What Matters About Market History, and the Worldwide Bull Market

What we can learn from market history and the world-wide bull market.

“That a more on this Saturday personal finance edition of "Molly Full Money."”

[MUSIC] I'm Robert Brookamp, but this week I speak with Ryan Dietrich, the chief market strategist at Carson Group, and a consistent source of data about the market's past, and what it could say about the future.

The first, some news from this week, according to Count Thomas of Top Down Charts, 80% of the

70 companies he tracks have stock markets that are up at least 20% off their 52 week lows. He writes that this indicator has rarely been above 50% over the past couple of decades, and asserts like this is usually a good sign. Previous spikes have happened in 2003, 2009, and 2020, which were all good times to be an investor. Many more locally, a recent graphic from Bloomberg illustrates that the year-to-date rally in

U.S. stocks is the broadest ever, as there's a record number of individual stocks in the S&P 500 that are outperforming the index. That said, not every stock is doing well, including some of the biggest tech-oriented

“names, which has resulted in lower valuations for those stocks.”

In fact, according to Matt Seminarle of "RitHealth Management," the forward PE of the Mag7 minus Tesla is now below the forward PE of the Consumer Staples sector, which has returned almost 15% so far this year. Next up, mortgage rates are dropping. The current 30-year fixed rate is 6% down around 80 basis points from a year ago, and the

lowest level since 2022. Lower rates might make home ownership more affordable for some buyers, especially as price growth has slowing. This past week's standard pours announced that the case-shiller National Home Price Index rose an annualized 1.3% in December, down from 1.4% in November.

Another home loan news report from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York published on Tuesday says that the total amount in home equity lines of credit, otherwise known as Helox, rose in the fourth quarter of 2025, which was the 15th consecutive quarterly increase.

The total amount in Helox is now $434 billion, up 36% over the past four years.

According to Bankrate, the current average interest rate on a Helox is 7.3%. Now the number of the week, which is 12, that is the number of calendar years that the S&B 500 has lost more than 10% since 1928, according to a report from Barry Gilbert of Carson Group. In other words, the market has been profitable or lost less than 10% and almost 88% of calendar

years. Four decades that didn't see any years of 10% plus declines, those being the 1960s, 1980s, 1990s and the 2010s. How much does that history matter? Well, that's the topic of my next conversation when Marley Full Money continues.

So how much does history matter in our ever-changing world and what past trends are likely to persist? Here to talk about that, and much more is Ryan Dietrich, the chief market strategist at Carson Group, the co-host of the facts versus feelings podcast, and one of my favorite sources of insightful or just fun stats about the market.

Ryan, welcome to Motley Full Money. Robert, thank you so much for having me. Obviously, a big fan of you and then the Motley Full of MSG, like a lot of people. I started reading Motley Full a long time ago when I got into this industry, so it's a real honor.

You quote me all the time. So thank you for that. It's an honor to get to talk to each other about how we see the world, so thank you again for having me. Thank you for those kind of words.

It is great to have you here. In your podcasts, your articles, your social media posts, you provide just a regular stream of facts about historical trends. Much of that data going back to 1950s, sometimes, as far back as the 1920s.

“What do you say to someone who says you do things that are different today?”

Way back then, they didn't have the internet, they didn't have low cost index funds, commission free trading apps in our pockets, we've transitioned from an industrial to a surface economy. How much does history matter? That's a good one there. I love the quote by Mark Twain, history doesn't repeat itself, but it often rhymes.

You look at history. Yes, there was no internet, 50 years ago.

Now, of course, we have AI and there's always something out there.

I think what's always true, though, is fear and greed, right?

fear out there. In the late 90s, there was a lot of greed out there.

Those are things that are never going to go away.

Maybe some of the people at the table, so to speak, whether it be computers, algorithms, or hedge funds, or high frequency trading, all that stuff, it is different than the past. But what gets us places, we're going to get into some more of this as earnings and profit margins. And the Fed, all that stuff, that hasn't really changed my opinion.

So we love using history. I think what I like about using history is it does show a guide, right? It's not gospel. I mean, it's a midtermier. History of the midtermier doesn't do that well.

Well, it's a worse, still pretty optimistic and we get into that stuff. But it shows a guide. We've been through a lot of bad stuff before. We've had a lot of good stuff before. That's why I think it helps your average investor, I work with advisors, a car's group

with financial advisors every single day in their clients.

“And I think that's why it's so important to kind of show, we've been through this before.”

Yeah, it's different. But at the same time, is it really that different? Fear and greed is still what drives markets. Love what you do in your writing is to say, okay, this is a current set of circumstances. And based on history, this is the likelihood that the market will go up.

