Are you sharp-eyed when it comes to signs of market froth? Do you wake up every morning on the lookout for bubble signposts? Have you seen The Big Short more times than I’ve seen The Town?

If so, you must be in a state of agitated excitement in 2025. After all, we’re almost surely in a bubble. Maybe even a “Real McCoy” bubble, to quote Jeremy Grantham from 3,522 SPX points ago. Or hell, who knows, it might even be “a fully-fledged epic real humdinger” bubble, to quote Jeremy Grantham from 2,887 SPX points ago. (Are you pickin’ up what I’m layin’ down there about ol’ Jeremy?)

I’m avowedly skeptical about the capacity of would-be mavens to tell us what’s a bubble, what isn’t and when a purported bubble’s likely to burst. But as discussed here on Monday morning, I’ve seen enough in the way of signposts to suspect we might see SPX 5500 again before we see SPX 7500.

When you venture outside of traditional valuation metrics (and who cares about those, right?), the evidence is far from conclusive, but since we’re on the subject, the two charts below, from Goldman’s David Kostin, are worth a mention.

On the left are recent returns for a number of Goldman baskets generally seen as indicative of froth and risk sentiment more generally. Mag7 returns since August, solid though they are (7% in two months ain’t bad), appear paltry compared to more “exciting” market slices like, say, “quantum computing” stocks, “Bitcoin sensitives” and everyone’s favorite froth thermometer, “unprofitable tech.”

“While broad measures of positioning remain constrained, some pockets of the equity market have recently demonstrated greater signs of investor exuberance,” Kostin wrote, noting that in addition to the shares mentioned above, “retail favorites” and a basket of “liquid recent IPOs” are up 14% in eight weeks.

The figure on the right above gives you a sense of risk appetite through the IPO lens. The average IPO this year was up 30% on its first day of trading. As Kostin went on to say, that performance has only been eclipsed in four other years: 2013, 2020 and — cue the ominous music — 1999 and 2000.