If You’re Not Buying Stocks Right Now… You’ll Regret it Forever

On July 6th, 2026, President Trump ran the stock market's opening bell right from the Oval Office and said the market is, and I quote, "going to go through the roof. Wall Street is raising its price targets, AI stocks are exploding, and the memory chip stocks everyone hated a year ago are suddenly being called structurally changed forever." It sure feels like a brand new era. Now, real quick, let's rewind through the first half of this year because it was pure chaos and it tells you a lot about where we really are. First, stocks got crushed. Then, they ripped. Back in March, the S&P 500 was nearly a correction. People generally thought the market was breaking. Then, it came screaming right back in the second quarter alone, the S&P 500 jumped about 15% and the Nasdaq gained about 21% in one quarter. By early July, for the year, the S&P was up nearly 10%. The Nasdaq was up about 11, the Dow up 10, and the small company, Russell 2000 index, was up over 20% for the year. Six months ago, people thought the market was falling apart. Now, the same market is being called unstoppable. But, here's what's strange. Under the surface, it was not one calm, happy market. It was violent and it split apart. In fact, almost 60% of technology stocks are actually in a bear market as we speak, meaning that they're down 20% or more from their highs. The market is near records and yet most tech stocks are getting quietly destroyed. So, the averages are hiding a lot of pain underneath. Second, software got wrecked. Those software as a service companies, that SaaS companies, the subscription software businesses that everyone used to call the best business model in the world, had one of their worst sell-offs since the COVID crash. Big respected names like ServiceNow, Adobe, and even Microsoft got hit really hard. The story flipped from best businesses ever to AI is going to destroy all them, and that happened in about 5 minutes. Growth was slowing, and investors suddenly split these companies into two different buckets. Old software that AI kills and new winners, and showed almost no mercy to the ones that they dumped in the first bucket. And then third, and this is the wild one, guys. While software was getting torched, computer chips and memory went absolutely parabolic. The main semiconductor index rose 82% in just the first 100 days of trading for the year. The strongest start ever recorded as the whole world panicked about not having enough AI chips and memory. Names like Intel, yeah, that Intel, AMD, Micron, SanDisk, they went absolutely insane. Micron alone rocketed hundreds of percent in a matter of months. So, on one side of the market, tech was in a bear market, and on the other side, chip stocks were partying like it was the greatest boom of all time. That kind of split, that kind of whiplash, guys, that's not calm investing. That's emotion running the show. And watch how fast the story changes to match the price. A year ago, when memory chips were down, everyone called them cyclical garbage, a boring up and down business you should avoid. After those same stocks shot up several hundred percent though suddenly the story flipped to, "Well, these aren't really cyclical anymore. This is a permanent structural monopoly." Same exact businesses. The price changed, and the story followed. Keep it in the back of your mind, guys, because as the market turns and changes, I really want you to remember this cuz it'll matter down the line. Now, real quick before I show you what the analysts are saying about the second half of 2026, while all the craziness was happening the first half of the year, some the most respected investors in the world were making very telling moves, and they were not chasing hype. We'll start with Michael Burry, the investor from the movie The Big Short. According to reports, Burry has been betting against the hottest names, things like Nvidia, Applied Materials, Caterpillar, Tesla, and the entire chip index. And he reportedly bet against Micron up around $1,000 a share while calling out the fear of missing out, FOMO, and the greater fool thinking that are driving this frenzy. At the same time, he's been reported to be buying the hated, beaten-down value names, Adobe, PayPal, Fiserv, even Microsoft. Burry is basically saying, "I don't want the stocks that everyone is forced to love. I want the ones everyone has already given up on." Then, there's Warren Buffett. Earlier this year, Buffett described today's market as being like a church with a casino attached. The church is real, patient, long-term investing. The casino is all the wild gambling and short-term betting that's been bolted to this onto the side of it. He's not saying America's doomed. He says quite the opposite. He is saying that the behavior on stocks has gotten more and more casino-like. And remember, this is a man who's built the largest pile of cash in company's history, close to $400 billion, more than he's ever held. And he even said he'd rarely in his life seen people in a bigger gambling mood. Guys, the guy is 95. He's been investing since he was 13. That's over 80 years investing, and he's never seen this much gambling. When the greatest investor of all time would rather sit on a mountain