Here's the median and average return. How do you distinguish between trends that are valid versus a spurious correlation, which is borrowing from the title of one of your recent articles? Well, so you're saying the fact that an NFC team just won the Super Bowl by more than 10 points. The S&P 500 is higher 19 at a 21 years.

And that's not a reason to be bullish, I know, playful, playful. I get it. By the way, the median return almost 15% very good news. Yeah, very good news there. Or this is the year of the horse.

And when animals walk on four legs, the market does a lot better than the times animals either used to or like a snake crawl. But nonetheless, nonetheless, or slither, I guess a snake slither, so we call it, it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. Yeah, that's the fun stuff.

But at the end of the day, we look at a lot of data. I work with the guy named Sonu Vargui, so chief macro strategist, and he's my co-host. And in fact, Cersei's feelings, we look at the macro backdrop, and we look at all these different factors. And it's not like one thing matters, right?

I mean, we took a big top down approach and focus on all this different stuff.

“And to us, you know, again, it's like what drives long-term stock games?”

Well, I think it's earnings. I think it's earnings, right? And then we have seen record earnings. We have seen record profit margins. We continue to see positive things.

I get it. I know a lot of listeners probably feel this way because consumer confidence is very, very low. And we just got some data, and it's still very low. In some cases, consumer confidence is lower than it was during 100-year pandemic. Yet retail sales are still strong.

You know, auto sales are still strong. So it's this interesting dichotomy. People feel one way and do another and put a bow on this. We think following the hard data, three years ago, Carson Group was pretty optimistic. Not many people wore it.

We were laughed at. We were mocked for that optimistic view. We said follow the hard data, the hard data continues, at our opinion, to suggest things are strong. And again, that is what the Fed is up to.

That is what fiscal policies up to. That is earnings. All these different things we pay attention to, and it's fun to talk about animals on four legs. I get it.

But no. We don't invest in that. We focus on the fundamentals. As you just hinted out there, you cover a lot of ground in your articles, podcasts, social media, macro, some fundamental, even some technical analysis.

You mentioned earnings.

But if you had to narrow it down to maybe three or five things that are most important to

pay attention to, what would they be? One of them I already talked about. We'll get that out of the way right now earnings. I mean, earnings are hitting record highs. Profit margins are hitting record highs.

We're looking at some of the best revenue this fourth quarter that's wrapping up since we've seen in like four years. So that's an important one. That's number one. I'll try to do three.

So that's number one. Now I do have a, we'll be called a CMT. I'm not a country music person. That's not what that means. I'm a chartered and market technician.

So I do like to look at technicals, relative strength, the seasonality stuff. I'm kind of known for market sentiment, all this different things. And when you do that, there's something called an advanced decline line Robert. It's a cumulative basis.

“How many stocks growing up versus down every single day?”

I keep this real simple. That's market breath. Market breath leads price. Now in the late 90s, market breath peaked and started to roll over. That was a warning that something was wrong under the service.

It's literally only thing going up was tech stocks, right? In 2016, 2007, financial started to go down. A lot of other groups started going down. And there were warnings when market breath was weak. Where are we right now?

Literally we could go. The S&P 500's advanced decline, I hit a new all time high. The newer stock exchange of advanced decline, I didn't know all time high. Mid caps all time high, small caps, 52 week high. What am I getting at?

This is still a healthy, strong bull market being led by a lot of stuff. I get it. Technology is lag. We understand that. But the life-blood of bull market's rotation.

We are seeing that. So earning strong. That's good. That's a decline line, market breath still solid, that's good.

The third one that I would say is very important.

We follow every day are the credit markets, right? If the credit markets see a monster under the bed, there'd be more stress in things like high yield spreads, triple B spreads going to keep this high level and fairly simple.

I mean, in 2023, the regional bank crisis, high yield spreads really didn't move that much. It was saying, you know, it's not a scary to tell a new on TV, 2024 when we had the in-carried trade-on-line, and I know maybe some people, I remember this, trust me. For a few days in August of '24, it was a pretty scary period. Japan was crashing, gold-barkest crashing.

The credit markets weren't worried.

Even during the crash we had around liberation day, the bottom line credits spreads hung

in there. The credit markets weren't worried. So right now, worry credits spreads are just fine. I know the AI stuff and the worries about software, yes, maybe some credits spreads on some of the more specific technology companies have blown out a little bit.

Overall, the credit markets are functioning just fine. Credit to me are the smartest people in the room. So credit strong, bread to strong, earnings are strong. Those are three things that we've seen for three years now. And knock on wood, they're going to continue to be strong.

“That's why we remain overweight equities and optimistic in 2026.”

