncertain missed a 26% year. The people who waited in 2024 missed another 25%.

Waiting has a cost. Most people never add it up.

The bottom line.

Earnings are at records. Margins are at records. Estimates keep going up. The AI buildout is adding fuel to a fire that was already burning before most people believed it was real. The bear case is based on feelings. The bull case is based on numbers.

Friday was noise. The earnings are the signal. They always are.

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Markets held together through most of the week, then fell apart in the final session. The S&P 500 had its worst day since October 10, 2025. The Nasdaq dropped almost 5% on Friday alone, its biggest single-day loss since April 4, 2025, and wrapped up its worst week in 14 months with a 4.7% decline.

The Dow was the exception. It slipped just 0.3% for the week, largely escaping Friday’s carnage.

For the year, the scoreboard still reads positive. The S&P 500 is up 7.9% YTD. The Nasdaq is holding a 10.6% gain. The Russell 2000 leads the pack at 13.3%, despite falling 2.9% this week.

Away from stocks, the 10-year Treasury yield rose to 4.54%, now up 9% for the year. Oil climbed to $92.87, up 50% in 2026. Gold slipped 4.5% on the week. Bitcoin got the worst of it, down 14.3% on the week and now off 30.1% for the year.

One bad Friday doesn’t erase a good year. But it’s a reminder of how fast the mood can change.

Market Recap

Weekly Heat Map Of Stocks

The Cracks Are Starting to Show

Read more

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Consumer sentiment just hit an all-time low.

At the same time. Simultaneously. Those two things are happening right now.

Let that sink in for a second.

The University of Michigan Consumer Sentiment Index goes back to 1952. Over 70 years of data covering wars, recessions, pandemics, and inflation spikes. Americans are feeling worse about the economy right now than they did during COVID, the financial crisis, and the aftermath of 9/11.

I’ll be honest. That one got me. Really?

And yet, here’s the S&P sitting near record highs. So which is it?

Both actually. That’s the whole point.

The K-Shaped Economy Isn’t a Theory Anymore

You’ve heard the term. The K-shaped recovery. One group going up, one group going down, the gap between them widening every year.

We’re not debating whether it exists anymore. We’re watching it play out in real time.

If you own assets, things are good. Great actually.

Your 401K is up. The AI trade is minting wealth at a staggering pace, and if you hold any of the companies powering it, you’ve had a front row seat to one of the greatest wealth creation events in history.

Even if you’ve done absolutely nothing except own a home, you’re up substantially since COVID. Your exterior paint job could be peeling. Doesn’t matter. Property values have surged regardless.

If you don’t own assets? You’re getting squeezed from every direction.

Most Americans Are Invested. But Not Equally.

Here’s a chart worth pausing on. Most Americans (62%) own stocks in some form, whether directly or through a retirement account or mutual fund.

That sounds encouraging. But stock ownership is wildly uneven. The top 10% of earners now account for nearly half of all consumer spending in this country. The bottom 80% are losing ground. That gap has been opening for decades and has accelerated sharply since 2020.

The people feeling good right now are the ones who own the most. That’s not a coincidence.

The Cracks Beneath the Surface

Now here’s where it starts to get uncomfortable.

Read more

Market Recap

Weekly Heat Map Of Stocks

On the sector side, tech continues to lead everything. Info Tech is up 21.3% on the year and put up a massive 13.8% just in May. Energy is the other standout, up 25.7% YTD, though it was the worst sector in May, falling 5.1%. Financials and Utilities also had tough months. Healthcare quietly had a solid May, up 3.2%.

The S&P 500 has already hit 21 new all-time highs in 2026. Through late May, that puts this year on pace with some of the strongest ATH years in history. For context, 2024 had 57. We have seven months to go.

The Russell 2000 deserves its own callout. Small caps are up about 18% through the first five months of the year. That is the best start since 1991. And it is outperforming the S&P, Dow, and Nasdaq.

The global picture is something else entirely. The US (SPY) is up nearly 30% over the past year and a half. But South Korea’s EWY is up 303%. Taiwan, Poland, Austria, Greece, Spain, and Colombia are all up more than 80%. Even Emerging Markets broadly are up nearly 65%. Indonesia is the big loser at -27.6%. International is having a moment.

I Said Don't Sell in May. Don't in June Either?

May closed strong. The S&P 500 gained about 4.9% on the month, which brings the combined April and May return to roughly 15.9%. That is a massive two-month run.

History says to take that seriously. When May gains more than 5%, the S&P 500 has never been lower one year later. That stat has held every single time since 1950, with an average return of nearly 20% in the following 12 months.

The April and May combination is just as telling. Every prior instance where both months gained more than 4% saw a positive June. Every single one. The average June return in those setups was around 2.4%.

And when the combined April/May return exceeded 10% (which happened in 1997, 2003, 2009, and 2020, and now 2026), the rest of the year was up double digits every time, averaging nearly 19%.

June also just tends to be pretty good on its own. The S&P 500 has finished higher in 9 of the last 10 Junes. That is a hard trend to argue with.

None of this means anything is guaranteed. But the historical setup heading into June is about as clean as it gets.

