This is what the Warren Buffett indicator is saying about the economy

Is Wall Street flashing a warning sign from Warren Buffett's favorite gauge? It's the so-called Buffett indicator, which compares total stock market value to the size of the U.S. economy. Well, that just hit a record 232 percent. To give you some context here, anything near 100 is considered fair value. We're more than double that. Berkshire Hathaway has been sitting on a massive cash pile north of 370 billion dollars. Is this a message that the market is too expensive? This chart has been circulating Twitter and social media forever. The only person who's not talking about it is Warren Buffett because it's wrong. It's been around for he talked about it in 2001 when it was valid. Here's the problem. You have U.S. market capitalization. Here's the problem. Over the last 25 years, a lot more of the revenues of the S&P 500 are international. Over 40 percent for the hyperscalers. It's 50 to 60 percent. So if you want apples to apples with the numerator and the denominator, what you need to do is put S&P relative to global GDP or back out U.S. revenues and earnings from the numerator. So do U.S. market capitalization X international revenues and earnings. And that takes the ratio down to about 140, 1.4 versus 2.3 when you divide it. So 1.4 would still be high. Yes. But the composition of the S&P market capitalization, we've gone from capex heavy and industrial heavy to capex light. So on an adjusted basis, it's probably reasonable. I'm not saying the stock market's cheap. This is I think about it as not a stock market, as a market of stocks. There are buckets of the stock market that are exceptionally inexpensive right now. And there are buckets that are expensive. And right now in the indices, you're weighted more towards the expensive stocks. But this is my problem and why I typically lose when picking stocks or even looking at the market, Taylor. It's because sometimes indicators, math, whatever, momentum just drives a market. And if you sit out those periods of momentum driven rallies, you end up missing a lot. Like I used to be miss fundamentals. And if there was anything that was worrying me, I wouldn't buy stocks. And I've just watched them go up, up, up. And they're poised to go even higher. So how do I say this? You could say that maybe the market's overvalued if you're looking at the stock market as of yesterday. But I guess that I'm in that camp that continues to believe that AI is the fourth industrial revolution that has created a structural shift in this economy. So the economy is poised to grow faster and productivity gains are coming so that I can't analyze the stock market based on fundamentals of how I did it yesterday, because we didn't have the productivity and the AI yesterday. So I guess my instance is I look at this market based on all of the growth that I see in the future. And that's where it doesn't seem to be wildly overvalued to me, because I think that we do have high growth and we do have AI that has created a structural shift. So we might actually need new models to be looking at this if AI is structurally shifting the way that we view this economy. The only concern that I bring is this is a market of stocks. And I see hints of that bubblish behavior where we talk about Allbirds that goes from a shoe company and says, just kidding, we're going to build chips. And the stock goes up 700%. And to me, that's like, oh, that's like 1999, where you just added dot com to your name, or like dot Bitcoin to your name 10 years ago, and you took off. And to me, now there's always going to be one off examples like that. But that's where you start to get hints of like, oh, that's late cycle behavior when that stuff happens. And I don't want to be in this market when there starts to be a shoe company pivoting to an AI chip company overnight. Yeah, and Warren Buffett, you know, we're tearing him apart right now with respect to his gauge, but he has a lot more money than probably all of us at the table. And then some Dagan. So I mean, do you want me to respond to the Buffett thing or what Taylor said? I'm gonna hold the productivity because I just read a white paper, a brand new white paper about AI and productivity. And it's fascinating love. Because now I want to know. It's a deep don't don't get me start talking about mammals cause disease. So not the Buffett sign of trouble. Robert Bryce is a well known kind of blogger, but he focuses on the energy space. And as something that certainly feels like the dot com bubble that we lived and worked through the first go round, he noted that back in 2000, pets.com raised 82 and a half million dollars in its IPO. And then nine months later, it declared bankruptcy, and it became a symbol of the dot com bubble. And Robert Bryce wrote an entire blog post about Fermi, the company. Last Friday, that company announced that its co founder and CEO, it is a power for AI startup, had departed his role as the chief executive officer. Quote, this is Robert Bryce writing and a terse eight K found the company did not give any reasons for the CEO's departure. And it came one hundred and ninety eight days after Fermi went public on the Nasdaq and London Stock Exchange public at 21, currently trading at 587. By the way, he went goes into what's happening at that company. To your point in March of 2000, there was an article that said, has Warren Buffett lost his touch because all these people were buying tech stocks? They were getting wealthy. What was Warren Buffett doing? He was buying consumer staples because they were down. The current yields were high. Procter and Gamble, Coca-Cola, boring companies. Over the next three years, when the Nasdaq corrected 80 percent, OK, he had one of his best three years of performance. He was positive while everyone else was negative. There are similarities right now to that period. You can't give away a lot of consumer staples stocks and some of them are yielding seven percent. So Buffett historically would be a buyer of that, whether you take and I'm not endorsing any of these General Mills, Conagra, Hormel Foods, Hormel Foods we own, actually, but a whole basket of them yielding six, seven percent as that. And these stocks get beaten down when there is that euphoria. No one wants defensives. They want all birds turning into an A.I. company, which is a little scary. We are in a midterm election year. We should expect a little bit more volatility going into the election. But as it relates to A.I., we haven't even started to see the productivity gains that normal businesses are going to receive over the next few years. The 100 year old manufacturer whose margins are going to go up 20 percent. So I think we're midway through. The key is how do you play it? Do you play the A.I. cost centers like the hyperscalers that everyone's crowded into at high valuations? Or do you play the A.I. beneficiaries like we're doing at Great Hill Capital? Boring businesses that can have margin expansion. Very Buffett. A hundred percent Buffett. He's my mentor. I've read every single word Warren Buffett has written, and I think he's changed more than my life. I think he's changed millions of people's lives by giving common sense advice and leading by example. I just think it's funny that literally no one believes this Buffett rule. Nobody trades on it. Right. Does anybody trade on this? Does anybody believe it? Does anybody say this is my operating principle? And yet the financial press has got to trot it out periodically to tell everybody we've got problems. Do we? Nobody believes this stuff. It looks more like a rhetorical weapon than it does a decision making criteria. It was correct when Warren Buffett was talking about it, but you haven't heard it 25 years ago. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, financial press. Twenty five year old advice. We didn't know it was correct, though, when he was talking.