So you're optimistic about the market. You're also optimistic about the economy. You don't see a recession on the horizon. You just highlighted many reasons for the optimism. Any of the in-else people should be looking at or that you're factoring into the fact

that you think the economy's probably going to be okay. Yeah, you know, we talked a lot about the US, obviously, because we're US-centric. But the round the globe, I think it's really important to point this out. I mean, most investors know this. You've rest of the globe's done really well, relative to the US over the past year or so.

But on an economic front, we've seen a lot of growth coming from emerging markets, coming from the Delta or National around the globe. I mean, we are seeing that. So it's really a kind of global story in terms of economic growth and stock market returns. And I think that's a real positive thing.

You know, things that we like to look at business investment. I mean, business investment is strong. AI investment. I mean, I know a lot of people talk about this. AI capex spending continues to be strong, showing virtually no slowdown.

Consumption is still solid. You look at all these things together. Yeah, housings take it away from GDP six out of seven quarters. Okay. We get it.

That's a week part out there.

But the reality is we're about 37, 38 trillion dollar economy.

There are some cracks out there. Sure.

“But overall, I think our economy is still really on firm footing and the great part about it.”

The rest of the globe is really on firm footing also. Let's comment here. Look at copper called Dr. Copper. My copper is flirting with all time highs. People are gobbling up copper.

It's hard to be bearish. The overall kind of global economy of copper was weak. You could be bearish as weak. It's not. And that's an important thing from our point of view as well.

So overalls a nice global, bull market and economy out there. One thing related to the economy that of course is of concern or that people pay attention to both economically and politically is inflation. Not a little bit about why you think inflation will likely stay closer to 3% than the Fed's target of 2%.

Well, yes, we can get out some rabbit holes with this one if you want. The Fed's target's 2%. I mean, the Fed itself has said, you know, that's wink, wink, nudge, nudge. It's probably not around 2%. We've been saying for a while that we think we're going to be in a 3% inflation world

versus 2% inflation world. I'm going to be very clear here. The inflation world is sore to 6% the next six months. Yes, this would upset the apple car. This would mean the market's probably in trouble if we're going to fire interest rates,

not as many Fed cuts. That wouldn't be a bullish scenario. But you look at history going back like 150 years, inflation's averaged about 3.5%. All right. So we're right.

Core PCE, the Fed's favorite measure inflation came in last Friday, right about 3% year of year. We all think it's a bad thing. I mean, we've been flirted with 3% for a while now and last I checked the economy's doing pretty good to stock market's hanging in it.

And the reality is look around, but some of the previous answer.

A lot of the prices, as everybody knows on this show, how our commodity prices do it. Yeah, they're higher. So that is kind of upward pressure on inflation. But the other part of this, something called shelter shelter is about 42% of core

DCE. It's fairly simple. That is deflationary in a way. I mean, we are seeing housing prices, rent prices, rent prices have been negative of your rear from Zillow and apartment lists for like a couple of years down.

The government's data is delayed, keep it easy here. We think the shelter is going to kind of put a lid on inflation. So we're going to have inflation right around 3% or so. That's okay. We've been seeing it.

That's where we are. But again, we manage billions of dollars on the Carson team last comment here. And for years, we've been positioning for a world of a little bit more inflation, a little bit more being around 3% than 2% maybe a little bit less bonds, a little bit more stocks. We do have some gold.

We have some energy futures. I say if you drop it, hit your foot and hurts, you buy one a little bit more on that you're portfolio than you did say 10, 15 years ago. And that's what we position.

“And working really well, honestly, we think it will continue with a little bit higher inflation”

world around 3%. You mentioned to sell off in some stocks, some tech related, it's off our stocks and in your podcast, you were might have folks that a year ago, we were all talking about deep seek. And what happened then and that ended up being a pretty good buying opportunity.

Is that generally what you think right now when you see some of these names going down 10, 15, 20%? Yeah, it is. Yes, I want facts versus feeling. So when I talked about that recently, just a year ago right now, we're all worried

about deep seek. And the worry was, there's this cheap Chinese chatbot that's going to come in and mess everything up and people aren't going to be investing in AI anymore, going to be investing

That literally were the headlines a year ago. And that was almost laughable. And if we see all the AI spending that we're still seeing.

“Now where we are now, we think it's somewhat similar, right?”

We are throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

Yes, there are companies, there are industries that are in trouble because of the revolutionary

changes we're seeing with AI. But when it comes specifically to software, we're here some really solid companies, some really solid modes of just still making a lot of money that have really pulled back. I mean, people say all the time, well, the market's expensive. I mean, parts of the market are, but why does that look software is a cheap, what's

it's been relative to the SB500 since 2013. All right. So that's it. Now, they listen. I've tried to catch a fall in night before, you know, on a rubber, maybe you have

it's not very smart because sometimes you cut yourself and it looks cool when you do it. But I mean, I think it makes sense for someone who has been waiting for parts of the market that are going to be cheaper. Software is really cheap. If you have some technology, what we did in the money, we were going to result a little

bit of broad-based technology ETFs and bought a little bit of software because we did that's going to come back in six to nine months, we're going to look back and see, once again, our opinion, the large cap tech wasn't dead. The Mac 7 wasn't dead. Yes, this was volatile.