of cash earning 3 and 1/2% than buy stocks, that should tell you something about the prices out there relative to the value. Guys, I see it on Twitter all the time saying, "Why would you buy in a market that's at all-time highs?" All-time highs have nothing to do with it. In the late '80s, stocks were hitting all-time highs and we're still undervalued. It's about price versus value. But guys, it's not just Buffett. Jeremy Grantham, a legendary investor who correctly warned people before past bubbles, has gone even further warning that this market is a super bubble, and that stocks could eventually plunge as much as 70% from the top. Guys, and he's not talking about tech alone. He thinks the S&P. Guys, two other things to validate him just a little bit. Back in 2000, he called for the Nasdaq to fall 75%. It fell 82%. And in a recent interview with The Diary of a CEO, Steven Bartlett, he said he would not even own US stocks. Now, I'm not going to go to that extreme in my opinion, but I get why he's saying that. There's a lot more value internationally. When investors with a track record like Buffett, Graham, and even Michael Burry are this cautious while everyone else is euphoric, it's at least worth stopping to ask, why is this the case? Okay. So, with all that fear from the legends, you might think everyone's bearish. Not even close. Wall Street is loudly bullish right now. And I want to give you their case fairly at full strength, because it's actually a possibility, and here's the key. The bulls are not saying that stocks are cheap. A lot of them are saying that stocks are expensive. But what they are saying is that earnings and AI spending will grow into these high prices and justify them later. It's really five stories on stacked on top of each other. Story one, earnings are exploding. According to FactSet data, the big companies in the S&P are expected to grow their profits about 22 and 1/2% compared to a year ago. That is the strongest jump since 2021. The bulls say the profits are about to catch up to the price. Story two, the AI spending isn't a bubble. It's a super cycle, a boom that lasts for years. Goldman Sachs was so convinced that it raised its target for the S&P all the way up to 8,000 by the end of 2026, expecting profits to climb another 24% next year with AI builders driving roughly half of that growth. Story number three, the rebound itself proves that there's more to come. A strategist by the name of Ryan Detrick pointed out that when the market has a rough quarter and then bounces back with a big double-digit gain the very next quarter like it did, the quarter after that has been positive 16 out of 17 times since 1950. So, the bounce itself is being used as proof that the party can keep on going. Story number four, the big banks are still on board. Morgan Stanley also sees the S&P reaching 8,000 by the end of this year and even higher by the middle of 2027 pointing to AI, strong earnings, and investors' healthy appetite for risk. We also heard about giant of Goldman Sachs already, but the giant institutions are not running for the exits. They're raising their targets. Story number five, this isn't just about software dreams anymore. It's about physical stuff. JPMorgan says the real opportunity has moved from apps to the actual machinery of AI, the chips, the data centers, the power, the security, the supply chain. Stack all five together. Booming earnings, real AI spending, powerful balance, big banks now doing along, and the whole thing broadening out. And honestly, it sounds all right. It sounds smart. It sounds like a genuine new era. And guys, this goes beyond analyst targets. When you listen to the smartest bulls out there, you hear a few more arguments for why this run keeps going. Let me read you three of them word for word. Reason number one, and this is a quote, "This technology is changing everything. It's creating a massive productivity boom across the whole economy. The market might pause here and there, but the companies leading this transformation should keep right on winning." Number two, again a quote, "You simply can't judge these companies with the old price-to-earnings ratios anymore. The old rules don't apply. The market is badly underestimating how enormous this shift really is and how much these winners will dominate for years to come." Reason number three, "Yes, some of these might pull back. Yes, a few names have run too far, too fast, but this is just a healthy breather inside a much bigger long-term bull market. The demand is real, the shortage is real, and this is not a normal cycle anymore." Now, these three arguments sound completely reasonable, right? They sound like something an analyst may have said on TV this morning. They sound like 2026. Guys, here's the thing I need to tell you. Not one of those was originally written this year. Every single one of them came from late 1999 and the year 2000, right before the dot-com crash wiped out trillions of dollars. That third one, about the shortage and not a normal cycle anymore, that was people talking about chip shortages in May of 2000, after the crash had already begun. Change two words and it'd be Micron headline from this week. Sit with that for a second. The exact same words, the exact same confidence, the exact