저자: TomLee · 외국인
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증시는 전쟁·유가 불안에도 S&P 7300 돌파로 강세이나, 유가 선물이 실제 수급 부족을 반영 못해 연내 조정 가능성 존재. 새 연준의장 불확실성으로 연내 변동성 예상. 소프트웨어 주가는 15년 저점 수준으로 리스크 대비 수익 긍정적. 신용시장은 하이일드 스프레드가 주식 바닥 선행지표. 블록체인은 토큰화·24/7 거래 등으로 은행 업무 전환 중이며 향후 10년 내 상위 10대 은행 중 5곳이 디지털 네이티브가 될 것으로 전망. 비트코인은 가치저장, 이더리움은 컴퓨팅 레이어로 우위.
다듬은 글
Crypto has underperformed expectations. If someone was to look at why crypto matters today, I think there's two stories that are really central to what blockchain does really well. One is of course instant settlement and the ability to sort of confirm transactions quickly and that's why Wall Street is tokenizing on the blockchain.
And it's not even just a theory anymore. I was at Consensus, one of the big conferences last week in Miami. Actually, we spent the first part of that week at Milken. And actually both at Milken and at Consensus, the corporates, the financial institutions were all talking about how tokenization is a big unlock for their business.
Because not only does it allow trading to happen 24/7, it all starts to allow leverage or borrowing or monetizing non-traditional financial assets, whether it's like real estate or art, etc. So, it's a real thing. Bitcoin was supposed to be dead by now. At least that's what the people running the global financial system spent the last decade telling anyone who would listen.
And here we are watching the same banks that called it a fraud quietly moving their most profitable operations onto the very infrastructure they spent years trying to discredit. Now, Tom Lee, a former JP Morgan chief equity strategist, said that within 10 years, five of the 10 largest banks in the world will be digitally native blockchain companies.
Not crypto startups, but banks. The kind that move the kind of money that moves governments. And his argument isn't built on speculation or price targets. It's built on something much harder to dismiss. The profit numbers are already in and they're humiliating the traditional financial system in real time.
Now, let's hear directly from Tom. A lot of investors are because the US is in the midst of a war that could be a long war and oil prices are at record highs. And I think a lot of folks at the start of this year would said that this would have been enough to trigger a bear market or even a recession.
But instead the S&P is at an all-time high and the groups that led last year like AI and semis are the ones leading again. So I think it's really speaks to me about the resilience of the US economy and maybe the continued very weak conviction of most investors. I know you talked about, you know, S&P magic number 7300 and we're there.
Like, you know, what kind of led you to that call as you were thinking about it ahead of time? Well, in early December we typically look at the year ahead and we write down what we think are the key drivers and kind of what the contours of the market would look like. So, December 2025 as we were thinking about this year we just thought this year would look a lot like 2025, which is a difficult year for markets, but ultimately very strong.
And but in the middle of that we penciled in the idea that the market would test a new Fed. And therefore we would have a sort of start to the year that would be strong. 7300 was an aspirational number at the time cuz the S&P was in the 6000s. But then we think that there'd be a pause and then the setup would still be positive because we think there were some structural tailwinds.
And so we thought we'd end the year 2026 at 7700. So I the year is tracking the way we expected, although we're a bit above 7300 right now. But if someone asked me today, well, first of all, can the S&P make its way to 7,800 first before it dries out in the air? I think anything's possible, but I think what I am mindful of is that stocks were a lot cheaper at the end of March at the market lows.
They're a lot less cheap now, so a lot of good news is priced in and I still think that there is potential for turbulence in the middle of this year and with maybe more reasons for it. One being, of course, the market testing a new Fed. The second is I think it's still hard for me to reconcile that oil prices are not reflecting the acute shortage that's developing for petroleum products around the world.
So, I think that there's going to be some reconciliation maybe later this year. Let's expand on that cuz, you know, I've heard you say at 100 bucks it doesn't kill the US economy. Do you think this resolves in a way where oil moves higher? Do you think it resolves where it's just it's not as much of an impact to us today because we produce so much or like what's the thesis behind that?
I'm penciling in my head just an a quote like unknown right now because to me the current price of oil doesn't seem to reflect what will be the clearing price later this year cuz we know inventories have been drawn down and we know there's a supply shortage and we know the straits aren't allowing normal traffic and these are going to affect a lot of economies outside the US.