Yes, this was unfortunate for a lot of investors. It got over the top in large cap tech in Mac 7 to start this year. But that's why we stayed diversified.

“That's what we don't always chase a shiny object if it's the best group for three years”

in a row like Mac 7 was it probably won't be the best group again last common. And on this time magazine, head that cover AI architects with a person of the year, all the big leaders in AI, what I saw that cover as like, you know, that's a pretty high bar.

I mean, AI is incredible.

The technology we have is amazing. But that's a really, really high bar and sure enough, you know, Mac 7's lagged a little bit. I don't think it's abnormal. But I do think there's some great opportunities for investors here to step up with

the so-called saying stock markets, only place things go on sale. Everyone runs out of the store screaming, I'm seeing a lot of screaming running out of the store. I think savvy investors might use this opportunity and you look back and you're going to thank yourself down the road.

Final question here. You know, we're at long-term investors here at the multifold, we've reached by and hold a lot of what you write about is short-term-ish and nature. You talk about the seasonal stuff. You recently pointed out that we're in what you call the banana peel part of February.

So it's all very interesting. But to what degree should long-term investors factor those types of things into their investing strategies? Well, I'd say very little, that's a great question because, you know, where we put it is this?

For long-term investors, that's awesome. The best investors I've ever met are the long-term investors that put money in their 401k, they put money in investing every two weeks, every month, and they look up in a couple of decades and made a lot of money. But it's not that easy.

I mean, when you have a bear market like we did last April, even if you're a long-term investor, it's uncomfortable.

“It's so important to know that volatility is the toll we pay to invest.”

It's something we say a lot in the car's and team.

The reality is on average, you see a 10% correction once a year.

You see a bear market about every three, three and a half years. You see a five percent mild pullback four times a year and a three percent or seven times a year. A bunch of numbers, I get it. Just know that it will be scary, it will be uncomfortable, but long-term investing

is one of the best ways to create wealth, one of the best ways to beat inflation. And a lot of times when it's scary is when you want to really kind of step up or at least what's the old saying, eyes and how our plans are useless, planning is everything. The coming of the year expecting a 15% peak to trough correction at some point because, by the way, that's the average peak to trough correction is a 1980.

That's normal. When it happens, don't panic. When it happens, don't make a rash decision that you're not going to be still comfortable when you see your 401(k)s down, all bunch, I get it. Everybody felt that way back in April.

But the people that didn't panic didn't sell, maybe it uses opportunity for those long-term gains when you buy something that cheap, that's the way to invest. All right, and this has been an enlightening conversation, as expected. Thanks so much for joining us. I appreciate a Robert.

Thank you. Thanks all listeners out there. I can't wait to come back. Thank you. Does that get?

Save. Vizou Stoia. Hoytidangetsuruk. Yes, cause no doubt for being. It's time to get it done, and I mean, really good stuff done.

Just as we did this past week at the Motley Fool, because last week was our 16th Annual Financial Health Week, during which we encouraged employees to use company time to tackle personal finance tasks. During the week, we hold classes taught by both internal and external experts. We offer a checklist of money related to two items, and we offer rewards to fools

who complete at least seven of those tasks. And those classes and to do items covered just about everything, including budgeting, workplace benefits, investing, retirement, insurance, college planning, estate planning, and wealth defense. Now, you may not work at a company that has a financial wellness program like we have here

at the Motley Fool, but you can hold your own financial health week, or even just a day. When you clear your calendar, limit distractions and devote a few hours to those lingering,

An investment of time will pay off for years to come in the form of a bigger portfolio,

“a stronger safety net, better awareness of the current state of your finances, and what”

you can do today to get you closer to where you want to be.

To quote productivity guru James Clear, your net worth is a lagging measure of your financial

habits. And that, my friends, is the show.

“Thanks for listening, and thanks as always to part-shan in the Engineer for this episode.”

People on the program may have interest in the stocks they talk about, and the Motley Fool

may have formal recommendations for or against, so don't buy or sell stocks based solely on what you hear.

“All personal finance content follows Motley Fool editorial standards and is not approved”

by advertisers. Advertisements are sponsored content and provided for informational purposes only. To see our full advertising disclosure, please check out our show notes. I'm Robert Procamp. Fool on everybody.

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