same variation of it's different this time. And it doesn't even stop at 2000. Go back to the 1960s and any company that ended in tronics shot up just for sounding futuristic. Go to the early '70s, it was the Nifty Fifty, 50 wonderful companies that people swore you could buy at any price cuz they were just that good right before they got cut in half. The technology was usually real, the excitement was real, but the weird words people used at the top, they never, ever change. So, why am I showing you all of this? Am I trying to trick you? Not at all. I'm not trying to scare you. I'm not trying to tell you AI is fake or that a crash is coming next Tuesday or it already happened. It might not. I'm showing you this because of one simple truth about markets. The news follows the stock price, it does not lead it. When prices soar, the headlines glow and every argument sounds like pure genius. When prices fall, those very same people suddenly sound terrified. Guys, the story on AI, the story on chips is going to change when stock prices fall. I see it all the time. Look at companies like Microsoft and Adobe. If you go on Twitter right now, you will literally see people saying is Microsoft dead because the stock price is down. Is Adobe dead because the stock price is down? Even though every quarter they're reporting better revenue and better profit. So, if the story only became obvious to everyone after the stock had already gone up 10 times, be very, very careful. Here's the uncomfortable truth and I really want you to hear this. The bull case can be completely right and the stock can still be a terrible investment if you pay too much. Now guys, I want to have a quick reminder. Don't take our title and thumbnail literally. We're never here to give you a stock tip, we're here to play the YouTube game. Get you interested in a topic and then we teach you the process so that one day you can sleep better at night because you know how to value a stock, you know how to make good assumptions about its future, and you understand the price you're paying. So, back to the analyst market predictions for 2026. Let's try to remove as much emotion out of it and look at what the actual price tag is because this is where it gets serious. There are two measuring sticks that I want to show you. The first one is Warren Buffett's favorite. It has actually been called the Buffett indicator. You take the value of the entire stock market and compare it to the GDP of the US economy, all the goods and services that the country produces in a year. When stocks are worth a lot more than the whole economy, that's a warning sign. Right now, that measure is sitting at the highest level basically in history, higher than before 2008, higher than before the dot-com crash, and it's up there with the 1928 Great Depression where stocks fell 86%. The second metric is called the 10-year cyclically adjusted P/E ratio, also known as the Shiller P/E. Don't let the name scare you. It just smooths out the company profits over a 10-year period, so one weird up or down year in profit doesn't fool you, and then asks, "How much are people paying for each dollar of those profits when you take them all and bring them into today?" And again, that number is the psych- second highest in history, second only to the dot-com bubble. Guys, every time the number is above 26 to 30, it has usually led to a really, really bad 10 or 12 years. Guess what? It's over 40 again. In 2000 when it hit 44, the S&P didn't hit the 2000 level again until 2012, when it was permanently above that. Now, here's that what that matters for your actual money. History is remarkably clear on this. When you start investing from valuation levels this high, your returns over the next 10 years have almost always landed in a narrow, disappointing band, somewhere between about plus 2% and minus 2% per year. Let that sink in. Starting from prices like today, the following decade has historically given you close to nothing or even a small loss before you even adjust for inflation. To make that real, imagine you put $10,000 in today. In a normal decade, you might reasonably hope to double it, often times even a bit more than that. But starting from valuations this stretched, history says you could look up in 10 years and have barely more than you started with or even a little less. The money isn't gone, but an entire decade of growth could be. That's the real price of overpaying. It's usually not a dramatic movie-style crash. It's a long, quiet decade of going nowhere while you wait for the price to make sense again. And this is exactly what Howard Marks, another brilliant investor, talks about. He's a legendary investor who runs Oaktree Capital, and he wrote the book Mastering the Market Cycle. And in his famous memos and interviews, he hammers this point again and again. You cannot control what happens, but the price you pay absolutely controls your future return. What a great quote. Buy when things are cheap and hated and the odds are suddenly in your favor. Now, it doesn't mean buy anything that's cheap. Buy the things that have been beaten down where the fundamentals are still good. If you do that, the odds are heavily in your favor to make a lot of money. But when things are expensive and everyone's euphoric and