저자: KenFisher · 외국인
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연간 경기침체 확률은 낮다고 봄: 주식시장이 최고가 경신 중이고, 대출 성장이 견조하며 경기침체 전에는 보통 주가가 먼저 하락함. 주식은 3번 중 2번 이상 상승하므로 하락을 맞히려 하기보다 상승 쪽에 베팅하는 게 유리하다고 주장. AI 붐은 닷컴 버블과 다르다고 주장: 현재 AI 기업들은 막대한 영업이익과 자체 현금흐름으로 투자하는 반면, 닷컴은 주식발행에 의존한 적자 기업이 많았음. AI는 리서치 효율화에는 유용하나 창의적 혁신은 못 한다고 평가. 개별주 분석은 아버지 필립 피셔의 15가지 기준(펀더멘털) 확인을 권장.
다듬은 글
Let me just say to you that stocks tend to rise. Three out of four time periods. So, if you spend more of your time looking for when stocks are going to fall than you do for when stocks are going to rise, you're betting on the wrong side of the odds. So, every month I get these questions that somebody sends me in from here, there and wherever.
And I type them up on a little card so the print is big enough that I can read them in front of you, and I rattle off short answers to them. Sometimes. It's hard for me to give you short answers, I'm pretty windy. So, what is the probability of serious recession in 2026? Low. Why? Well, first, you will always get the stock market falling for months before you get a recession start.
The stock market is the best leading indicator of a recession. And since we just hit in early 2026 new all-time highs in the market, you know that you're not getting recession starting at all until, at the earliest, the spring. Secondarily, and I've written about this a lot in 2025, globally, in America, outside of America, globally, lending has been increasing at an increasing rate and robust from about 18 months ago when it was lower.
Loan growth is fuel for economic growth because there's almost nobody that's borrowing money that doesn't intend to use it. You don't borrow money that you don't intend to use. You borrow money shortly before you're going to use it. So that loan growth is a reflection of supply availability, but also demand for that money that will get utilized.
Now, let me say that, is it possible to have a recession? Yes, but you said what's the probability of serious recession? That's the question. Probability is low because the lending environment is good. Lending is going strongly. It's one of the most important indicators to watch for looking ahead. Economists are too dour.
Economists expectations are all focused on global trade, and they miss the point that the global world outside of America can actually trade pretty freely among themselves. And they, the economists, tend to be too much fixated on global trade between us and the non-US world. Regarding your recent video on corporate earnings, if we don't look at earnings reports, what should we focus on?
So, let me just say one word and then let me make 15 points. One word is you should focus on the fundamentals. How might you do that? The 15 points. Now, giving a tip of the hat, despite the fact I'm not wearing a hat, to my father. In 1958, my father wrote a legendary book called <i>Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits</i>, which is outdated in its writing style, but the fundamental points that it makes are as valid today as the day that my father wrote that book.
In <i>Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits</i>, he, and I'm not hawking the book at you here, I got an easy way for you to do this. But in <i>Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits</i>, he made 15 points of what to look for in a stock, in fundamentals. And you don't have to buy the book. You don't have to go to the library.
All you got to do is go and look up the internet, And go to some standard AI source, like Grok or Perplexity or something, and put in, "What were the 15 points Philip Fisher wrote about in his book, <i>Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits</i>?" You don't have to do anything more than that, and it'll take you right to them.
And when you do that, they'll cover the waterfront, from the gross profitability of the company, market size potential for the company, research expenditures, whether the management is open and willing to discuss its shortcomings as well as its strengths. There's 15 of them. Just look it up on AI. That's what you look for.
Why have I heard you called "a perma-bull"? Is that accurate? Well, there's lots of reasons that I'm called a perma-bull. Perma-bull is implied in a negative context. Perma-bull is stated by people who think the key to life is figuring out when the market's going to fall. Let me just say to you that stocks tend to rise three out of four time periods.
So, if you spend more of your time looking for when stocks are going to fall than you do for when stocks are going to rise, you're betting on the wrong side of the odds. People have a hard time with that. They treat it like it's a 50/50 proposition. Tomorrow, it's not 50/50. Tomorrow, I don't know what will happen, but when we look out over periods, most of the time stocks rise.
