Daily Commentary

MarketMinder’s View: Love may be blind, but don’t let that empty your pockets—an all-too-common occurrence given the proliferation of romance scams. “The median reported loss for romance scams was $2,218 in the third quarter of 2025, according to data from the Federal Trade Commission Consumer Sentinel Network. During that quarter, a bit more than 11,200 people reported losses to romance scams. The total loss during the third quarter alone was $398 million.” How to protect yourself? While it may seem obvious: “The best bet, according to the BBB: Cut off contact if someone starts asking you for money or information like credit card, bank, or government ID numbers.” Which may be harder than it sounds, especially when scammers use ever-more-sophisticated techniques like “video or audio that has been created by artificial intelligence.” Bad actors may impersonate celebrities and first reach out via social media channels in an effort to make a connection and build trust—and those nefarious efforts may be long term. Another tell: “Does the potential victim really know where that money is being sent? Is it to a shell company overseas? Corporate structures, such as shell companies, are often used by scam centers to conceal their crimes. Multiple businesses are often registered at the same address. Moody’s research found, for example, that a single residence in South Africa registered around 61,000 companies. An address in Spain registered more than 8,000 Chinese-named businesses.” Given the lengths scammers go to separate you from your cash, “You should always bring a good dose of skepticism to any new relationship to figure out if some smooth operator is handing you a line.”

MarketMinder’s View: Judging by the press coverage the last several weeks, you might think AI is the only thing driving the global economy—and markets—but as helpfully pointed out here, that isn’t quite right. (Since this article mentions specific companies as examples, please note MarketMinder doesn’t make individual security recommendations and our discussion relates to the broader theme only.) “When you zoom out, consternation in some AI‑exposed sectors is masked by rotation into others. The main U.S. stock indexes are actually little changed for the year to date, and global stocks are doing better and are up about 4%. Pull back further to view the U.S. macro economy, and the hundreds of billions of dollars in AI-related capex are a huge factor. But that’s not the only one—and when you zoom out further still, the global economic picture shows AI is still only one part of what’s happening across industry worldwide.” The piece further details how the global industrial sector has resumed growing—an overlooked positive—and consumer spending remains resilient. Now, it attributes some of this under-the-radar resilience to rate cuts and government spending, which we think undersells global private sectors’ firm footing. Around the world, stimulus is overrated—just look at the UK. But dimmer outlooks abroad are evidence of cooler sentiment, a bullish factor to us. Consider, “... the AI capex story is the cherry on top of a broader global industrial sector that’s already growing again ... As it stands, AI is not the only driver of global activity—there’s still plenty of life in the old economy yet.” This suggests to us there is lots more left in the tank for US and non-US value stocks alike.

MarketMinder’s View: Determining where we are in the sentiment cycle is more art than science given how fickle human emotion is, and the answer isn’t always clear-cut. This article leads with how US stocks’ flattish year-to-date returns have “pushed the number of bears in a closely watched survey of investor sentiment past the bullish group for the first time since November.” But it also lays out how “equity bulls ... point to a broadening of the rally, as investors continue to move from Big Tech into riskier smaller stocks and emerging markets.” Sounds like a mixed bag to us, as further polls and surveys cited here suggest. For investors, note that sentiment measures are, at best, coincident indicators and aren’t predictive for stocks. It isn’t surprising moods are mellower after four months of “relentless churn.” Would optimism have cooled if markets were continually making new highs? We doubt it. We also broadly agree with the equity strategists quoted here: Rising bearishness is nothing to fear. As Sir John Templeton said: “Bull markets are born on pessimism, grow on skepticism, mature on optimism, and die on euphoria.” Sentiment that retrenches from warming optimism to something more fearful is no bad thing—it rebuilds some of the bull market’s wall of worry. Debates about it underscore how stocks are far from euphoric, which absent a wallop (which we don’t see), is reason to remain bullish. Lastly, we would be remiss not to point out that Q4 earnings—two months in the rearview—aren’t “concrete reasons for optimism.” Stocks always look roughly 3 to 30 months forward. Never backward.