Today we revisit a September 2025 Digest that helped frame how to think about “late-inning” markets – not by predicting tops, but by identifying the behavioral and structural signs that often accompany them.
This piece introduced the “Crazy Map.” It’s a tool for understanding when speculation begins to outweigh fundamentals, and how to stay grounded during that shift.
I selected it because it remains a unique and helpful explanation for navigating a maturing bull market.
Have a good evening,
Jeff Remsburg
The last two weeks have brought more speculation about “the top” than any time I can recall over the past year.
The familiar worries have resurfaced: an AI bubble, exorbitant valuations, Dot-Com comparisons, market concentration, a cooling economy, risk of Fed policy error…
The consensus seems to be that we’re in the late innings of this bull market.
Of course, such a conclusion is of limited value…
Continuing with the baseball analogy, the average duration of a Major League Baseball inning is close to 20 minutes. But averages can obscure dramatic variations.
For example, on May 8, 2004, the fifth inning of the Tigers vs. Rangers game set a record, lasting nearly 70 minutes.
So, even if we are in the last inning today (still debatable), are we looking at another 20 or 70 minutes?
In recent weeks, our technology expert Luke Lango provided a timetable for how he sees this bull market progressing – and ending.
Here’s his one-sentence bottom line:
In the next 12 months, tech stocks could soar like it’s 1999. Then comes the reckoning.
Building off Luke’s work, let’s demystify this bull market’s final innings by identifying signs of the top, assessing where we are today, and outlining how to shift into bear mode when the time comes.
A quick walk-through of late-cycle “craziness”
Every bull market has a honeymoon phase when solid earnings and reasonable valuations drive steady gains. But things change in the later stages.
As prices climb, investors get bolder, money gets cheaper, and “story” begins to matter more than profits. Basically, “crazy” takes over.
Here are three quick historical examples:
- Dot-Com bubble (late 1990s): Start-ups with no profits – or even revenues – rushed to market and scored sky-high valuations. Pets.com went public in February 2000 and was bankrupt by November.
- Housing bubble (2007): Wall Street bundled shaky mortgages into exotic “synthetic CDOs” that somehow carried investment-grade ratings. Banks were slapping AAA ratings on bundles of subprime mortgages that were already starting to default (watch The Big Short for a refresher).
- Meme-stock mania (2021): GameStop rocketed from under $20 to over $500 in weeks as online traders squeezed short sellers. At the same time, hundreds of blank-check SPACs flooded the market – and then crashed.
Bottom line: Despite different decades and different assets, these crazy episodes had the same underlying pattern – too much money chasing too few good ideas, with increasingly wealthy (and greedy) investors convinced that someone else will pay even more tomorrow.
Can we distill these excesses into a “Crazy Map” that we can track?
Let’s try.
While each bubble has its own flavor, they all tend to share similar fingerprints…
Speculation over substance: Stock prices come to be driven less by profits and more by narratives – think the Dot-Com’s “clicks not bricks”, promises of crypto cutting out middlemen and upending all sorts of sectors, or “the next Amazon.”
Easy money and leverage: Margin debt and other forms of borrowing surge, ramping up today’s gains while setting the stage for tomorrow’s trainwrecks.
New financial products: Wall Street gets creative (and crazy) with its offerings. Think SPACs, ICOs, structured credit. They all promise easy riches while sidestepping old-fashioned disclosures.
Retail crowding in: Social media, zero-commission trading, and the promise of overnight riches lure small investors into the market in droves.
Headline-grabbing deals: We see large numbers of mergers and IPOs that seem focused on “buzz” as much as genuine value creation for shareholders.
To be clear – these signals don’t definitively signal “the top,” but when you get a bunch of them flashing at once, it’s usually a warning.
So, where are we right now?
Let’s use a simple Green-Yellow-Red system.
Green means healthy or “okay” levels. Yellow signals elevated risk. Red signals the danger zone.
Speculation over substance: Story stocks are back. AI start-ups with little revenue are getting triple-digit price-to-sales multiples, and some IPOs are doubling on day one (Figma and Circle Internet Financial).
Investors are looking for the “next big thing” narratives, even though cash flows/profits might be years away.
Score: Yellow tilting Red – fundamentals are less important in the hottest corners of AI.
Easy money and leverage: Margin debt has climbed to roughly $1 trillion, near all-time highs and comparable to peaks seen before prior market corrections.
Even when we adjust for inflation, the current margin debt is just slightly below the all-time high set in October 2021.
Score: Red – a dangerous volume of borrowed dollars are sloshing around out there.
New financial products: The newest twist is the boom in single-stock leveraged ETFs – funds that let traders take double- or triple-leveraged bets on single stocks like Tesla or Nvidia.
But it’s even crazier than that. On an internal Slack channel, one of our InvestorPlace analysts highlighted a “weekly pay” ETF that combines leverage with weekly cash distributions. But a significant portion of these distributions is return of capital, not investment gains.
Score: Yellow – creative (and potentially dangerous) packaging is back, but not yet at 2021 SPAC-mania levels.
Retail crowding in: Meme-stock craziness isn’t at stratospheric levels, but it’s still out there. Social-media chat rooms can launch a stock 20% in a day – case in point, Opendoor Technologies (OPEN) back in July.
Score: Yellow – the retail army is smaller than in 2021 but it’s still active and looking to make a quick buck.
Headline-grabbing deals: Merger announcements and splashy funding rounds aren’t at 1999 or 2021 levels, but there are eye-popping valuations in select AI, biotech deals.
An example is OpenAI: Late last year, it had a valuation of $157 billion. Today, that valuation has exploded to $500 billion.
Score: Yellow – things are frothy.
Altogether, our Crazy Map puts us squarely in the “yellow” caution range.
Of course, for many people, “yellow” means “slam on the gas!” – exactly what we expect to happen in the coming months in certain corners of the market.
So, we’ll keep tracking this as we move into 2026. The more “Red” we see, the more you might consider becoming defensive, depending on your specific financial situation.
But this isn’t the only way we’ll track this late-inning bull market. There are also some technical indicators we’ll monitor that – when coupled with this Crazy Map – can provide a very helpful sense for when to hunker down.
Together, we’ll do our best to mark the specific time when your general mindset should switch from “ride the crazy wave higher” to “sidestep the impending crazy wave crash.”
More on that technical analysis in a coming Digest.
Have a good evening,
Jeff Remsburg
P.S. To set yourself up for even more success in the new year, I encourage you to check out veteran trader Jonathan Rose’s Profit Surge Event. With experience forged in the chaos of the Chicago trading pits – as well as challenging trades that required patience and conviction before they turned around – Jonathan has learned that discipline goes a long way, and can produce big rewards – like 200% gains in just two weeks.
During his presentation, he’s joined by InvestorPlace Senior Analysts Louis Navellier, Luke Lango, and Eric Fry to explain how applying Jonathan’s framework to their stock picks can maximize your gains. Click here to watch the replay.
