00:00So, Steve, I know when I spoke with you lately, you mentioned the word FOMO a couple of times.
00:06So before I get into your thoughts on sort of where is a good sort of a place to invest
00:10right now,
00:10I just wondered, where are we on the fear and greed scale, in your opinion?
00:19Now, if there's, you know, fear here and greed here,
00:22we are all the way on the greed side of the equation at this point.
00:24And FOMO, although the F stands for fear, it's actually a form of greed.
00:30Right. Because from an individual investor point of view, it's envy.
00:33Right. You know, it's it's the it's the fact that, like, you know,
00:37oh, my my neighbor bought Tesla, you know, 10 years ago when he's driving.
00:41He's you know, he's been driving his Tesla ever since.
00:44That's you know, that that borders on envy from a institutional investor's point of view.
00:50FOMO is a very real problem because you're benchmarking and you don't meet that benchmark.
00:56You're you've got problems, you know, professionally.
00:59And so I've used the term in several different ways.
01:02And, you know, one of the ways I see it is in the options market where I see, you know,
01:07people buying call options.
01:09And a lot of times that's institutional investors saying, you know what?
01:11I can't pay these nosebleed prices, but I can't risk missing it.
01:15So it's the flip side of the old hedge hedging strategy on the downside.
01:19So I call it FOMO insurance on the upside.
01:22They don't want to miss that.
01:23They can't miss that rally.
01:24And now, you know, it's it's basically when I look up and see stocks, you know, that are just rocket
01:30rides,
01:31you know, parabolic parabolic moves.
01:33You know, you get into you get into some silly investment habits when you see these inherently unstable patterns developing
01:41among certain stocks and certain markets.
01:43I think the other thing that's at play, too, is that, you know, there's there's a fear of missing out
01:48trade.
01:48But there's also, especially for this new retail investor cohort that is popped up and is here to stay, you
01:54know, post COVID,
01:55there's a fear of getting out trade at play because, you know, when you look at retail participation in in
02:01the bull market that we've had since COVID.
02:04First of all, we haven't had what I would think of as a real bear market in the post COVID
02:07environment.
02:08I mean, you've had these really sharp drawdowns.
02:112022, yes, you could equate that maybe to closer to a real bear market, but it was a non-recessionary
02:16bear.
02:16If you take out the mag seven, the decline was not that bad.
02:19So I think from a duration standpoint, you know, that that experience of a real bear market has not hit
02:25this new retail investor class.
02:27And I think it's one of the reasons that that cohort, when we look at positioning data, that cohort has
02:32sort of always been there,
02:33not necessarily as this buyer that steps in, not only as the buyer that steps in at the low, but
02:39the ones that are holding on that whole time.
02:41We've only really been through one de-risking period with that cohort.
02:43And it was earlier this year when they started moving outside of tech and into other parts of the market.
02:48So I think that's another aspect of this that is that is at play and how it has sort of
02:53changed, you know, market behavior and market structure a little bit in the post COVID environment.
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