Euphoria Has Taken Over The Markets — ft. Barry Ritholtz

28:38Scott Galloway:need capital, the financial system roots you to a 23 % unsecured card instead of the asset you already own. Aven built the first home equity line of credit issued on a Visa card. So the same swipe that used to cost you 23 % now costs a fraction of that, saving you hundreds of dollars a month. Check your offer at no cost with no impact to your credit score, no hidden fees. Aven holds a 4.9 star trust pilot rating from over 8 ,000 verified customers. Go to aven.com. That's A-V-E-N.com. Aven. Stop overpaying for capital. Aven Financial, Inc., NMLS number 2042345. Cards issued pursuant to a license from Visa USA, Inc.

29:16Scott Galloway:by Coastal Community Bank. NMLS number 462289. Member FDIC, equal housing lender, subject to approval. Terms apply. Visit aven.com for details.

29:31Scott Galloway:Support for the show comes from BCX, the public ticker for private tech. For generations, American companies have moved the world forward through their ingenuity and determination. And for generations, everyday Americans could be a part of that journey through perhaps the greatest innovation of all, the U.S. stock market. It didn't matter whether you were a factory worker in Detroit or a farmer in Omaha. Anyone could own a piece of the great American companies. But now that's changed. Today, our most innovative companies are staying private rather than going public. The result is that everyday Americans are excluded from investing and getting left further behind while a select few reap all the benefits.

30:03Scott Galloway:Until now. Introducing VCX, the public ticker for private tech, now available wherever you buy stocks. VCX by Fundrise gives everyone the opportunity to invest in the next generation of innovation, including the companies leading the AI revolution, space exploration, defense tech, and more. Visit GetVCX.com for more info. That's getvcx.com. Carefully consider the investment material before investing, including objectives, risks, charges, and expenses. This and other information can be found in the fund's prospectus at getvcx.com. This is a paid sponsorship.

30:39We all do it. You have a night for yourself, but don't like the sound of the silence. So you turn on the TV just for the ambiance. It's a little trick that helps you feel like you've got company and aren't alone. And other insurers, well, they may make you feel alone. But when you switch to Geico, you've got claims reps available around the clock. So whenever you need, you'll have people around to help. And let's turn on the washing machine, just for good measure. Well, isn't that soothing?

31:06Scott Galloway:It feels good to have support. It feels good to Geico.

31:15We're back with Prof G Markets. One of the things you mentioned when we compare like dot-com era to today, to what we're seeing in AI today is that the business models, like we're seeing real revenues agreed, incredible, like unprecedented revenue growth agreed. But then you also say we're seeing real profits. There, I think you might have a little bit of contention because the big companies that we're talking about, like OpenAI, like SpaceX, the profitability isn't there. They're losing billions of dollars. And in addition, if we're talking about like what metrics are real and what revenue is real and what profits are real, what we're also seeing is this issue of the circular dealmaking where a lot of those enterprise contracts, which are massive, are being handed over by their investors.

32:08You know, Google goes and buys billions of dollars worth of GPU chips from SpaceX and Google is an investor, a significant shareholder in SpaceX, which makes you question how real that revenue actually is and how long it will actually last. So that's one point that I'd like to get your views on. And the reason I bring that up is because the dot-com era had similar metrics which seemed real. But when you looked at them clicks, eyeballs, how real is it? Really questionable. And the second thing I want to get your reaction to, you know, back in the fall, there was a lot of the comparison to the dot-com bubble to today.

32:46Are we seeing the same thing? And a lot of people said, you know, there's an AI bubble, valuations are getting stretched. And our view on this show was maybe there's a bubble, but the valuations don't hold a candle to what we saw in the dot-com era. But now I'm looking at the Shiller PE ratio today. And as of today, the Shiller PE is 42. It's the second highest reading ever. The only time it was higher was in 1999, but it wasn't that much higher. It was around 44. And that was right before the dot-com crash. And my point is, it seems like right now, valuations actually are comparable to the dot-com era.

