Most stocks are already well into a bear market. Some names are pretty marked down. There are a few names I like, Uber for instance has a great moot and service I really use and appreciate as I no longer have a car. And they are moving into delivery.
But even this name can get cheaper and still sells at a 15 PE. I also spent time with ChatGPt gaming out how Uber drivers can make money at the fares they charge considering the auto depreciation, insurance and fuel costs. We went over some of my routes and the charges involved. Chat says it is nearly impossible economics especially in more congested urban centers. My conclusion is that Uber drivers are subsidizing me. Demand may hold but not the drivers.
The other shoes to drop for me preempt going into already beaten down stocks. Nothing here looks that cheap.
The poor condition of the bond market has already been addressed on these pages, refer back to those posts.
MOVE is bond market volatility. VIX is stock volatility.
Around 60% of the S&P 500 stocks are, on average, 24% below their highs, which means they are already in a bear market. This has only happened twice before, once in 1973 and then in 1999, and in both instances, SPX entered a major downtrend.
With the SPX only 0.8% below their high, only 26% of the index trade above their 50 day moving average. 55% of S&P 500 stocks are now trading below their 200-day moving average.
Today’s “AI Big 10” (Mag 7 plus Broadcom, AMD and Micron) are 41% of US market cap, which is where all previous major bubbles peaked.
The trade has piled into ten Ai related stocks, and right as a Minsky Moment credit event is emerging in those names. This is similar to what happened in the precursor to the 2008 crash.
Moodys: We have growing concerns about the $3 trillion of hyperscaler commitments (and $2.5 trillion of LLM operators) that have not yet hit balance sheets while relying on future RPO that is largely circular in nature between the companies.
Deep dive into the Ai mega gamblers:
stop worrying about the bear market, get outside and take a deep breath pic.twitter.com/Rs0CfijS1f
— naiive (@naiivememe) October 8, 2025
“My conclusion is that Uber drivers are subsidizing me. Demand may hold but not the drivers.”
That has been my conclusion for, what, a decade or more – how long has Uber been in existence?
Craigslist created the ‘gig’ economy, IMHO.
Silicon Valley enshrined it; it was the death of worker’s rights and the ascendance of a new paradigm whereby workers could be treated like machine parts.
Traders like to claim we have a free market but it is a marketplace where frequently the buyers are hobbled by ignorance.
This ignorance of the metrics of the business demonstrated by the bottom strata attracted to these sorts of gigs guarantees a steady stream of new talent – a new crop of ex-students, with cars paid for by parents, unemployed, every year, like clockwork.
I should mention, I was a San Francisco bicycle messenger for a few years.
Bike messengers were the original gig worker, IMHO. Call a number, have a guy show up. Or a gal. Bike messengers were an interesting crowd. Many of them were serious punk rockers at night. Ah, for the days of the fabulous Mabuhay Gardens …
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mabuhay_Gardens)
Amongst this interesting crowd were a few people who tried to run their own messenger businesses. But anyone who did the math quickly grasped the fact that the only reason the business flourished was because the owners were constantly cheating their employees – dropouts, mostly, unable to calculate their own paychecks, which were all derived from a complex matrix of package counts, weights and distances. Messengers trusted the dispatchers and the owners and were relentlessly screwed, for decades.
So, yes, Russ, you are spot on the money. Your drivers are being sucked dry by their employer, then discarded and replaced by fresh new victims.
I thougt we had laws against involuntary servitude but apparently I was wrong.