And so, I as much as I want to take some comfort from like the futures price of oil, I actually don't think that that reflects the price that's going to exist later this year. So, to me, I'm going to just put it as an unknown because for now the market doesn't seem to be bothered by it, but it could be that there's a resolution before the shortages get too great or the market will be surprised in a negative way.
So, I actually don't know. That's a thoughtful response. I think the struggle with a lot of us as we look through the markets and macro and news is the thing that is everyone's focus on changes over time. You listed a handful of drivers, US stocks, you got the White House, oil, inflation, private credit, Fed, and then of course earnings.
Is there one that sticks out to you right now that matters most? I know we're mostly through kind of earnings, but any of those front of mind for you? All of them matter, and at different times the market's going to care about something else. We've written about private credit recently. I do think that there is going to be losses, and software has a little bit of uncertainty, but I think the underwriting is probably better than most people appreciate for some of the private credit firms.
So, I think as a sort of as a our general view is I think private credit is a problem, but it's not systematic, and we've done a lot of work on the software stocks. I do think a lot of the bad news is priced in because on a relative price basis you're back to 15-year lows. So, the entire software is eating the world thesis has been unwritten in just the last 6 months.
So, I think a lot of positive risk-reward now exists in software stocks. And then with regard to the Fed, it's an unknown because um we've got a new Fed chair. He's got some very specific views about the sources of inflation that vary from existing Fed views, and how to measure inflation also varies.
So, I think it's going to be now a time where markets want to understand how the Fed will interpret incoming inflation data, and we know that looking at history 11 of the 13 new Fed chairs have seen a drawdown of of at least 10% in the first year. So, that's why I think later this year we could have some turbulence.
What Lee is laying out here isn't a doom prediction, and it's not cheerleading either. It's something more unsettling than both of those things. He's saying the market already climbed past 7,300, which was itself considered an ambitious target when he set it at the start of the year. And yet the risks he flagged then have not gone away.
They have just been ignored. Oil inventories are being drawn down. Supply through key shipping routes is disrupted. And the futures price, which is what most traders are watching, is, in Lee's own words, not reflecting what the clearing price will actually be later this year. That gap between what the market is pricing and what reality is building toward is exactly the kind of thing that resolves suddenly and not gradually.
And sitting on top of all of that is a brand new Fed chair with views on inflation that differ from anything the market has had to interpret before. Lee's historical note on that isn't a small data point. 11 of 13 new Fed chairs produced at least a 10% drawdown in their first year. That's not even a coincidence.
It's a pattern built on uncertainty. And uncertainty is exactly what this moment has in full supply. Credit is important signal, often a leading indicator for equities. It's a long-standing debate cuz when I was at JP Morgan, our credit teams, whether it's high yield or even on the mortgages, said they used to look at the stocks to decide what it would mean for their for the credits.
But I would tell them in the same stead I was always looking at high yield to figure out what would happen with the equity markets. At turning points, and we've demonstrated this, high yield leads equity markets. So, at on downturns, I think one of the best ways to always make a bottom call is when high yield spreads are widening, but equities are still weak because that tells us that the divergence is happening.
So, that we already know a structural bottom has taken place. You know, I know people are looking today at trying to discern what See, like credit, for instance, CDS is saying about stocks like Oracle. More Oracle CDS spreads have really widened. It's hard for me to say that that's actually signal because, for instance, you know, Oracle, if you look at where CDS stands now, it ranks 246th in the S&P 500.
So, in other words, it's got the default risk of like the midpoint of the market. So, I mean, I think if someone's saying Oracle is bankrupt cuz the CDS spreads have widened in the totality of like the S&P, that means like half the market has the same sort of credit outlook. I think it's important, but it's not always that clear-cut for me.
AI is going to favor those who want to start businesses because it's going to allow people to become superhuman. And so, that's why I would probably fall in the camp, and of course, this is just my guess, that AI is going to be very good for American labor and productivity because a lot of people are going to view AI as the ability for them to launch new businesses.
And actually, a lot of the good companies are going to use AI to their advantage. So, in fact, that's why I'm not that bearish on software because I think the best software companies are going to basically say, "Let's just literally reinvent ourselves using AI like one shot, just change our business model." And I think that that's why US companies actually continue to handle crises pretty well and disruption.