33:29Yes, we're seeing significant earnings, but prices are pretty high at this point, at which point I'm starting to think maybe this actually is dot-com all over again. I just want to get your reactions to those two points. So let's start with the Shiller PE has been showing that the market's been overvalued pretty much straight up since 1991. So it's a useful tool, but certainly not as a timing vehicle or even as any particular insight as to whether or not you should be long equities. What I find the Shiller CAPE, the cyclically adjusted P ratio is useful for is it gives you a pretty good sense of what should your expected returns be looking out 10 years.

34:16I don't know why we continue to see it get used so often because it just doesn't give anybody any sort of timing. That's number one. And then number two, you threw a lot at me there, so I'm trying to unpack. I was talking about the profitability and the fact that many of these aren't profitable and that there's the circular revenue question, which makes me question all of it. So the profitability thing is kind of shocking from this perspective. And I always think back to the initial Jeff Bezos letter from Amazon. These companies are as profitable as they want to be. Like if they choose to consistently reinvest, reinvest, reinvest.

35:02So they're not showing a profit. They don't have to do dividends. They don't have to pay taxes. Like Bezos famously sent in that letter. Hey, don't expect profits from us for 20 years. and they didn't have profits for 20 years. So there's that. The circular question, I think, is a little overwrought. All these companies have a side venture arm. When they find something they like and they say to someone internally, hey, not for nothing, but we think these guys are going to be huge. Maybe you want to take a piece of it. I'm less concerned about that circular stuff because it's still real capital investment.

35:45You're getting real dollars. Now, let me show you my favorite contra to that. When Cisco went public in the late 80s, early 90s, they manufactured routers, which were sold to startups that were all venture funded. And those venture funded companies would buy these routers for cash. By the time we got to the late 1990s, it was late 99, Cisco started a couple of years earlier, a manufacturer of financing from their purchasers, sort of like Ford Credit and GMAC and those sort of things, where the builder is running a separate finance arm. And it turned out that Cisco was financing something like 93 or 94 percent of all their sales.

36:36So in other words, they weren't selling all these routers. They were giving these routers away and accepting a promise to pay one day from sketchy, borderline, maybe they'll make it, maybe they won't, VC-funded startups. And so when the dot-com implosion happened, Cisco, which was a big, stable company, because of that sort of circular financing. So those companies' VCs were the same as Cisco's VCs. Everybody knew each other. Everybody played each other. The problem was it was a promise to pay, not actual cash. And so when the tide went out, Cisco fell 93%. By the way, this was happening just as Fortune put, or Forbes, I don't remember which, Cisco on the cover.

37:24The one stock you have to own, the stock did nothing but go down for the next 20 plus years, down 93%. It was only last year. It finally got back up to that level. That's right. 25 years of zero returns for the one stock you have to own. So that was truly circular. If I see just like a lot of stock swaps or a lot of, you know, paper and notes, I'm very skeptical. But if Google is going to the bond market to get$75 billion to buy more of these chips and build more of these data centers, this is real money. All right. So admittedly, they're taking debt, but it's not just a piece of paper. They're getting cash for it.

38:10So, yeah, the degree of circularity is a little annoying, but it's certainly nothing like what we saw in the 90s.

38:18Scott Galloway:So the farm team players, whether it was Rocket Lab or Virgin Galactic, they sold off. And I think a lot of people decided why own the farm team when you can own the Yankees. But what was impressive or more shocking was that the ETFs holding NVIDIA, Apple, Amazon, Alphabet were down the same week. Usually when you see this, there's kind of these players trade up in sympathy or people get excited about the market.

38:46Scott Galloway:So it's not the rocket lab went down. It's just that SpaceX was large enough to pull capital out of NVIDIA, Microsoft, Amazon, and Apple. I'm curious if you think there are going to be other losers here that, you know, there is a finite amount of capital for IPOs of these types of companies. And when you have SpaceX on top of OpenAI, on top of Anthropic, do you think, generally speaking, the rest of the Magnificent 10 gets hurt? I don't really think so. There's a great chart out of Deutsche Bank that looks at the market capitalization percentage of new issuance, new stocks, IPOs, as a percentage of total market cap.

