Did you hear? There’s a bubble afoot.

The financial media’s all over it. Michael Burry bought some puts. I don’t know what the right superlative is for this particular stage of the bubble. You’d have to ask Jeremy Grantham. It was a “Real McCoy bubble” on his reckoning in June of 2020 which was — checks notes — 120% ago on the S&P. In January of 2021, it was “a real humdinger,” according to Grantham. That was 44% ago.

I suppose you could argue that because there were selloffs (2022 and “Liberation Day”) between those warnings and two years of successive new record highs for the index, Grantham wasn’t actually wrong but… well, who are you kidding? “GTFOH,” as the kids say. Grantham’s full of shit. You know it and I know it even if his fan club doesn’t.

I should probably lay off Jeremy. Right? I mean, he’s 87. Every morning I make fun of his folksy bubble lingo is a morning I risk being the asshole who made fun of a guy who died on us later that afternoon. I’m sorry, Jeremy. If it’s any consolation, you’re a legend and a billionaire, two things I’ll never be outside of my own mind.

Anyway, on some measures equities have never been more expensive outside of the dot-com boom. The Shiller P/E’s north of 40, for example. That’s a real doozy if I’ve ever seen one! A ripsnortin’ whopper! Dammit, sorry again Jeremy. I’m done. I promise this time.

The figure below, from SocGen’s Andrew Lapthorne, shows you the number of stocks which doubled (or more) over the last three months excluding shares which fell by 20% or more during the preceding nine-month period.

As you can see from the chart header, Lapthorne would “call that a bubble.”

I would too, I suppose, but at the risk of repeating myself (an occupational hazard when you write about the same limited subject matter every day), identifying a bubble is something different from knowing when it’s going to pop.

In the note accompanying that chart, Lapthorne wrote that although some of the more egregious manifestations of irrational froth witnessed during the dot-com boom are “obviously lacking this time around, the signs of exuberance are still here.”