Consumer Credit Stress: What The Data Really Shows In today's Macroview, we examine the difference between headlines about consumer stress and what is actually happening to determine how close the economy is to breaking. lanceroberts.substack.com/p/…

9-25-26 From TINA To TIGA: 5% Treasuries Are Changing Asset Allocation w/ @michaellebowitz Investors are being forced to confront a reality they haven’t faced in years: there is finally a legitimate alternative to equities. For much of the post-2008 era, we lived in a TINA (There Is No Alternative) market. Rates were near zero, bonds offered little income, and if stocks could generate something close to an 8% long-term return, the choice seemed obvious. Now we’re moving toward TIGA — There Is a Good Alternative. With Treasuries yielding around 5%, investors can earn meaningful income from what is considered the market’s risk-free asset. Treasury prices can still fluctuate as rates change, but held to maturity, they repay their face value. That changes the equity risk/reward calculation. Stocks are near record highs after several strong years, valuations are elevated, and investors can potentially earn around 5% without extending all the way into 10- or 30-year Treasuries. Investors don’t need to abandon stocks for this to matter. A shift from an 80/20 stock-bond allocation to 70/30 may seem small, but across trillions of dollars, incremental rebalancing can create meaningful pressure on equities. If yields keep climbing, that incentive only increases. More importantly, higher rates may already be hurting the stock market — the S&P 500 is simply hiding it. Just look beneath the headline indexes. Equal-weight stocks are weaker. Small and mid-caps are weaker. The Dow has been weaker. Rate-sensitive sectors like utilities have been hit particularly hard. Meanwhile, mega-cap technology continues to hold up, allowing the capitalization-weighted S&P 500 and Nasdaq to look much healthier than the average stock. The extreme divergence between utilities and technology reinforces the message: higher rates are already creating significant stress beneath the surface. Small and mid-cap companies often feel tighter financial conditions first. Mega-cap technology, with stronger balance sheets and enormous cash flows, can remain insulated longer. But if Treasury yields stay elevated or continue rising, that pressure could eventually spread. That’s why watching only the S&P 500 can create a false sense of security. The headline index can remain near its highs while significant portions of the market are already buckling under higher rates. The question isn’t whether higher rates are affecting stocks. They already are. The question is how long mega-cap tech can keep hiding the damage. $TLT $BND $SPY $QQQ $RSP $IWM Please ❤️like, bookmark🔖, and 🔁share with fellow investors.

RT @LanceRoberts: 9-24-26 If Bonds Get Crushed, Stocks Will Get Crushed Even More w/ @michaellebowitz If you think bonds are about to get…

The AI buildout is on track to be the largest infrastructure buildout in US history. Each previous buildout was economically transformative and created massive wealth for smart investors who participated. There will obviously be winners and losers, but betting against AI entirely seems like a losing bet.

"Yields are spiking higher; everything is going to go to shit." Hold on there, Sparky. Yields have returned to the long-run historical average following a period of abnormally low yields induced by 15 years of ZIRP and QE.

Don't look now, but the ratio of momentum stocks to the broader market broke above its 100-day moving average yesterday.

In tracking our weekly updates to earnings estimates, they remain very optimistic, with no sign of softening, which continues to underpin equities for now.

This year, U.S. ISM PMIs have picked up sharply, finally catching the earlier surge in earnings-revisions momentum. The cyclical upturn is now underway as Capex spending feeds through to the rest of the economy. h/t @ISABELNET_SA

Daily Market Trading Update: September 25, 2026 lanceroberts.substack.com/p/…

No live show today as workers are tinkering in our suite. Catch all of our recent guest interviews on our YouTube channel, plus previous episodes of The Real Investment Show: piped.video/playlist?list=PL…

RT @LanceRoberts: 9-23-26 Money Is Moving Into Bonds — Earnings Are The Next Warning There’s growing evidence that a significant amount of…

9-24-26 If Bonds Get Crushed, Stocks Will Get Crushed Even More w/ @michaellebowitz If you think bonds are about to get crushed, understand what that would mean for everything else. If Treasury yields continue significantly higher, stocks are likely to feel even more pain because we’re a debt-driven economy. The cost of money matters enormously for future economic growth. A lot of companies borrowed aggressively in 2020–2021 when rates were incredibly low. Debt that was financed at 2%–3% is increasingly coming due, and companies may now have to refinance at 5%, 6% or 7%. What happens when interest expense suddenly doubles or triples? Companies have to find the money somewhere. That can mean layoffs, lower CapEx, reduced investment and cuts elsewhere in the business. Higher yields therefore don’t stay confined to the bond market—they gradually work their way through the real economy. And there’s a second problem: asset allocation. Imagine the 10-year Treasury yielding 8%. How much capital would move out of stocks when investors could earn something close to 8% in Treasuries without taking equity risk? That rotation is already happening to some degree. The higher yields go, the more attractive fixed income becomes relative to equities. But there’s an important paradox here: higher rates ultimately create the conditions for lower rates. If yields rise far enough, they destroy economic demand. Growth slows, companies cut spending, unemployment rises and inflationary pressure weakens. Eventually you get disinflation or potentially deflation. It’s similar to the old saying that the cure for high oil prices is high oil prices. Eventually high prices destroy demand. High rates can cure high rates for the same reason. That’s why simply extrapolating yields higher forever misses how dynamic markets and economies actually work. If yields became extreme and the economy entered a deep recession, you could initially see enormous pressure across virtually every asset class as investors scramble for liquidity. But eventually those high bond yields become incredibly attractive. If inflation starts falling toward 1%–2% while the economy is in recession, investors aren’t going to ignore Treasuries yielding 5%, 6% or potentially more. Money would pour into bonds, pushing yields lower and bond prices higher. So if bonds really do get crushed first, be careful what you wish for. Because the economic mechanism that crushes bonds could hit stocks even harder—and ultimately create the setup for bonds to become one of the most attractive trades on the other side. $TLT $BND $SPY $QQQ Please ❤️like, bookmark🔖, and 🔁share with fellow investors.

Are the headline indexes obscuring significant market weaknesses beneath the surface? Here's my latest Before the Bell Report:

9-24 26 Will the Next Trade Be Bonds? nitter.net/i/broadcasts/1yxBePQmb…

This is a great chart that shows the ABNORMALLY low rate environment created by Central Banks post the Financial Crisis. The "TINA" trade (There is no alternative but to buy equities) is now over as rates have normalized and provide a real alternative to equity risk.

AI infrastructure stocks are expected to drive roughly half of S&P 500 EPS growth in 2026, but their contribution is expected to fade in 2027 as Capex from hyperscalers begins to slow as buildout of datacenters begins to complete and depreciation starts to kick in. @thedailyshot

Despite concerns about corporate profits coming under pressure from higher rates and inflation, institutional investors' equity allocations remain near 25-year highs. @SoberLook

As interest rates have risen, the market has been primarily rangebound since April. That has allowed earnings to catch up, bringing down valuations.