39:29And if you look at the last peak, that was 20 and 21 during the little bit of that SPAC frenzy that we saw. And at the worst point in 21, 2.2 percent of the total outstanding market cap of U.S. equities were new issuances. That collapsed in 2022 to something like less than 0.2 percent. Here we are. We're just about at the halfway point of 2026, and that's 0.8 percent. So not even a little more than a third of the peak we saw in 2022. Now, by the way, you go back to like the late 90s and you end up with one one, one point two, one point three. So that SPAC peak was unusual. If we end up at one four, one five for the year.

40:25Yeah, that's a high amount of money. But when you think about it, you know, everybody was complaining companies don't want to go public. There's so much cash around. These these firms can stay private for forever. So it's weird to hear people first say, you know, there clearly is something wrong with the market that none of these companies want to go public. And then just a few short years later, oh, my God, look at how much money is coming out of everybody else because these companies are going public. I don't think one, one and a half, two percent is all that meaningful to companies like Apple, Amazon, Google, Microsoft.

41:06It really isn't. When you think about the way professional managers buy stocks, and I love the phrase my partner Josh came up with for this called the relentless bid. When you own 60 stocks in a mutual fund or 30 stocks in an ETF and flows continue to come in, this is absolutely true when it comes to 401k money. Every paycheck, people have a little piece of money peeled off and it goes into their 401k. Rarely are these managers going out and opening up a brand new position. It happens a few times a year, but nine out of 10 flows go into their existing holdings. So if maybe$1 ,000 comes in and instead of that getting spread out amongst 100 or 500 stocks, maybe now it's going to be something like$990.

42:09It really just gets lost in the wash. I don't think that's going to have a significant impact on the long term prospects of companies like Google and Apple. So many cross currents, so many different things are going on. It always forces me to recall and to remember how little we know about the future, how little we understand about what's happening right now. The predictions, the forecast, the hot takes, you know, they have such a short life, such a short shelf life because everything changes so rapidly. And it takes a solid like I'm really amazed how many people were whining about market concentration throughout 2025, even as it was pretty clear of the magnificent seven.

42:59Only two of them beat the S &P 500, NVIDIA and Google. So, wait, five of the seven underperformed the broad index is and the market was still up 18 percent for the year. And by the way, that was the worst returns. The rest of Europe and Asia and Japan and Korea did much better. And so sometimes you dig into the data and it's all right. We think we know it's happening, but we really don't.

43:24Scott Galloway:You introduced a concept to me that I hadn't considered before, and I think it's a really novel concept, and that is we have this natural instinct that when something hits an all-time high, we should think about selling. And you introduced me to the concept that if you invested just on the days where the market hit all-time highs, you would have done really well. Better than investing on any other day, which is mind-blowing to me. Yeah, I think that's an incredibly unique concept. Let me ask you this, though. At some point when, and I don't know what the metric is you look at, if it's not Case Schiller or PE or the Buffett Index, but at some point, do you, Barry Ritholtz, would you say, you know, at some point it is time to start hedging?

44:09Scott Galloway:And whether you hit an all-time high or not, when you look at it and go, okay, folks, we have officially entered crazy town. And it would be very – I look at the valuations of these AI companies and what reminds me of 99 was this notion that we moved to a different model of economics and that this is new and these companies will compound it five times and they're revolutionizing every portion of the economy. And that multiples are forever – there's a floor on multiples, yeah. A permanently high plateau was Irving Fisher's famous line in 1929. It's different this time is basically what they're saying again.

44:47Scott Galloway:Is there a point at which Barry Ritholt says, OK, folks, we need to bring our horns in? And what are the metrics you look at? So first, start out with the understanding that it is more art than science. There isn't just a series of data points where you can say when A and B and C happens, here's guaranteed where the market's going next. For a couple of reasons. First, the setup each time is unique because 2025 isn't 2000, isn't 87, isn't 29. Like the world is very different, even though human nature, when people the line about the most expensive words in the English language or this time it's different.

