This Week's Focus
Nary a Bear Has Stirred
Steve pulled an old article this week. The headline read "Wall Street's Outlook for 2000," published by CBS MarketWatch on December 31, 1999. The opening line: "It's not easy to find a good debate brewing among market strategists on where stocks are headed next year. It's tough to find the pessimists: nary a bear has stirred on Wall Street this season."
That was the consensus six weeks before the dot-com bubble peaked. Twelve weeks before the S&P 500 began a decline that would erase nearly half its value over two and a half years. The CAPE ratio at the time of that article was 44.2. Today, it sits at 42.7. The mood among market strategists for 2026 looks remarkably similar.
This week's edition draws the parallel directly. We look at Australia's Q1 GDP, which just printed 0.3% (the softest quarter since 2024 and held up only by data centres), the property market starting to show real cracks with days-on-market climbing across every major Australian city, the Bernard Baruch warning every investor should have on their wall, and the ramping environmental concerns now appearing in the rare earths buildout. The signal Steve sees through all of it is …
… that we are seeing the same complacency at the same valuation. Steve has spent this week working through the full Westpac Q1 GDP partial breakdown, the data centres distortion (5.7% qtr business investment ex-data centres tells a very different story), the property days-on-market table by city, and the CAPE update with full context against the 1999 peak …
Plus the environmental backlash now hitting the rare earths buildout in South America, the Westpac downside scenario showing a possible Q2 contraction (the first since the GFC ex-COVID), and the framework Steve is using to position client portfolios for the regime shift …
And of course the monthly members coaching call coming up shortly with Steve, Tom and Jacob …
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