Hard Not To Be Bullish

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We took her and four of her friends to Door County for two nights. A real sleepover trip. My wife’s birthday also fell the day before, so the whole weekend carried a little extra weight. The kind of thing everyone will probably remember. The kind of thing I know I will.

Door County is a place that has followed me through my whole life. I went there as a little kid with my family. I went back as an adult and wrote the majority of my book there, finishing it on one of those trips. It’s also where Spilled Coffee began. Some of the most important moments of my life have happened in that water, those trees, that quiet. And now my daughter is building her own memories there.

Watching her with her friends, I kept thinking, where did the time go?

She is 10. Which means I’ve been a father for 10 years. Which means my parents are 10 years older than they were when she was born. Which means every person I love most in this world has less time ahead of them than they did a decade ago. Including me.

I’ve been sitting with that feeling for a while now.

Sometimes life sends you the same message from multiple directions at once. Lately, a movie, two TV shows, and a podcast I came across all circled the same theme without knowing it. Time. What we are waiting for. How short and precious life actually is.

I don’t think that’s a coincidence. I think I was finally ready to hear it.

In investing, I talk often about the idea that there is always something to worry about. Always.

Think back across just the last decade or so. The debt ceiling. Trade wars. A global pandemic. The fastest rate hikes in modern history. Inflation at levels not seen in 40 years. Bank failures. Russia invading Ukraine and what it meant for energy and inflation. War spreading through the Middle East. Tariffs. Recession fears that seemed certain and then didn’t arrive. More tariff fears. The news cycle has never once run out of reasons to be afraid.

And yet. The market went up. Not in a straight line. Not without pain. But it went up. The people who waited for the all-clear signal, who needed the headlines to calm down before they felt comfortable investing, missed most of the gains. Because the headlines never calmed down. They just changed.

There’s never a perfect moment to invest. There’s always a reason to wait.

That same truth applies to life. And I’m not sure I fully understood that until recently.

We’re always waiting for something.

Waiting until we save a little more. Until the kids are older. Until work settles down. Until we pay off the debt. Until next summer. Until we feel ready. Until the moment feels right. We manage our lives carefully, like we’re holding something fragile, protecting it from risk. And somewhere along the way, the life we were protecting passes us by.

I’ve been guilty of this. I think most of us are.

Whatever number you have saved right now, there’s probably a bigger number in your head that you’re waiting for. And when you get there, there’ll be another one after that. At some point, you have to ask whether the goalpost is ever going to stop moving. Whether you’re chasing a number that will give you permission to live, or whether that permission was always yours to give. The number goes up. The waiting continues. And the years keep passing.

We’ve told ourselves that convenience is optional, something we earn. But somewhere along the way, convenience became the default. Comfort became the plan. Waiting became the strategy. We optimized for safety and called it wisdom.

I’m not sure it is.

Watching my daughter blow out her candles, I thought about the windows we get in life. They’re smaller than we think. The window to take that trip. The window to call that person. The window to start that thing. The window to just be present with the people you love before everyone gets too busy, too old, or too gone.

My parents won’t always be here. My kids won’t always be kids. The friends I have right now won’t always be a short drive away. I know this. But knowing it and feeling it are two different things.

I’m feeling it now.

I write to learn. I write to teach. But sometimes I write because it’s the only way I know how to process something that doesn’t fit neatly into a conversation. This is one of those pieces.

I’m coping with time. With the reality of it. With the strange mix of gratitude and grief that comes from watching a life you love move forward whether you’re ready or not.

It’s not easy. It’s also the most human thing there is.

So here’s what I keep coming back to.

You’ll have as much life as you allow yourself.

Not as much as your schedule permits. Not as much as your bank account unlocks. Not as much as the market cooperates with. As much as you allow.

Make a memory a day. Not a grand one. Not a vacation or a milestone. Just a moment you chose on purpose. A conversation that mattered. A meal you actually sat down for. A walk you didn’t scroll through.

Die living, not existing.

Because the alternative, I think, is the real risk. Not losing money. Not making the wrong call. The real risk is arriving at the end of a life you managed very carefully, realizing you forgot to live it.

We all have a very small window.

I don’t know exactly what I’m waiting for anymore. But I’m trying, right now, to stop.

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The Dow was the week’s standout, surging 2.1% to close above 50,580 for the first time. Small caps were right behind it, with the Russell 2000 jumping 2.7% to 2,869 and now leading major indexes on a year-to-date basis at +14.7%. The Nasdaq added a modest 0.5%, closing at 26,344 with a strong +13.4% gain on the year.

On the fixed income side, the 10-year Treasury yield dipped to 4.56%, falling 0.8% on the week as bond prices caught a bid.

It was a rougher week for commodities. Oil slid 4.9% to $103.94, though it remains one of the year’s top performers at +67.9% YTD. Gold gave back 1.0% to close at $4,511. Bitcoin dropped 2.0% to 75,386 and remains the week’s notable laggard among the tracked assets, sitting at -13.9% for the year.

Market Recap

Weekly Heat Map Of Stocks

The View From Here

Eight straight positive weeks for the S&P 500. Let’s put it in context. Looking back 50 years, there have been eight prior instances where the S&P 500 strung together an 8-week win streak outside of a bear market. The historical paths that followed were almost uniformly positive over the next 100 trading days. History isn’t a guarantee, but it’s a reasonable tailwind.

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