I came to Wall Street without a suit 22 years and 20 days ago. I had never owned a formal suit until I got to NYC when I bought a 60%-off Hugo Boss suit from the sale rack at Bloomingdales. I was a stockbroker’s assistant when Greenspan (whom I thought at time, incorrectly, was an actual Ayn Rand anti-central-control advocate) infamously made his “irrational exuberance” comments.

I was working at a telecom/dot-com incubator when the markets went into a telecom and dot-com bubble and then when it crashed and took hundreds of public companies to bankruptcy. I launched my tech hedge fund exactly two weeks before the Nasdaq bottomed in October 2002. I rode the Steady Betty Market into its top in 2007, when I closed my hedge fund and became a Fox Business TV anchor full-time. And there, I continued to predict and lived through the 2008 Financial Crisis and the Bailouts. In late 2010, I quit TV and went back to investing/trading my own money, launching TradingWithCody.com in early 2011 so I could write about what I was doing. And we’ve ridden this Bubble-Blowing Bull Market for the last seven or eight years now.

So I’ve seen ups and downs, bubbles and crashes, panics and euphoria, horrible predictions from permabears and horrible predictions from permabulls and I’ve seen thousands of wannabe traders (day traders, swing traders, cryptocurrency traders and so on) fail miserably and maybe a handful of people squeeze an often-very-hard living out of trading. I’ve seen thousands of people make millions of dollars by buying and holding stocks. I’ve seen very few money managers (his name is Warren Buffett) outperform the markets over the 2.2 decades I’ve been on Wall Street.

I know that 80% of Wall Street is marketing/selling/churning money out of the world’s pockets, 5-10% of Wall Street products are fraudulent and 10-15% is actually trying to deliver value for their customers. I remember in 2007 when I got set up on a soft blind date with a woman who was a derivatives trader at Goldman, Ivy League educated who told me when I asked her if she knew she the real estate crap she’d been peddling was garbage answered, “Yes, of course. But everybody was doing it and we made so much money. I pretty much had no choice.”

I’ve seen Republicans and Democrats in control of either or both chambers at the same time, come and go in the Presidential Office and I’ve read tens of thousands of pages of hundreds of actual laws/bills that they’ve passed in the last twenty years. (Every single law they’ve ever proposed on a Federal level was done at the behest of a giant corporation/industry that donated many millions to make that happen.) I’ve interviewed and hung out dozens of Senators and Congressmen and Governors and billionaires. I’m buddies with the likes of Anthony Scaramucci (former communications director for Trump), Chrystia Freeland (the Foreign Minister for Canada) who is at this moment trying to cut a deal with the Head of White House Economic Advisors, Larry Kudlow.

I’ve been around the block and I’ve seen the sausage being made by powerful people at every level all over this country. And I do my best to use all these experiences and connections in my Trading With Cody economic and market analysis. I’m not going to pretend that these same experiences and connections color my political viewpoints and why I’m so cynical about how I know the Republican Democrat Regime is never on the common man’s (or my own) side.

So thinking back over all my Wall Street/TV career, I’m trying to see if there’s anything I’m missing in my analysis right now.

Let’s review the set-up.

Near-term (say, over the next 3-6 months), the market set-up is all about headlines from The Great Trade War of the 21 Century and the wild swings/pain being caused in the currency markets and in many developing economies. We’re another six weeks out from the next earnings season, which will likely be another very strong one for most public companies, but which most analysts have long expected. And near-term, I’m bearish, as I think the sentiment is way too euphoric and greedy and bullish right now. So I’m expecting maybe a 5-7% pullback in September.

Mid-term (say, over the next year or so), corporate earnings are likely to continue to grow strongly as corporations legally avoid paying almost all taxes and continue to receive trillions in direct subsidies and trillions in indirect corporate welfare. But, there’s certainly a risk that all The Great Trade War of the 21 Century is already causing the unintended consequence that the US, China and every other nation’s global corporations are making adjustments to their supply chains and future plans. And we’re talking about trillions of dollars of economic activity in these supply chains and future plans which will have other unintended consequences. So maybe that’s where the biggest threat to the longer-term lies too.

Longer-term (say, over the next 3-5 years), the broader economy will likely see some significant disruptions to the status quo as those aforementioned unintended consequences ripple through the global system. Will they be positive for corporate earnings and/or the US worker? I think there’s a lot of risk that they won’t be. I am certainly comfortable predicting that any future laws passed by the Republican Democrat Regime on a Federal level will be done at the behest of a giant corporation/industry that donated many millions to make that happen so there will certainly be more firepower thrown at corporate earnings from a policy standpoint in future years. Then again, as we saw in 2001 and in 2008 when the markets crashed and the economy went recessionary, the Republican Democrat Regime policies continue to point towards more bubbles and crashes. So are we in a bubble and about to crash?

Want to know something funny? I just recalled writing that same question back several years ago. Here it is, from May 2011:

Shut up and buy the tech bubble – The Cody Word – MarketWatch – May 29, 2011

Bold mine from 2018 real-time here. Let’s repeat that last phrase: “Especially if it can turn into an outright bubble, as it overshoots to the topside in coming quarters and years.”

Now let’s look at these stocks’ moves since 2011 to see if they look like they might have “overshot to the upside” in the last couple years as I’d predicted they might:

There is now indeed here in 2018 a lot of straight up moves in the those stocks I was writing about in 2011 as potentially one day becoming Bubble Stocks.

Now one more thing I want to note about where we are in the cycle.  Here’s a comment from the Trading With Cody Chat Room this morning:

“No offense to your guest Celente but he has been saying same stuff for 10 years. Listening to people like him is why I bought gold in 2008 instead of AMZN or AAPL. I think ultimately he is right but his timing has been awful. Question is, when house of cards comes crumbling down, how bad does it get? 1920s bad? When will our debt finally matter? 30 trillion? 50, 100?”

And here’s a screenshot of a bear-killing market chart that is making the rounds this week:

You certainly don’t get commentary and grave dancers on the permabears like this when the markets are at a bottom.

Now none of this analysis necessarily means that the Bubble-Blowing Bull Market is over right now. But what I also know is that we’re closer to the top than the bottom here. Long-time subscribers know that I pride myself on catching the broader economy and stock market turns before they happen. And I do think the risks to this Bubble-Blowing Bull Market are rising just as stocks are indeed going parabolic as I’d predicted they would seven years ago.

We don’t want to just sell everything or go short or freak ourselves out of our long-term holdings that have done so well for us over the years. And I know that new subscribers want some new Revolutionary ideas that could go up 500-1000%. But I also know that it’s getting harder to expect huge upside in the average and not-so average stock as prices, valuations, the economy cycle and the market cycle are all extended.

So be careful out there. But don’t freak out. I’m always working on new ideas, looking for amazing opportunities and I do think we’ll have some more huge homeruns over the next five years no matter what the broader market does.

And if you don’t own any of my Revolution Investing long-term Trading With Cody hard core stocks at all, I’d suggest starting slowly and buying maybe a 1/10th or 1/5th as much as you want to own in the highest rated names from the most recent Latest Positions. But I’d give yourself room to buy another tranche in a month or two and then nibble a little more in six months and/or three years and/or as the markets give us opportunities to do so with better risk/reward scenarios.