COMMENT: Marty, despite being repeatedly advised to disregard your work, I distinctly remember your 2020 call that we were entering the most hated bull market in history. No other analyst I know can match your predictive track record—which, I suspect, is precisely why you face so much opposition. Any media outlet that refuses to host you only reinforces its own lack of credibility. I’ve attached an AI-generated comparison between you and Jim Cramer. What stands out most is that your analysis is never rooted in personal opinion; it remains strictly objective. In that regard, you captured the very essence of Socratic wisdom. Every forecast article you read is about the crash. Nobody but nobody has been long-term bullish.
Jeb
PS: As you know, I am a lawyer. I read your sentencing TR and everything they say about you is a lie. They dropped the whole Ponzi allegation, the bank plead guilty, and the judge ruled people were not entitled to be paid twice and ordered you had full credit for the bank’s restitution so you had none. The fact that they put a gag order on you to prevent you from helping you clients says it all.
REPLY: The entire reason I am doing this conference on July 25th trying to keep the cost to a minimum is because of what you are saying. The reasons offered are always domestic. I have witnessed international capital flows. I taught Socrates how to analyze the world from that perspective, not classical economic theories that were all forged during the Gold Standard so they NEVER considered currency as a variable. You can invest internationally all based on the currency at times even alone. This is why these theories crumble to dust and need to be swept away. Things change. War was fought with stones, then clubs, then swords, bullet with the discover of gunpowder, followed by nukes, and now war has become drone-warfare with a kid who is great at video games.
Another reader sent this in:
A Taste of Armageddon” (Star Trek: The Original Series, Season 1, Episode 23).
In this episode (aired February 23, 1967), Captain Kirk and the Enterprise crew visit the planet Eminiar VII on a diplomatic mission. They discover that Eminiar has been in a 500-year computerized “war” with its neighbor, Vendikar. The conflict is entirely simulated by computers that calculate attacks and casualties—no actual weapons are fired—but the designated “casualties” (including, at one point, the entire Enterprise crew) must voluntarily report to disintegration chambers to be killed for real, keeping the war “civilized” and bloodless on the surface.
Kirk and his landing party get caught up in the system when the Enterprise is declared “destroyed” in a simulated attack, and they’re ordered to report for disintegration. The episode explores themes of war, dehumanization, and the illusion of sanitized conflict, ending with Kirk forcing the societies to confront the reality of their choices.
Is this the next wave of creative destruction?
I have been calling this the “most hated bull market in history” because, it has been a powerful rally that most investors don’t trust, don’t participate in, and constantly expect to collapse. Based on data from the Federal Reserve’s Survey of Consumer Finances, only about 21% of American families directly own individual stocks. The 21% figure for direct stock ownership is from the Federal Reserve’s 2022 Survey of Consumer Finances and is NOT a record high. In fact, it is less than the direct ownership rates seen in both 1929 and 2000. So where is the Bubble?
The Wall Street Journal accused Jesse Livermore of trying to influence the election by putting out a bullish forecast in 1923. They were wrong, and Time Magazine wrote that those who were “bearish to begin with” refused to allow the market to guide their analysis. They were bent upon having a depression and chose to slander Livermore by suggesting that he might gain some personal favors from the President if he could make the market go up. The excuses were, quite frankly, defamatory and uncalled for. The Wall Street Journal falsely accused Jesse of turning bullish for the election and refused thereafter to ever quote him again because they were wrong. The same applies to me. No mainstream press will ever report the truth because they get their marching orders from behind the curtain as we saw with COVID.
Amazing, on one had they tried to discredit the model claiming I stole it from a 1998 movie to go back in time since I first published it in 1979. Yet the movie the Forecaster they made on me had to be insured by Lloyds of London to even make the film. Everything had to be proven to them that the government lied at every stage of the case. The government even put it in writing that they demanded I turn over the source code or they would fire all 240 employees worldwide.
The government will NEVER tell the truth and mainstream press is used to push disinformation. The UK government is now seizing YouTube and they will now censor everything in Britain no different than the Communists. Even Castro’s daughter has warned that government always seizes the press. We saw what they did with COVID. That was a tiny taste. NEVER expect to get real forecasts from mainstream media.
Despite the market’s long-term strength, the prevailing sentiment has been persistently bearish. All we need do is just look at the fact that many analysts and investors are constantly predicting a crash, rather than celebrating the rally. This contrasts this with the Roaring ’20s, where market participation was widespread, noting that retail investor involvement during this current bull market has remained near historic lows.
I approach things from a global perspective. Many analysts are misreading the market’s health by looking at it through a narrow, modern Domestic lens. Using my own proprietary models, it was clear that we were in a long-term historical bull market. The market is not as dangerously “overbought” position as it appears. Looking at data going back hundreds of years, the current bull market appears more sustainable than conventional indicators suggest. Both 1929 in the USA and Japan in 1989, were capital concentrations globally, which was also pushing the respective currencies higher. Foreign investors made more money than domestic investors in both cases.
Pervasive Bearishness remains a positive signal for as I have also repeatedly said, the MAJORITY MUST ALWAYS BE WRONG! The widespread negativity and lack of speculative frenzy are the very reasons the long-term bullishness remains optimistic. This broad skepticism acts as a protective “wall of worry” that can continue to fuel the bull market, as it prevents the kind of euphoric, overleveraged peak that typically ends a rally.
All I hear is that the inflation is rising so the Fed will raise rates and that will kill the bull market. While 99.9% of analysts seem to focus on interest rates as the major factor, they assume the bull market is over simply because of price. NOBODY can forecast the future from a personal opinion. My computer beats me all the time. I have learned over the last 50 years when it is contrary to everything out there, it is correct. Irving Fisher was the most famous forecaster during the Roaring ’20s. He did not understand the international implications of the capital inflows as money was hiding out in the US during WWI and WWII had begun in the financial markets.
I we look at Goldman Sachs (GS), which by no means is a favorite company of mine, its book value is $366.15 with a stock price at $1,050. That is 34%, well below even the 1982 rally no less 1937 or 1929. That is not historically over the top. The trailing P/E Ratio of the Dow is about 25.49. During 1972, the PE Ration on the Dow hit 50. That was a flight of capital into the Dow because of the collapse of the gold standard on August 15th, 1971. I have stated countless times, when you lose confidence in the government, you run to equities.
As most know, I was blamed for the whole 1980s takover boom because I was running around showing these charts back then and advised many of the takover tycoons. I am explaining some of that in the next Textbook on Understanding the World Economy. The average cost of college textbooks and supplies for a full-time student is about $1,370 per year. A textbook will often run $400-$600. I promised to try to keep the costs down and this textbook will be $250 fully illustrated in color.
Dr. Dan Diker, president of the Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs, told Newsmax on Sunday that the only way to defeat Iran’s ruling regime “is to defeat it militarily.”
If anyone thinks for one second that peace is in the wind, I really do not know what you are smelling. I have laid out the timing for a correction on the Private Blog. But this is not the end of the bull market. It still qualifies as the most hated bull market in history.
We will be offerring the textbook after the conference for $250.