you're fighting an uphill battle for the next decade, that's going to be a problem. He's not predicting a crash tomorrow. He's saying the setup, the starting point, matters enormously. And right now, the starting point is very, very expensive. He likes to put it this way. You can never know exactly what tomorrow brings, but you can absolutely know when you're dressed for the wrong season. So, here's the balanced truth, and this is the whole point of the video. Our job is not to deny innovation. AI is real. I love it. It's absolutely incredible. Denying it would just be as foolish as blindly chasing it. And our job is also not to run and hide in cash because timing the market is a loser's game, and an expensive market can keep climbing for years and years to come. So, what do we do? Caught between an amazing story and a scary price tag. What we do what we always do here at Everything Money. We stay invested. We get selective, very selective. We're not throwing money at whatever is hottest just because it's going up. For our broad index money, we keep buying steadily, month after month, no matter what the headlines say. I do that and I recommend everybody do that for their long-term retirement. But for individual stocks, we demand value. We figure out what a business is actually worth, and we refuse to overpay. No matter how exciting the story sounds, no matter how exciting that stock going up and up and up looks. This is about sticking to our principles when it's hardest to do so. When the president is ringing the bell, launching those new Trump accounts to get every kid in America invested in the market, when the price targets keep going up, when your neighbor is bragging about a cheap stock that tripled, or his pimply little kid bought Bitcoin, that's exactly when you need a strong process to keep you from getting sucked into the hype. And don't get me wrong, guys. Getting families invested for the long run is a genuinely wonderful thing, and one of the reasons why we started this channel. But just notice the timing. Everyone falls in love with the stock market after the hype is already started. Almost never when they're cheap and hated. Because at the end of the day, a great company and a great investment are not the same thing. The price you paid determines your return. That is true in a panic, and it's just as true now when everyone is euphoric. So, what does selective actually look like in real life? Well, it's actually simpler than you think. Before you buy anything, you figure out what it's roughly worth, and you compare that to what it costs. If a wonderful business is trading at a ridiculous price, you wait. And when a good business gets thrown out with the bathwater, like those hated value names Burry's been buying, that's exactly when you lean into your research, lean into your community. You let the price come to you. You never chase it. Our edge is not predicting the next 6 months. Nobody can do that over a long period of time consistently. Our edge is discipline, owning great things at the right price, and most importantly, having the patience to wait it out. So, let me ask you something. Everything I just showed you, the expensive market, the crazy stories, the smart money quietly buying the hated names, what good is any of this if you don't have a way to actually use it? Cuz here's the truth. The people who make the real money in a market like this aren't the ones chasing the hottest stock in the long run. They're the ones who know what a business is actually worth and have the patience to wait for the price to come to them. That's the game. And that's exactly why we built the Everything Money community and our most popular tool, the stock analyzer tool. And guys, you're not doing it alone. Our community is full of people doing this every single day, sharing what they're finding, catching value the crowd is ignoring, and getting sharper together. That's where the real edge is. So, here's what I want you to do. I want you to think about that. What is that worth to you? The ability to be able to sleep well at night, pick stocks that you understand and know what they're worth, and have people to rely on. Is that worth a dollar per day to you? Of course it is. So, do yourself a favor. Join the community, access our tools at everythingmoney.com, run your favorite stocks through our stock analyzer tool, and see what they're really worth. Once you see what everyone else is missing, you're going to wish you joined sooner. So, click the link in the description below or our first pinned comment and see how much a dollar a day impacts your portfolio and your emotions during troubled times. Now, here's the good news I want to leave you with. Even if the next 10 years really are tougher for the big expensive index, that does not mean you're stuck earning nothing. It just means you have to be smarter about where you look. I made an entire video on exactly that, the smaller, cheaper, often forgotten corner of the market called the Russell 2000, and why even starting from a massively overpriced market like this one, it could be one of the smartest places to be for the decade ahead. It's the real solution to everything we just talked about. Click it on your screen right now and watch that video. Thank you for your time.