Mike Santoli admits the market refuses to move despite earnings growth of 24% year-over-year. He calls equities "reasonably priced." The S&P sits exactly where it sat two months ago.
Reasonably priced. That's the phrase you use when your date orders the lobster and you check your credit limit under the table.
Earnings exploded. Projections looked eye-popping. The market yawned and went back to sleep. Retail traders refreshed their accounts every fourteen seconds waiting for the moon mission that never left the launchpad. They bought calls. They posted rocket emojis. They explained to their wives that this time the technical setup was different.
It wasn't different.
The issue isn't that earnings expectations failed to lift the market. The issue is that retail believed numbers on a screen would force other numbers on a screen to go up. They confused cause and effect. They mistook a press release for a price catalyst. They read "stupendous growth" and assumed stupendous returns would follow like a natural law of physics.
Stocks don't care about your earnings report. They care about what the next guy thinks the guy after him will pay. Santoli knows this. He wrote the headline anyway. He needed to fill column inches. You needed to fill your portfolio with tech calls that expired worthless.
The mantra heading into Q2 was that growth justifies valuation. The mantra heading out of Q2 is that your broker sent you a margin call and you're Googling "what happens if I just don't answer."
Two months of eye-popping expectations. Two months of flat returns. Retail spent the entire summer waiting for reasonable pricing to become unreasonable profits, and all they got was a Seeking Alpha subscription they forgot to cancel.
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