Things You Don't See at the Bottom

One of the hardest parts about investing is recognizing excess before everyone else does.

You rarely hear people say, "This has gone too far," while prices are still climbing. In fact, it's usually the opposite. The higher markets go, the easier it becomes to justify the claim that this time is different.

More buyers show up.
More money pours in.
More leverage enters the system.

Two Things I Saw This Week That Have Me Concerned

Neither of these, by themselves, means the market is about to fall apart.

But together, they tell a story that I think is worth paying attention to.

1. Record Money Chasing the Same Trade

This chart from Bank of America stopped me in my tracks.

This chart shows inflows, this is new money in, not growth of the value of all the stocks. Investors have poured $46 billion into semiconductor ETFs in 2026 alone.

To put that into perspective, that's more than double the cumulative inflows of the previous nine years combined.

Think about that.

From 2017 through the end of 2025, investors collectively added about $22 billion to semiconductor ETFs. In less than seven months this year, they've added another $46 billion.

The chart almost goes straight up.

Now, this doesn't mean semiconductor stocks are about to collapse. AI is a real technological shift, and many of these companies are exceptional businesses.

But it does tell me that an extraordinary amount of money is chasing the exact same investment theme. When everyone wants exposure to the same trade at the same time, expectations become incredibly high. History has shown that crowded trades don't have to be bad businesses to become bad investments—they simply become priced for perfection.

2. Making Leverage Easier Than Ever

The second thing that caught my attention wasn't a chart.

It was a headline.

CME announced it's launching single-stock futures, allowing investors to trade leveraged positions on more than 50 of America's largest companies.

The marketing pitch?

"Leverage without the complexity of options."

That should make investors pause.

Leverage has never been dangerous because it was difficult to access. It's dangerous because it magnifies both gains and losses.

My guess is that 99% of the people who eventually trade these products won't fully understand what they're trading. They'll hear "simpler than options," open a leveraged position, and have little understanding of how futures work, how daily mark-to-market functions, or how quickly losses can compound.

Every market cycle seems to create a new product that makes speculation easier, faster, and more accessible. Those products rarely arrive when investors are fearful. They tend to arrive when confidence is already running high, and everyone believes the trend will continue.

Things You Don't See at the Bottom

Neither of these developments tells me the market is about to roll over tomorrow.

But they do remind me of something that's easy to forget during periods like this.

Market bottoms aren't created by bad news alone.

They're created when optimism finally runs out.

When the last buyer has already bought.

When crowded trades begin to unwind.

When leverage that looked brilliant on the way up starts forcing sales on the way down.

It's only after the bottom falls out—after portfolios have been cut in half, after confidence disappears, after people feel the pain—that we all look back and say:

"Yeah... maybe that was a little too much."

That's what makes bottoms so difficult. The warning signs are almost never obvious in real time.

Our Take

As advisors, our job isn't to predict the exact day enthusiasm fades. It's to recognize when risk isn't being priced appropriately and to make sure our clients aren't dependent on one trade, one sector, or one narrative working forever.

That's why we continue to emphasize diversification over concentration. Not because we know what's going to happen next, but because we've seen enough market cycles to know that the biggest risks are often the ones that don't feel risky at all—until they do.

Sometimes, the most important things you notice at the bottom are the things almost nobody paid attention to at the top.

Process over predictions.

Shean