Today&#x27;s Post - https://bahnsen.co/4fUPJml David Bahnsen hosts Friday’s Dividend Cafe from East Hampton on June 19, a Juneteenth market holiday, and discusses whether current conditions signal a “top” while rejecting short-term market timing. He notes elevated S&amp;P 500 multiples based on operating earnings and warns that today’s concern is more about market mood and complacency than valuations alone, citing Bill Ackman’s SpaceX-related quote as symptomatic of circular reasoning about value. Bahnsen argues the risk paradigm is shifting as companies move from low reinvestment and buybacks toward heavy capex, more borrowing, and potential equity issuance. He highlights NVIDIA and Broadcom stocks lagging despite strong revenue growth as possible signs of over-discounted narratives, and points to extreme SpaceX valuation as a sentiment indicator. He also describes a Fed leadership shift toward a more constrained approach that may tolerate froth coming out of risk assets, concluding investors should prioritize rational, defensible portfolios tied to operating performance and dividend growth. 00:00 Summer Intro and Holiday 00:57 Is This the Top 02:33 Valuations Aren&#x27;t the Trigger 04:45 The Market Vibe Problem 06:13 Ackman Quote Warning Sign 09:27 Risk Paradigm Shifts 11:59 NVIDIA and Broadcom Signals 14:32 SpaceX Valuation and Mood 16:19 Fed Regime Change 19:53 Do the Right Thing 22:19 Closing Thanks Links mentioned in this episode: DividendCafe.com TheBahnsenGroup.com

Is This the Dreaded Top

The Dividend Cafe

# Full Transcript

**Podcast:** The Dividend Cafe

## Participants

- **David Bahnsen** (The Bahnsen Group)

## Transcript

Welcome to The Dividend Cafe, weekly market commentary focused on dividends in your portfolio and dividends in your understanding of economic life. Hello and welcome to this Friday's Dividend Cafe. I am your host, David Bahnsen. I am coming to you from the beautiful village of East Hampton, New York, and I am excited for a summer.

Whenever you start to see me recording out here, I mean, summer is officially upon us. It will be a wonderful weekend and I want to wish you all a great weekend. Today, Friday, June 19th is not a market date. For at least the last couple of years, it has been a stock market holiday in conjunction with the federal holiday that is Juneteenth.

And so what I am really wanting to focus on here is the subject matter at hand, totally disconnected from any particular events. But I'm going to talk about a couple of things this week that were actually events of the week. Things with the Fed that took place, things ongoing, following up from stuff we talked about last week with the SpaceX IPO.

But I'm doing all of it as part of a broader conversation that I want to get into, asking the question, is this the dreaded top? Are we at that moment that many have feared for some time where a market frothiness takes us into a place that we don't want to go?

I'm hoping that many of you right now who are regular listeners to the Dividend Cafe are saying to yourself, we've been following David for some time. We already know that he is not prone to believing that one can make some sort of forecast about imminent market turn, an imminent market rally, these various predictions about short-term market phenomena.

Even in my belief about the relevance of valuations, I have never attached them to timing. I think as a matter of mathematics that it is true that one's long-term expected rate of return is connected to valuations at entry point.

But I do not believe that that question has anything to do with what I want to talk about today, which is allowing investors, the intellectual and, if you will, emotional honesty, to think about the environment in which we are in, if nothing else, at least at a high level.

I want to tell you why we are in, if nothing else, at a high level.

You're talking about $2.50. You're talking about two and a half times earnings. And again, it could be $23. It could be $22.1, depending on the exact numbers. There's moving targets here. Some have said, oh, well, I'm hearing $360 to $370 of earnings. And that's not operating earnings. They're doing a little bait and switch there because that is, it's totally GAAP compliant. But it is utilizing certain one-time, non-recurring events.

And in this particular case, it's just an anomaly that there's three companies that have moved the needle to the extent, what is the amount? $63 billion of gains in Q1 from various other income markups in privately ...

Is This the Dreaded Top

Transcript

Built for investment professionals

Every day you wait, your competitors are finding
edge in conversations you're not hearing.

Is This the Dreaded Top

Transcript

Built for investment professionals

Every day you wait, your competitors are findingedge in conversations you're not hearing.

Every day you wait, your competitors are finding
edge in conversations you're not hearing.