Welcome back to the Stating Trade podcast, everyone.

Listen, I want to start right out with, as I mentioned, typically at the end of every episode, we're listening to you.

And a lot of you've asked that you just want us to get right to the content, get right to the data right away. So I'm listed. I'm listed. I might not appear like I'm listening, but I am. Now, I will say that, you know, since we relaunch the podcast, I did do longer intros on the other ones just because I wanted to kind of get all of our longtime subscribers up to speed. But that being said,

listening to the listeners, let's get right into it. So the topic for today is basically wrapping up

the first half of the year. You know, we're heading in the 4th of July, the best year of all year.

I often say history began on 1776, July 4th, everything before that was a mistake. But that being said,

welcome back, Matt, my man. We've got to go over today. Yeah, we do. And we're going to have

a lot of different backgrounds for me in the next few weeks. I'm in Lisbon right now, as you know.

So I'm here in some conference room. Fleeing from Interpol

currently? Yeah, fleeing from Interpol. I just let them know where I am, so I don't know if it's going to go too well. But here, you know, so if I have my voice a little weird, overnight flight kind of gets me sometimes. So we're all in battling something here today. But yeah, I mean, I think, Tim, this show should be a little bit of probably maybe half and half.

We'll take a look back at the first half because you always have to learn from history, right? You know, history, you have to look back. And you can't drive a car looking in your rearview mirror, so we need to look ahead as well. So we'll look back at what happened and kind of, you know, break down what we thought was going to happen and what really happened in the first half of 2024. And then let's look ahead and get my view and your view of where we kind of think things are going big picture. We're not going to break it down in specifics, but maybe some big picture stuff. So if we look at the first half of the year, you're probably like me, you know, overall the numbers were great. I mean, we had the NASDAQ up 17%, the S&P up 15%. Dow lagged behind. It was only up single digits. Keep in mind,

Dow was only up single digits. Keep in mind, Dow's only 30 stocks, a little bit different of a way. That's one of the reasons. Like when people ask me about indexes, I'm like, I mean, I know the Dow is like the Dow, like especially if you watch the mainstream, I'm like yeah remember 30 stocks like like

that that's why I only track the S&P and the NAS I don't I don't even I used to like when I was a

newbie I would follow the Dow but I'm like to me it's borderline worthless so it is and and you

know but the Dow is like you know the first the first index ever, basically, you know,

it started down in Wall Street, and it's got, it's got this flair of, okay, it's, it's a lot of history involved, and it's never going to go anywhere, and I'd hope it doesn't. But again, reality, you know, and like when I manage money, you never use the Dow as your benchmark. It was usually ESMP 500. You don't use a doubt because you're looking at 500.

However, if you look at, you know, how the equally weighted stocks did this year so far the first

six months, the RSP, which is the ETA that tracks it, only up 5%.

So if you look at the S&P up 15, equal weight S&P up 5.

So that means that the S&P, as we've talked about before and shows, Tim, is it's so heavily weighed into the big guys, you know, the apples, the Amazon's, Microsofts at a world that it's really deceiving. So I think really if you want to see how the overall market's truly doing, you probably look at the RSP and it's only a 5%. So people are out there saying, too much, too fast, went up too much. We're only up 5%, which really annualized out is about 10%, right, which is about in line where the market's done over the last 40 years. So we're kind of right in line, strangely enough, even though you think things have gone, you know, the semiconductor ETF, the SMH, up 49% in the first six months. So there was pockets of strength, and there's pockets of weakness too. So I think we need to keep that in mind when we look ahead and we look at our portfolios, we can't just look at, okay, well, I must be doing bad because the SMEs are up 49%. No, the weakly weights up 5. So if you're up 5, 10%, you're basically in line with the market maybe beating it.

Right.

And like what I just love to see, you know, again, as more of a, you know, day trading focus, you know, I just love to see the big gains, you know, especially like the S&P because like if you're a day trader, what's nice about that is, you know, that that creates hype, that creates momentum, that creates dollars flowing into the market. And like the more people see that all time high, all time high, you know, that's where, you know, we mentioned in previous episodes. So like it reminds me so much of 2020 when you got so much FOMO coming into the market.

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