45:31It's because human nature is unchanged and you can rely on people to panic at the exact work where worst possible time. Number one, there have only been two moments in my entire career where I said sell everything or get short and move to cash. One, I was a little early in January 2000. And for the wrong reason, I thought, hey, everybody who's sitting on a ton of gains in 99, they're not going to want to pay taxes on that in April. So they sell in January. You got to April 2001. Totally wrong. Had nothing to do with it. The second time was January of 08. And I had been pounding the table for, I don't know, two years before that, talking about subprime mortgages, talking about the backwards, low rate, real estate driven economy, talking about derivatives.

46:26And I spent about a year being the biggest putts on Wall Street because I wasn't even forecasting this. I was just saying we are wildly underestimating the risk that is taking place today. And that was 07 and 08. And so at the time the firm I was at was all institutional, so it was very easy to move the model portfolio to all cash. We were short companies like CIT and Lehman and AIG. By the way, very hard to hold a short even as they're heading down because nothing goes straight down. Every jank up, it's a knife in and twist, and you're waiting for the stock to get called away. and I wasn't savvy enough to own a put with each short.

47:12All right, the stock gets called away. I have a put. Who cares? The hedging question is really interesting. And we all hedge every day. We just don't realize it. You have health insurance and auto insurance and homeowners insurance, and that's a hedge against the loss of this property or an unexpected cost. We don't get upset if our house doesn't burn down. Oh, I wasted$25 ,000 on homeowners insurance. I didn't make a claim. But when it comes to investors, and I want to say to somebody, you have a$10 million portfolio. I need about$400 ,000 to hedge your downsides totally. And there's no guarantee it'll work.

47:56All it means is we're going to prevent the downside from being too large while still maintaining the upside. People are upset that, wait, I'm taking a 4 % hit. And the market, if you did that in 25 and the market's up 18 percent, I spent almost half a million dollars and$10 million. I have nothing to show for it. Well, you were hedged. You are your downside. You have a whole year of no worries about downside. People hate that. So in my personal account, I fool around with a few hedges. I am long emerging markets. I'm long Japan. I'm short silver, I think. Like this is before the war was ended or settled or I don't even know what the hell to call this.

48:43Is it a war? Is it a military action? Is this a temporary truce? Like we'll find out sometime. But as oil prices and commodities start to come down, you should see gold lose a little bit of its luster and silver, which had a crazy run. for me to really want to hedge my portfolio, I would have to see a lot of things start to go wrong. Right. And keep in mind, this has been an incredibly robust economy. I continue to see profits growing. What's the other side of that? Well, the mayhem of this presidency is a risk factor. The tariffs were a problem. I'm long companies like Ford and GM, and I previously were long things like Walmart that did well when the tariffs were overturned.

49:37So we survived that. The war, maybe this is over. So this risk factor is done. All of the ice stuff, which is a contributing factor to sentiment at record lows, that's another factor. And on top of the K-shaped economy where, you know, you can't have the top 10 percent driving half of all of the consumer spending. Like that's just not a sustainable situation. So I look at all those factors and I'm tracking sentiment, which is useless except at extremes. So when the sentiment is at record lows, at least short term, that tends to be bullish. We're not seeing massive layoffs. we're not seeing a whole lot of hiring and we're only seeing modest wage increases, like all the things that are risk factors that would make me say, hey, I want to get out of these equities or at least hedge my core portfolio and get out of the I own the queues.

50:42I own an A.I. ETF, B.A.I., which is doubled over the last year. All of the wacky, high growth, high octane stuff. That's the first thing I would do when I start to say, and again, more art than science. All right, we're pretty close to the top. I'm going to cut this, this and this. I've held them long enough that the taxes are going to be as low as I'm going to get. And then let me start watching these factors. But it's so much feel and so much intuition and so much craft and so little science that you're making these decisions. And in the back of your head, you're constantly saying, what happens if I'm wrong?

51:30What where's my line in the sand where I say, because I started on a trading desk and there's no difference between being early and being wrong. Right. If you tap out at 50 ,000. down, it goes to 60 ,000 and on a way to 30 ,000, you weren't early. You were wrong. You could have tapped out at 55 or 60 or wherever the hell that number is. So the biggest warning sign is going to be a major trend break in a number of these different sectors and broad indices. We're not seeing that. We're seeing positive momentum. We're seeing all-time highs. Yeah, I say this every cycle. There absolutely 100 % is a top out there.