Crypto has underperformed expectations. If someone was to look at why crypto matters, today I think there's two stories that are really central to what blockchain does really well. One is, of course, instant settlement and the ability to sort of confirm transactions quickly. And that's why Wall Street is tokenizing on the blockchain.
And it's not even just a theory anymore. I was at Consensus, one of the big conferences last week in Miami. Actually, we spent the first part of that week at Milken. And actually, both at Milken and at Consensus the corporates, the financial institutions were all talking about how tokenization is a big unlock for their business.
Because not only does it allow trading to happen 24/7 it all starts to allow leverage or borrowing or monetizing non-traditional financial assets, whether it's like real estate or art, etc. So, it's a real thing. And the second, of course, is AI is going to start to need a neutral way to both prove identity and to start to create transactions and to carry wallets.
In fact, that's why Elon Musk kind of famously said multiple times in the last 12 months, you know, in the future money is just mass and energy. Meaning the nature of money is essentially compute and power. That basically it's all describing blockchains. And I think the reason it's becoming a boomer story is that the banks, who are the most powerful movers of money in the world realized they can make a lot of money moving things on blockchains.
So, they they are kind of descending into crypto. But at the same time, blockchain is enabling the creation of new financial institutions that will compete with banks. And I think we did a presentation at Consensus highlighting this very collision. JP Morgan makes 60 billion a year. The most profitable bank in the world with 300,000 employees.
Chain Street is a firm that is newer, just moves money around, you know, trading with a lot of quant and compute. And this year is probably going to earn $40 billion. They just reported $10 billion of profit in the first quarter with 3,000 employees. So, with 1/1000 the number of employees they're almost as profitable as JP Morgan and they're making more money than the second, third, fourth largest banks in the world.
So, they're more profitable than Goldman, Morgan Stanley, Bank of America. Tether, which is a crypto-native, completely digital-native bank selling a stablecoin called Tether, is going to make 15 billion this year, which would rank it as the eighth most profitable bank in the world with 300 employees.
So, I think that what's happening with blockchain is what happened with digital media, where there were the traditional studios and then there was Netflix. Or with telecom, where there was long distance, local, and then there was cellular. And that the new entrants gained a lot of power relative to incumbency because of technological innovation.
And I think that's what's happening in crypto today. So, it makes sense that the boomers are descending on crypto, but my guess is that in in 10 years, five of the 10 largest banks in the world will be digitally native companies. So, it's still very early days and I think there's a lot of opportunity, but the base layer winner in the work we do is, you know, is Bitcoin is going to be arguably the most important blockchain because it's really good at storing value, and then Ethereum because it's really the compute layer.
Now, let's pull all of this together because what Tom Lee is describing across this entire conversation is one connected thesis. And the Bitcoin piece at the end of it only makes sense when you see what it's sitting on top of. He started with the market. The S&P has already moved past the target he set at the beginning of the year.
And instead of calling it a victory lap, he immediately flagged the risks that the rally has not priced in. Oil shortages building quietly underneath headlines about record highs, a new Fed chair whose interpretation of inflation data nobody fully understands yet. 11 of 13 new chairs produced double-digit drawdowns.
The market is not safe just because it's at all-time highs. It's potentially more fragile because of it. Then, he he to software and AI. His reading there is that the stocks have been so beaten down on a relative basis that they are back to 15-year lows and the best companies in that space are not waiting to be disrupted.
They're using AI to reinvent their own business models from the inside. That's not a defensive posture. That's an offensive one and Lee thinks the market has not fully priced that recovery yet. And then comes the part that ties the whole thing together. The same AI wave that's going to reshape software is going to need a financial infrastructure.
Machines conducting commerce with other machines cannot route payments through a compliance department. They need something neutral, something that runs continuously, something with no single point of control. That's what Bitcoin and Ethereum were built to be. Lee isn't saying buy Bitcoin because the chart looks good.
He's saying the entire direction of the global economy, the AI transformation, the institutional migration onto blockchain rails, and the erosion of trust in traditional financial institutions, all of it is converging on the same infrastructure. Now, the banks that spent years dismissing that infrastructure are now the ones most aggressively building on top of it.
Now, that's not a bullish opinion. It's what the profit numbers are already showing. The only uncomfortable question left is how long you plan to wait before that becomes impossible to ignore. Drop your thoughts in the comments and subscribe if this is adding value. It costs nothing and it puts this content in front of more people who need to hear it. See you in the next video.
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