Another red flag valuation reading … record investor sentiment … record ETF inflows … but is this bull still young? … how you can stay invested with peace The S&P’s price-to-book ratio just hit 5.3X. As you can see below, this is the highest level since the 2000 Dot-Com bubble burst. Could we be near the top? 
Now, this comparison comes with a grain of salt. Today, physical assets play a smaller role in U.S. businesses than they did in 2000. Instead, we find more more intellectual property, algorithms, and digital assets. However, even if the importance of the price-to-book indicator has diminished since 2000, this comparison deserves our attention. After all, it points toward some degree of overvaluation, even if the specifics are clouded by changes in the corporate landscape. This reminds me of the classic quote from Benjamin Graham: You don’t need to know a man’s weight to know that he’s fat. This isn’t the only recent reason to tread lightly today… Mom ‘n pop investors are increasingly “all in” and bullish on stocks which, historically, is a sign we’re near the top. As you can see below, 43% of investors believe there won’t be a market crash within the next 6 months. This figure has doubled over the last two years. It’s now at the highest level in the last 15 years, well above the average of 30%. 
Source: Global Markets Investor / Shiller, Hulbert Ratings Meanwhile, as you can see below, investors have flooded the ETF market with a record of $1 trillion this year. 
Source: Stocktwits The second highest year was 2021, right before the 2022 bear market. This has shades of “everyone is invested.” Of course, if everyone is already in the market, who’s left to keep buying, pushing stocks higher? | Recommended Link | | | | Luke Lango is about to reveal a destructive market anomaly that could impact every stock in the market next year and wreak havoc on millions of investors’ portfolios in 2025. After nearly a year of working with his team, Luke has developed a strategy to help you turn this unfortunate reality into an extremely lucrative opportunity. To prove it, Luke is holding an emergency stock market update tomorrow, December 11 at 1 pm ET, where he’ll break down this anomaly and provide the exact steps you should take immediately. It’s not too late to sign up but you should do it now. Go here to sign up. |  | | But not all the indicators are signaling caution Analyst Ryan Detrick just crunched the numbers on historical bull market performance after a bull has survived 26 months (the length of our current bull). If we go back 50 years, bulls that make it this long tend to have many more years of life. In the chart below, our current bull is in red. As you can see, within this “26+ months of bull” context, we have enormous runway ahead of us. 
Source: @RyanDetrick / Carson Research Plus, with Trump headed back to the White House, there’s a good case to be made for lower corporate taxes and deregulation to support another one-to-two years of bull market at a minimum. Here’s our hypergrowth expert Luke Lango with how that might happen: While we think stocks have good upside prospects over the next 12-24 months, we think spectacular upside potential will depend on the path forward for inflation and interest rates. If inflation stays low and interest rates are able to keep moving lower, then valuation multiples on the S&P 500 will expand and power strong upside in stocks… After walking through the math of projections based on Trump tax cuts, the related earnings boost, and sentiment-related stock multiples, Luke concludes: If inflation stays low and interest rates keep falling, you could see stocks rally more than 30% in the next 2 years. From deregulation to tax reform, Trump promises to reshape the U.S.’ economy through pro-growth policies. Those promises are stirring investors’ “animal spirits”… and so the market will likely continue surging higher in the early days of his administration. Embrace that boom. This “bull or bear?” back-and-forth has many investors unsure how to position themselves for 2025 This is why Luke and his team have spent the last year creating a new system called “Auspex.” Borrowing from Luke, it’s a way to “embrace the boom” and yet “beware the bust.” As we’ve been profiling in the Digest over recent few days, Auspex is an advanced market system that searches out stocks with superior fundamental, technical, and sentiment criteria. It screens more than 10,000 stocks looking for the select few that are anchored in operational strength, have technical support and tailwinds, and are being buoyed by investor sentiment. As you’d expect, this creates a high bar that only a select few stocks pass each month. With the hard work done for you, users just have to buy Auspex’s recommended selections at the beginning of the month, and that’s it. You hold until the end of the month when Auspex either suggests you remain in the stock (based on a new scan of strength at that time) or rotate your money into a new stock that made the cut. With this system, you keep your wealth aligned in the “best of the best” of fundamental, technical, and sentiment strength on a month-by-month basis. Now, for the most important question – does it work? – here’s Luke with some performance details: Auspex requires just about 10 minutes of work a month, and exposure to only around 10 stocks at a time. Even so, our historical analysis shows that from September 2019 to September 2024, that this system if rebalanced monthly, would have returned 1,054%! The S&P 500 only put up 110% over the same five-year period – so, we’re talking about an outperformance of the market by 9X. 
And it has beaten the market every single month since we started live-testing it with a small group of my members in July. Tomorrow at 1 PM ET, Luke is holding a special live broadcast to provide more details You’ll learn how Luke and his team engineered Auspex, more on its track record and recent picks, and why it’s a great solution for the challenge of what market conditions we’ll find in 2025. Bottom line: If you’re feeling anxious about the eventual bust that’s coming, yet you don’t want to leave gains on the table unnecessarily, tomorrow is for you. I’ll give Luke the final word: All booms of this nature turn into busts. It’s just a matter of timing. Does that mean you should dump your stocks while you still can and head for the hills to avoid this inescapable bust? Absolutely not. The best year for tech stocks in the ’90s was the final year of the Dot-Com Boom. That’s why you don’t want to leave a stock market party early. But you also don’t want to leave too late. So, what’s an investor to do? Embrace the boom… beware the bust. Ride stocks higher, and then head for the exits when the warning signs appear. Of course, as we said before, that’s much easier said than done. But that’s exactly why we’ve been working to create the Auspex investment tool that helps folks navigate through the market turbulence and all these booms and busts. (Sign up to reserve your spot for my free broadcast on this new tool – tomorrow at 1 PM ET – here.) In short, this new tool is a home-grown stock screener that I use to give my subscribers the chance to make long-term gains again in again like clockwork – but in only 30-day bursts. That way, you can get into a position, potentially make a lot of money, and then cash out. That kind of action helps limit your exposure to the increased volatility coming our way in 2025 and beyond. To learn more, join me tomorrow at 1 PM ET. Have a good evening, Jeff Remsburg | 
