People have been buying stocks with borrowed money, in the hope of making a fast buck in a booming market. Margin debt had already risen 15% this year through the end of June. Doug Ramsey, chief investment officer at the Leuthold Group, a Minneapolis- based financial-planning company, notes that bullish speculation in the two most popular stock-market exchange-traded funds used for that purpose, the SPDR S&P 500 ETF SPY and the Nasdaq 100 index fund Invesco QQQ Trust QQQ, recently reached extreme measures. "The speculation in these two ETFs, the bullish speculation, the call buying, exceeds anything that we saw at the peaks of 2018, pre-COVID, in 2020 and late '21-early '22," he said in a podcast this week. To give you an illustration: Margin debt at the end of June, when the S&P 500 was around 5,500, was 27% higher than it was at the lows in October last year, when the S&P 500 was at 4,200. Logically, if we're going to buy stocks aggressively on margin, we should be doing it more when they are down and less when they are up. Be fearful, record levels of greed.

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Thanks Doug

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