52:15There's a top coming. There's a shitstorm coming our way. There's going to be an ugly, ugly market of down 20, 25, 30, 35%. I just don't see it happening tomorrow or the rest of this week or probably not the rest of this month. And when I take my Magic 8 ball, the outlook is cloudy beyond that. We'll be right back. And for even more markets content, sign up for our newsletter at ProfitMarkets.com.

52:58Support for this show comes from Odoo. Running a business is hard enough, so why make it harder with a dozen different apps that don't talk to each other? Introducing Odoo. It's the only business software you'll ever need. It's an all-in-one, fully integrated platform that makes your work easier. CRM, accounting, inventory, e-commerce, and more. And the best part? Odoo replaces multiple expensive platforms for a fraction of the cost. That's why over thousands of businesses have made the switch. so why not you? Try Odoo for free at odoo.com. That's O-D-O-O dot com.

53:39Support for this show comes from Odoo. Running a business is hard enough, so why make it harder with a dozen different apps that don't talk to each other? Introducing Odoo. It's the only business software you'll ever need. It's an all-in-one, fully integrated platform that makes your work easier. CRM, accounting, inventory, e-commerce, and more. And the best part? Odoo replaces multiple expensive platforms for a fraction of the cost. That's why over thousands of businesses have made the switch. So why not you? Try Odoo for free at odoo.com. That's O-D-O-O dot com.

54:20Scott Galloway:This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome? That's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50-page restoration block, or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online make sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responses set up required, compatibility and availability varies 18+.

54:51Scott Galloway:we're back with prof g markets i think that a decent lesson and i want you to validate or nullify this thesis but when people immediately go to the notion of hedging what i would suggest they do is they think about diversification as opposed to hedging i think people use the phrase hedging incorrectly. So my favorite example of hedging was when Yahoo bought Broadcom.com and Mark Cuban said, oh, my God, not only am I suddenly a billionaire, but all of this is tied to Yahoo stock. And I think he was limited with what he could do for six months and then put on a zero cost collar, which is just a way of saying, listen, I'm not selling the stock.

55:37I'm locking it in this tiny range. And if it goes over that range, it gets sold. And if it goes under that range, it's sold. But I'm stuck here. So it doesn't look like a sale until it's sold. And of course, Yahoo proceeds to drop 90 percent. And he sold somewhere around 200. And it was it was one of the greatest trades of all time. That's a legitimate hedge. How do I prevent downsize from affecting this specific holding. When people are broadly invested in indexes or broad mutual funds, you end up with a different situation where markets are down one out of four years. You look at the history of the S &P going back to 1929, it's about 26 % of the time markets are negative on the calendar year.

56:32And if you look at 5 % drawdowns happen two or three times a year, you get a 10 % drawdown. I think it's like every 1.2 years on average, meaning it doesn't come along like clockwork. Sometimes you get a few of them in a row. Sometimes you don't get any. The down 20 % is like once every three or four years. And the down 30 % are kind of generational. It's 10, 15, 20 years. You know, if that's what you're trying to hedge, that's just the normal course of how markets run.

57:07Scott Galloway:But in a lot of this is semantics. What you just described with Mark Cuban, I would say, is diversification, not a hedge. He didn't go short the stock. He didn't buy puts. He legally sold the stock effectively such that he could put the money in something else without triggering a capital gain. And that zero cost collar includes as part of one of the legs is a put that when the stock fell, he's essentially locked in from there. So but then he did roll it into a whole bunch of other things, including the Dallas Mavericks. He he did. You know, I love that approach of saying maybe this doubles from here, but I don't want to be greedy.

57:48I want to lock in a big win and then do really good things with it. So diversification is useful if any given sector or geography or style falls out of favor. But think back to the first quarter of 2020 or think back to 08 or 09. In a real crisis, all correlations go to one and everything moves in lockstep down. And so that's the risk you're always facing when people say, am I diversified? Do I need to hedge? I really look at that as two different questions. If you're diversified, two things. First, in a real crisis, it won't matter for the most part. But second, being diversified means there's always something in your portfolio that you have to apologize for.

