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Both perspectives are true. It just depends where you are looking. Take corporate earnings as a positive example. Creative Planning’s Charlie Bilello writes “with 70% of companies reported, S&P 500 operating earnings are up 19% year-over-year, the 11th straight positive quarter and highest growth rate since Q4 2021.” Given how well corporations are doing, you would expect investors to be euphoric. Their portfolios are growing in value and stocks keep climbing higher. But in the surprise of the year, investors are incredibly negative right now. Carson Group’s Ryan Detrick points out investor sentiment currently sits at Extreme Fear even though “a few days ago the S&P 500, Russell 2000, Dow, Nasdaq, and Nasdaq-100 all closed at new monthly all-time highs.” It is crazy to think about stocks at all-time highs, yet investor sentiment in the toilet. Those are the type of ingredients that almost certainly guarantee we can’t be at a market top. The sentiment divergence is not exclusive to investors either. Jim Bianco shows consumer sentiment is falling rapidly as well. He writes “Red is the stock market. It’s going straight up. Rate cuts help. Blue is consumer sentiment, it’s going straight down and is near a multi decade low. Inflation (affordability) is driving this measure lower. Rate cuts hurt.” Lets go back to investors for a second though. Ryan Detrick goes on to explain that the market is overwhelmed with bearish investors. They are everywhere. He writes “AAII bulls minus bears is -11.1% in 2025. Only 3 other times has this ever been -10% and all happened in bear markets (1990, 2008, and 2022). Incredibly, bears outnumber bulls by 11.1% in ‘08, the exact same level as in 2025 so far.” But the dichotomy gets even weirder when you dig deeper into the data. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick was asked about the US economy last night in an interview and he said “Which way is the stock market going? Up, up, up! Which way is the economy going? 3.8% last quarter... the economy is on fire because Donald Trump’s economy is one that says... BUILD IN AMERICA.” Lutnick is not wrong. But contrast that with the jobs data that came out this morning. CNBC’s Jeff Cox explains : “Job cuts for the month totaled 153,074, a 183% surge from September and 175% higher than the same month a year ago. It was the highest level for any October since 2003. This has been the worst year for announced layoffs since 2009.” So the economy is booming but the job market is deteriorating. Stocks are flying higher, yet sentiment is succumbing to gravity. The obvious culprits are artificial intelligence and interest rate cuts. Both trends help corporations and asset owners at the expense of the average citizen who has little to no investment assets. I don’t know what the solution to this problem is. The complexity here is hard to overstate. You can’t allow corporations and asset owners to be destroyed because job losses will only accelerate. You can’t continue to have half of the country being financially destroyed due to technology, economic conditions, and a lack of financial education. This may be one of the great challenges of our time. We have to walk a tight rope between these opposing forces. A potential solution is to get more Americans invested in the capitalist system. Programs like Invest America, which wants to fund a stock brokerage account for every baby born in America, could have a positive impact. The issue with a program like that is it will take decades to see the impact. It doesn’t mean we shouldn’t pursue the program. We just can’t count on it as a magic solution today. One idea I have been thinking through is a “Stock Dividend” to the American people. It could work as a potential tax rebate. The government would determine an amount to be returned to every citizen, but rather than pay in cash, the government would deliver shares of the S&P 500 or Nasdaq. There are a lot of nuances that would have to be figured out. And we have to remember a large portion of the
