I’ll take it. I suggest you think along the same lines, or at least if you care as much about your personal finances as most of you claim to.

By “it” I mean the 15% (and counting) paper gain on benchmark US equities since the Iran war lows on March 30.

Day in and day out, I get Donald Trump comeuppance vibes from liberal-leaning market observers, where that means it often feels like some of you’d rather (gladly, even) take a 30% haircut on the equity portion of your portfolios than see Trump wriggle out of another engineered crisis without incurring for the GOP a mortal political wound ahead of the mid-terms.

A couple of things on that. First, this is a party (the Trump-era GOP) which forgave its leader for his role in organizing what escalated into the first armed rebellion in America since the Civil War. The notion that such a party, and the people still voting enthusiastically for it, is going to abandon ship because of a two-month conflict halfway around the world in a region where America’s last Republican president waged a nine-year war of choice rivaled only by Vietnam in the tragic inanity department, is far-fetched.

Second, I’m a believer in an exceedingly strict version of personal responsibility, which is to say I think we should all hold ourselves and other people to account for decisions that cause other people suffering. I’m thus all aboard the comeuppance train, with the (self-evident, I hope) caveat that I don’t advocate nor believe in political violence. (Because what is political violence? It’s terrorism. By definition.)

But — BUT — the market’s job isn’t to dole out political comeuppance unless the fundamentals of the asset in question are directly impacted by bad political decisions. Gilts didn’t make Liz Truss the shortest-serving prime minister in UK history because gilts hate morons. Gilts ousted Truss because Truss’s policies threatened UK fiscal stability, and fiscal stability is a fundamental input to bond prices.

I’ve tried to reconcile the old adage that says markets (and typically in this context “markets” means stocks) “hate uncertainty” with the succession of new all-time highs for US equities amid unfathomable presidential capriciousness. I’ll admit to having a difficult time of it. Frankly, I think that adage is like any other old saw: “True” in a kind of general sense, but not especially useful outside of the abstract.

The figure above’s updated through noon on May 6. It assumes Wednesday’s outsized rally holds through the close. If it does, the S&P will have hit 10 new all-time highs since April 15 and 53 since Trump’s second inaugural.

On April 23, I engaged a few commenters in a repartee around the relative wisdom of fighting this tape. I won’t relitigate (you can read the exchange yourself here), but I will not-so-gently note that was 3.5% ago on the S&P and 6.5% ago on the Nasdaq 100.

This isn’t “I told you so.” Really it isn’t. Rather, the issue is that when you start talking about meaningful sums of money — and I think it’s fair to say more than half the audience here has at least six figures invested, seven in a lot of cases, and probably throws five figures at the occasional dip — missing out on 5% here and there, to say nothing of 15% rebounds from swoons catalyzed by exogenous geopolitical shocks which haven’t historically led to protracted bear markets, adds up. And in a helluva hurry.

Betting on geopolitics to overshadow the FOMO associated with the biggest tech bubble since the dot-com boom is borderline foolish, particularly when, at least for now and among the biggest participating names, the “bubble” is underpinned by an enormous upswing in global EPS expectations.

If you’re inclined to scoff and say “Well, expectations are forecasts, they could be wrong, and besides, most of it’s just rosy projections for AI-related names” I’d agree. But I’d also point you to partial results for last quarter (i.e., realized profits) which show the median S&P stock grew earnings by 11% in Q1, the quickest in years.

You might also argue that between record after record for the S&P and sticky Treasury yields, stocks are untenably expensive on a relative basis.

If you’re curious, the spread between the S&P’s earnings yield and benchmark US borrowing costs nearly hit -60bps a couple of days ago, which may as well be the lowest in 25 years.

But what if Trump’s farcical “MOU” with Iran undercuts oil and Treasury yields follow crude lower? While yields surely won’t fall enough to make stocks look attractive, they could recede such that the relationship doesn’t look as distorted as it does currently.

None of the above should be construed as an “apology” for an equity rally which is on most measures overcooked and in certain places (i.e., semis) looks wholly unsustainable. And God knows I’m not apologizing for Trump nor anything to do with him.

My point, rather, is that just as “hope’s not a strategy,” neither is hoping for something bad to happen. And while some of you are principled enough to be contented with a scenario that trades a drawdown in the price of assets you own for a month or two of bad press for Trump, my guess is that most of you are more like me: Not so determined for Trump to sweat that you’ll give up a significant share of your on-paper net worth to see him embarrassed. Besides, what’s a little embarrassment to the shameless?