The only time, and I've said this routinely, that's worth getting out of the market for, is if you have an ability to foresee or see early in a bear market that it is a bear market. And then it's worth sidestepping the bear market. It is hard to do that. I've done that a few times in my life. I'm not actually a perma-bull, but I have not done that, now, for a long darn time.
I missed the last big bear market, which was 2007, 08', 09', and I don't really consider 2020 and 2022 bear markets worthy of focusing on very much because they're both so short and didn't do very much. 22' didn't have a recession with it, and it wasn't very long, and 2020's bear market, associated with the outbreak of Covid, was exceptionally short.
So, is it accurate that I'm a perma-bull? Not really. But mostly, I'm biased. You got to have a good reason to be bearish; you don't have to have a good reason to be bullish. The thing that makes a good reason to be bearish, is seeing something that's big and bad, and able to create recession, that others haven't already been talking about, and therefore, isn't priced into stocks.
And that's hard to do. I'm always looking for it, but I'm human and I'm not all that great at doing it. And if you can't do that, then trying to call a bear market or a correction, or anything else based on other stuff, is foolhardy. Isn't the talk of AI today very similar to the dot-com bubble in the 1990s?
No, they are very dissimilar. I've written a fair amount about this. I understand why a lot of people who are wrong think they're similar. Why? Two basic reasons. Valuations are high, one. And two, it's Tech led. AI is Tech and valuations are high. Those are the two. Oh I guess there's a third. They both have expectations about good things that this technology will deliver ahead, as the 1990s did for the Internet and as AI does today.
So, you know, we could go one, two, three, if you want. Why are they very different? Well, the dot-com bubble was a bubble. And I wrote about that bubble. The dot-com bubble had hundreds of companies that were losing money, that had no gross operating profit margin, that were dependent entirely on their survival being based on future cash raises through stock offerings.
The companies, not all, but most of what goes on in AI today, are huge companies with huge gross operating profit margins that are funding their AI efforts out of their huge growing profitability, profits in hand, their own cash flow, not based on selling stock. That, in the late 90s, was a bubble because it was all 100% fundamentally dependent on the companies that were doing it being able to continue raising money through stock sales.
This one is not a bubble because there's no financial market requirement for the companies to be able to continue doing the activity in which they're engaged. Now, let me say differently, just to go off to a different direction briefly. That is not to say that the AI stocks can't fall, that the stocks that are involved in AI can't fall.
Yes, they can. Rising and falling, normal bear markets, stocks sometimes being overpriced. None of that's about a bubble. That's just normal stuff. We've had bear markets forever without having had bubbles. We've had categories of stocks fall forever without having had bubbles. It is a mistake to confuse the normal process that Sir John Templeton famously called the evolution of a bull market, of bull markets being born on pessimism, grow on skepticism, mature on optimism, and die on euphoria.
It's a mistake to confuse optimism and euphoria. Or the euphoria of the peak of a normal bull market with the different form of euphoria that's a bubble, which is a dependency on stocks going higher to finance fundamental business activities. Can investors gain an edge by leveraging AI for research?
Well, it depends how you want to view that. If you say, can you do better by doing research via AI? Standard AI sources. Asking questions and getting answers, then by going and doing it otherwise, the answer is absolutely yes. If you're looking for what would be the consensus answer you would get if you went into a kind of a library and studied it for a long time, instead of using AI to come to the same conclusion, because AI can just do that so much faster.
AI, however, cannot give you something. I mean, it's a phenomenal timesaver for that kind of answer to that kind of question. What AI does not do is gives you any creativity. Truly. It does not allow you to create new stuff because it's all a pre-programmed algorithm and because it's all a pre-programmed algorithm, it can't do the kind of creativity that does never yet done greatnesses for humanity, which is where most of the great world changing things come from.
So, the answer is yes, it's a great efficiency enhancer, and if you use it and others aren't using it, you gain relative efficiency to them. That's good. But in terms of game changing stuff, it's not so good. Thank you much, hope you found this grab bag month useful. Send in more questions for next month and I'll do my best to answer them.
Although, even though I'm supposed to answer them quickly, I never seem to be able to. .
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