For stocks, it's like the roaring 90s again, but stock trends don't go forever.

I'm David Brancaccio, looking at the last two years of stock prices because trees grow to the sky, because a trend never ends, because past performance is guarantee of future results.

Financial regulators listening, I'm being ironic, I guess 2025 will continue just fine.

Let's get a real take on this by turning to Larry Adam. He's chief investment officer at Raymond James.

The last two years have been phenomenal. I mean, we've been up over 25% for the last two years now.

Going in the next year, I do think we should have a dose of at least some caution

because historically when you do get to that third year of a bull market,

returns tend to get tamped down a bit, historically up just a few percentage points.

Turning to the bond market, I just had the misfortune of looking at where the 10-year

interest rate was going into this year. It was down below where we are now. We're at like

four and a half, and it was like 3.9 percent back then. But you've been doing some thinking

about how there's something that may help keep interest rates a little lower going into the new

year. It has to do with

Washington. As of tonight, the debt ceiling, which had been suspended, actually gets reinstated.

So the government will not be able to issue any new debt going forward. So we think currently

that interest rates are probably at the upper end of the range that

we've been in. And over the next couple of months, you could actually see them start to

retreat a bit as we go into 2025. Larry Adam is Chief Investment Officer at Raymond James,

which is a marketplace underwriter. Despite 1% drops for the major stock indexes over two

consecutive trading days, the S&P is still on track for about a 23% gain for the year. I don't know if it's carousing, starting early, or just financial players fleeing New York City before the New Year's crush, but the bond market closes early today, 2 o'clock Eastern, the stock market keeps to the regular schedule.

Employers have been collectively adding 186,000 more jobs a month on average in 2024. That's strong,

but not as strong as the year before. Unemployment is still low, but half a percentage point higher

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