58:39We spent the better part of the 2010s apologizing for overseas equity forces. Europe, Asia, even South America, they all did really poorly. And yet over the past two and a half, almost three years, they've been significantly outperforming the U.S. Perhaps this is the start of a 10-year period of overseas outperforming. So could the U.S. crash and not drag the rest of the world down? Most of the time, we do drag the rest of the world down. Maybe if we have just, let's say we're up 14%, 15 % for the year. Let's say we give that up by the end of the year and the rest of the world isn't doing as poorly as doing okay.

59:24You're not hedged, but you're diversified. And that offsets the risk of a concentrated U.S. domestic portfolio. You mentioned earlier that there's a difference between being early and wrong. That if you think you're going to see a correction and you take some action based on that belief, either you sell or you hedge or whatever it is, and then the market goes up another 10 % after that, then you were wrong. And I guess I want to hear a little bit more about that philosophy because I'll just tell you how I'm feeling about this market. um i think it is frothy i think these valuations are crazy i think spacex has a giant red flag i don't think the valuation makes any sense i don't necessarily think we're going to see dot com again but i think that we might see something like 2022 and by the way you mentioned that the the spack supply which did proceed almost immediately this uh pretty negative year for the markets, especially negative for tech companies in 2022.

1:00:33And my expectation, my feel, and no one knows, I don't know, is that we'll see something like a 2022 start to transpire over the next, call it six months or so. And then the question becomes like, what do you even do about it, about that, if that is your belief? My view is that it would make sense to start thinking about how to hedge against that event. But if I have it in my head that I need to make sure that I time it correctly, such that I'm correct, as you say, between the difference between being early and wrong, then I don't know, that's another thing to deal with. So I guess, how do you think about that?

1:01:16You said that you don't see this market turning negative in the next day or the next week or the next month. But if you think it's going to happen over the next, I don't know, six months or over the next 12 months, then what would be your approach to hedging in that situation? All markets end, all cycles end. And this will, like every other cycle before us, will eventually reach its natural or unnatural conclusion. When you make the decision to, hey, this market is crazy, frothy, overvalued, whatever, you are making three decisions. And most people don't think about the third decision. So decision number one is, all right, I have too much exposure to this equity, whether it's technology or U.S.

1:02:03or just equities in general. So you're choosing where you're overexposed. Decision two is, all right, so maybe I think I could pick the top and I'll try and get out there. Or maybe I think I can and I'll peel 10 percent of my holdings down to wherever I want to take them every month. The opposite of dollar cost averaging. dollar cost liquidation. So, all right, I'm not going to get the exact top, but I'll get enough of the curve that by the time everything gets really ugly, I'll have a cost price sale way above where we are. But the third decision is the one that people forget, which is just simply what are the rules, what are the parameters that and what what will trigger me reentering these markets.

1:02:55And I can't tell you how many people, we were getting emails, not just 2010, but 2013, 14, 15. Hey, I followed you out of U.S. equities in January 2008. And when you jump back in in March 2009, I thought you were nuts. And by the way, I'm still sitting in cash. That's the real risk. You can't miss that recovery because the market very quickly recovered. It took until 2013 from the October 2007 peak, March 2009 lows, back to 2013. If you're not back in then, you're never going to get back in. And P.S., academic research has found that people who panic sell into a crash, about 30 percent of them never come back to equities.

1:03:50So you want to avoid that. I think that's really, really great advice. And by the way, I would just put another option out there, which is another one that I'm considering, which is do nothing and stay invested for the long term. Ed, how old are you? Because I think you're a little younger than me and Scott. 27. So wait, you have a 40-year time horizon. Exactly. Your responsibility is don't just do something, sit there, because the math of bear markets is kind of fascinating. Think about 2000 to 2013 or 1966 to 82 in anticipation of the 82 to 2000 bull market. If you dollar cost averaged into either of those periods, you know, you lost 75 percent on a on a in real terms, in inflation adjusted terms of the money you put to work from 66 to 82.

