00:00 Speaker A
Burns, would you say this has been one of the most hated stock market rallies out there considering where we’re at with sentiment, yet we still have equities hovering near those record highs?
00:17 Burns
That’s a that’s a great way of putting it. Uh, yeah, the investment community has basically been dragged, you know, you know, by, you know, the heels along with this market rally. There really hasn’t been a boom in enthusiasm. You know, last year, um, when the markets were rallying, you know, investors really climbed a wall of worry. You know, you had a uh a recession that was bound to happen. Well, it didn’t. You had an uncertain election. Well, you know, we got a fairly certain outcome. You had geopolitical conflict. Well, none of that is necessarily escalated, um, to elsewhere. And you know, now we’re really in a place where the policy news is kind of shifted. And you know, if anything, we have a, you know, maybe a wall of complacency in that, you know, we have a world in which, um, you know, the policy, you know, certainly we have the tariff talk, but now investors are, you know, maybe pivoting towards focusing on tax cuts, on deregulation. We do still have a Fed that is in rate cutting mode. And so a lot of the bad news has been priced in, and uh, yeah, we’re probably in a place where, um, a lot of the good news is as well. Um, so that, you know, investors really should just have to rely on the underlying fundamentals of earnings growth, which should be a bit more muted this year.