Once upon a Saturday morning in 2015, I blinked bleary-eyed at a blank blog post. The cursor blinked back.

“F-ck me,” I muttered, before throwing back a second shot of — I don’t remember what it was. Gin probably. “No, actually, f-ck you,” I told the laptop screen, where a terribly boring weekly strategy note was open in another browser tab.

I had a big day planned. I was going to get roughly a third of the way through a fifth of liquor by lunch, then head over to Stew Leonard’s in Yonkers and let the drunk munchies dictate what went into my cart alongside the Modelo I had an inexplicable hankering for.

Then I’d come back home, indulge unapologetically in so many gratuitous Stew Leonard’s delights (seven-layer dip!), chug half a dozen Mexican beers, walk across the street to the Ridge Hill Apple store and blow through a cash windfall from shares of the privately-held fintech company I walked out on ~six months previous.

(“I really hate to see you give up your stock,” the CEO told me, when I said I wanted to exercise my options and sell to the company’s VC backers on my way out the door. “Who are you kiddin’? There’s never gonna be a public liquidity event,” I thought, but didn’t say. For the record: I was right. It never went public, and although I have no way to prove this, I’m reasonably sure the price I got way back then from the VCs was better than what I’d be able to get from the same firms for the same shares today.)

After the Apple store, I’d spend the rest of the afternoon oohing and ahhing at my new gadgetry, drink some more, then walk back across the street for dinner at Bonefish, then catch Bridge of Spies at the Showcase Cinema de Lux.

The only thing — or, more to the point, the only person — standing between me and what promised to be a glorious day of wanton surfeit was JPMorgan’s Nikolaos Panigirtzoglou, author of the bank’s once-popular Flows & Liquidity series.

I don’t know when it comes out now, but back then Flows & Liquidity came out on Friday evenings, and it was great material for the formulaic financial “journalism” (and I use that term very loosely) I was overpaid to produce just then.

Flows & Liquidity ca. 2015 checked every box for our outfit: It was esoteric enough to make us sound smart just for covering it, and whether ol’ Nikos realized it or not (he didn’t), it was reliably amenable to bearish spin. I had a two-article Saturday quota. One of the two deliverables was invariably mindless geopolitical propaganda. The other was a bearish riff on that week’s Flows & Liquidity.

But there was a problem: It was becoming more and more difficult to put a bearish spin on Flows & Liquidity, and if there was no bearish spin to be had, well then I was forced to make my quota some other way. Which was annoying because it meant looking around for another story at half past 10 in the morning on Saturdays, by which time I was half past buzzed on the way to drunk:45.

“These things are getting harder to write up,” I complained, over G-chat, to my Eastern European taskmaster that morning. “What things?” “Flows. There’s nothing here for us.” “Don’t waste time then. Find something else,” he told me. “Yeah, I know, it just sucks,” I shot back. I meant I didn’t want to find something else. That I wanted to be done by 11:30. He took it as a lament for the lack of bearish spin opportunities. “Panigirtzoglou used to be good,” he said. “Sad.”

There’s a lesson in that (completely true) vignette. Several, actually. One of those lessons (probably the least important one, but the most germane for our purposes here) is simply that you don’t want to spend your life looking for bear narratives or trying to reading them into markets when they aren’t there.

If you do that, you’ll underperform and worse, you’ll drive yourself crazy. Although US equities pulled back from record highs on Thursday, it’s no solace for those who spent the better part of the last month insisting on the implausibility of a rally set against a worst-case scenario in the world’s most important maritime energy chokepoint.

As I put it on Wednesday, “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.”

In other words: Bears were fighting FOMO and fundamentals over the last six weeks, all as Donald Trump TACO’d repeatedly.

The simple figures above are two more testaments to the fundamentals side of things. Just look at the trajectory of aggregate trailing margins (on the left). The table on the right shows you the sector-by-sector breakdown for EPS and revenue beats.

Those of you with an understanding of modern market structure were (or should’ve been) even more cautious about fading the rally than market participants who care only about the fundamentals. It was painfully obvious from ~three weeks ago that crash-up dynamics were in the process of self-fulfilling (action verb) behind the scenes.

“Mechanical flows are perpetuating the overshoot in standard pro-cyclical fashion, because the higher spot goes and the lower vol goes, the more there is to buy,” Nomura’s Charlie McElligott wrote Thursday, documenting what he described as “just impossibly large notional from options and vol-scalers.”

And then there’s the leveraged ETF universe, whose daily rebalancing needs manifested in a near $120 billion aggregate buy flow over the past month on Nomura’s estimates (upper-left chart below).

Remember: Virtually all (~85 cents of every $1) of that leveraged ETF AUM is in some manifestation of “tech,” semis and AI-adjacent names. As Charlie put it, it’s “a concentric overlap” that trades as “an upside lever.”

So… what? What now? Surely it’ll tip over. The rally, I mean. We’re “due,” right?

Maybe. And let me tell you folks somethin’: I could make a lot more money on my writing if I still spent my days insisting that the bearish tipping point’s nigh.

But the truth is, I have no idea. I said the semi rally was “due” to implode, or at least take a breather, late last month. That was +9% ago on the SOX. Already.

Consider this: Goldman’s US Equity Sentiment Indicator — it rolls up nine measures of equity positioning across various investor types — hit 1.7 late last week, a level which, as the bank’s Ben Snider noted, “typically signaled below-average S&P 500 returns during the subsequent 2-8 weeks.” There’s still time, but… well, that was three new record SPX highs ago. Already.

On Thursday, Paul Tudor Jones told CNBC that in his view, the AI rally’s nowhere near over. “I kind of think Claude, January of this year, would be the equivalent of when Microsoft came out in ’81, and then ’95 you can look at when we finally allowed the internet to be used for commercial purposes — those were both the beginning of productivity miracles that lasted four to five and a half years,” he went on. “If I had to [guess], I’d say we have another year or two to run.”