1:04:44And as soon as 82 crossed and we started this bull market, you're just accumulating assets of unloved indexes at deeply discounted prices. And they exploded higher over the next, you know, the market had a series of giant rallies and sell offs, including 73, 74, which was very equivalent, 56 percent to 08, 09. And so if you religiously dollar cost averaged, you ended up at the end of that period of no return, zero returns in nominal terms and minus 70, 75 percent in real inflation adjusted returns. You just own everything so much cheaper. And it's weird to think about this. But as much as we love the bull market and that's where the gains start to show up, setting up for that during a bear market, especially if you have decades to look out.

1:05:47Scott and I have a few years left, but I don't think we have 40 years of dollar cost averaging in us. You will find that no, but like the equivalent today is the 87 crash. Right. Not even 40 years ago. Right. So someone your age in 1986, if they just kept buying straight through that, the worst one day, 22 percent crash. Like, yeah, I'm a buyer. Yeah, I got 40 years. I don't care. Think about the market, which had fallen from like 900 to 600 on the Dow. It's now 50 ,000. That's what having a four decade time horizon does for you. and the other side is what are the odds that you'll get out remotely close to the top and get back in remotely close to the bottom if ever if at all yeah and i think you know every time i talk about any reasons to feel bearish whatsoever and i've said i think we're kind of close to the top i think your point is important one and it's something i would like to make on this show right now i'm not saying when i say that oh you should sell i mean i should be very clear about where I am, I'm still very long equities in my full portfolio position.

1:07:02Just because I think that stocks might go down tomorrow doesn't mean I'm like, oh, my God, we've got to sell everything now. That's not the implication. The reality is we've got to talk about markets because we're here and we're talking about markets. Sometimes they go down. But ultimately, yeah, we should all be long equities. We should all be invested. So I'm glad that you point that out. By the way, this is the reason I love having a cowboy account. Take 5%, 4 % of your liquid net worth. Trade to your heart's desire. Buy crypto, short silver. Get long whatever you want. Speculate on the hideous meme stocks and shit coins there are.

1:07:43Yes. And the beauty of that is twofold. So first, when it's not your real money and stuff is running, you can let it run because it's a small portfolio. You know, very often we'll speak to people. I have a$15 million portfolio. 14 million of it is NVIDIA, Amazon or Microsoft. I don't know what to do. Well, you're highly concentrated. Let's work out a plan for you. Um, uh, and very often those people are rare because most people, the stock doubles or triples and they're out and they don't let it run. Um, but the other thing is that scratches the bias towards action is the technical term. Um, and then you can do something.

1:08:27You could sell that all day long, but leave your proper main account unmolested and it'll be fine. Screw around all day long with the cowboy account, that's what it's there for. That's my behavioral hack. Barry Ritholtz is the co-founder, chairman, and chief investment officer of Ritholtz. He also hosts Bloomberg's Masters of Business podcast, writes the big picture blog, and has authored multiple bestselling books, including Bailout Nation and How Not to Invest. Great title. Barry, this was awesome. Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you, Barry. It was good to see you. Thank you, guys. Thank you, Ed.

1:09:04Thank you, Scott. This episode was produced by Claire Miller and Alison Weiss and engineered by Benjamin Spencer. Our video editor is Jorge Carti. Our research team is Dan Chalon, Isabella Kinsel, Chris Nodonohue, and Mia Silverio. Jake McPherson is our social producer. Drew Burrows is our technical director, and Catherine Dillon is our executive producer. Thank you for listening to Prof G Markets from Prof G Media. If you liked what you heard, give us a follow and join us for a fresh take on markets on Monday.

1:09:39Lifetimes

1:09:44You help me In kind reunion As the world turns And the dark flies

1:10:15Scott Galloway:When I scraped my car in that parking garage, I was worried that it could be a long process to take care of it. Like a landscaper's first day trimming a hedgeman. I have definitely already been here. Now, was it left, right, or right, left? Well, maybe I'll cut a path out and find my way back later. But it wasn't like that. I filed a claim in under two minutes on the Geico app, and they handled it from there. It was taken care of almost as quickly as it happened. It feels good to get help quick. It feels good to Geico.