Hey guys, it's Sasha The economy is booming, company performance is rebounding, consumer confidence has bottomed out, and stocks are about to start printing returns. But if you read the media or watch Finance channels on YouTube, you wouldn't know it. The unanimous opinion is that the world is about to burn. We are about to enter: World War III in the Middle East The biggest stock market crash ever is coming and it is irrefutable.

Credit card debt is at alltime, high savings rates has collapsed down to almost zero student loan payments in the US have resumed squeezing budgets that are already at breaking point after the biggest inflation spike in a generation. Oh, and there's always a recession. A few months after, rates go up and rates have just gone up. So if you listen to all of this, it's probably not surprising that you too would be certain of the impending doom and gloom.

Is absolutely definitely happening, right? We're all here knowing it's coming, all the newspapers are saying it's coming, And of course, the way that the economy in the stock market works is when everyone sits around expecting a specific outcome, expecting one particular thing to happen. Because look charts say so that outcome is 100% guaranteed and it definitely happens every time. And if you do not agree, you are an idiot because you don't listen to the data. But the reality is a lot more complex than you know.

finding a chart of what happened 50 years ago and then expecting the same exact thing to happen because one particular metric just happens to look the same. and I know I know there will be the comments saying oh Sasha you think it's going to be different this time This time is different according to Sasha and yes yes I un ashamedly think that this time is different because every time is different. every situation is unique and has its own drivers and there some things to consider. and I Prefer to base my own investing decisions on slightly more comprehensive data analysis from where I'm Sat I am seeing one of the biggest investing opportunities in decades so please excuse me for taking advantage of that while everyone else is doing const debated faces and YouTube thumbnails telling you to sell all of your stocks.

The S&P 500 is now down 10% since the end of July Inflation is on the way out and interest rates in the US have peaked. So while everyone is panicking, you can buy stock selling off at a discount using an app like Webull who are the sponsors of today's video and remember it's we bull, not we puppy. although technically speaking this puppy does we a lot since I got it the weekend but I'm going a bit of track here. we puppy sorry Webull is now available in UK and they are offering eight free shares worth up to $2,000 each to new customers.

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Now everyone looks at this chart of the S&P 500 and says look, the stock market bounced almost all the way back up in 2023. So The Real Crash hasn't happened yet. The real stock market market crash is coming and when it comes it is going to be brutal because even at the bottom in September last year the stock market was only down 25% from the peak and if we had a real crash that could easily go down 40 or 50% But the truth is the stock market crashed last year and has not recovered. You just can't see it because at the same time as the stock market crashed, chat GPT arrived and any company that could be lazily linked to AI saw their share price explode.

You often read about the Magnificent stocks that are pulling the whole of the S&P 500 up. These are Apple, Microsoft, alphabet, Amazon, Nvidia and Tesla And yes, without those big stocks, the rest of the stock market put together is actually down this year instead of being up 9% But the reality is even more Stark and much worse. because of these big seven, Amazon and Tesla for example, haven't really been propping the stock market up. The stock market crash started at the beginning of January 2022 and since then, Amazon and Tesla have both underperformed performed.

They perform significantly worse than the S&P 500, but they are big, well-known companies, so I guess it makes for a good story if you're a journalist, so you might as well throw them in there to write a good headline. But if you take out Amazon and Tesla there are plenty of other beneficiaries of the AI boom companies like Adobe Service Now and synopsis. Then you have the energy sector that blew up because of oil and gas prices that went through the roof after Russia invaded. Ukraine Chevron was up 42% until the stock market realized that all of the profits had nothing to do with the stock and everything to do with commodity prices.

so they won't continue after the earnings last week. K Phillips is up 63% since the start of 2022. But if you strip out energy companies and the AI Boom the rest of the stock market crashed starting in Q4 2021 and there has been no recovery. Retail investors seem to only be interested in big Tech which has done very well recently and meme stocks like AMC GameStop and paler well I Guess they're also interested in Nfts of monkeys wearing funny hats although I think we're not meant to talk about that anymore and pretend like that never happened.

But let me show you the numbers that you really need to pay attention to because I haven't seen anybody else talk about these. Over the last three years, we have seen an inflation run in the United States For only the second time in modern history, we have seen interest rates go up at the fastest rate in modern history. To combat that inflation in 2021, people flush with cash because everyone was locked at home, not being able to go out to spend their money and the government was stimulating the economy at the same time by more than the sum of the stimulus of the economy over the hundred years before that point. But as the injection of cash flushed through, we saw the inevitable inflation Spike And suddenly everyone has gone from paying off their credit card debt and saving money, to racking up their credit card debt and not having any money to save at all.

And then there are two things that multiply here. One is the actual lack of money because wages have not kept up with inflation. and so while food in the shop and gas at the pump has gone up, the amount of money that you get paid has not. So people have less money to spend and we saw a contraction in the rate of growth of a lot of companies through 2022.

On top of not having money, people don't have confidence. Consumer confidence is one of the most important factors in the stock market doing well, but it is also one of the least appreciated and least understood factors At the end of 2022, Consumer Confidence was on the floor. People would not spend money unless they absolutely had to. You can see it right across different data sets.

You could see it in new Car sales data. You could see it in travel, but you couldn't see it in GDP data because GDP has been growing during this period. And remember the figure that you see reported is real. GDP This is GDP adjusted for inflation.

So how come GDP adjusted for inflation is not a reflection of what's actually happening in the economy because it is adjusted right. Well, it's because GDP adjusted for inflation is not what actually happens to regular people's budgets and them trying to manage the money that comes in and goes out every month. Energy bills are way ahead of inflation. Price of petrol is way ahead of the average inflation.

Food prices have gone up many times more than the average rate of inflation over the last two years. The most basic things where people feel the price increases every day are up significantly ahead of inflation. So people's perception people's understanding of how much things cost. people's feelings on how bad the situation is are based on what they do and what they see and what they experience.

Every single day, people are spending more on those things because they have to, while at the same time, new car sales are down, luxury goods sales are down, travel spend is down, all nonessential activity is down. But you know who really understands consumer confidence Advertisers: The moment when people stop spending money, the advertisers stop advertising because they really care about their return on investment. Here is my Google valuation model. For example, you can see the waves of advertisers spending money there.

In 2020, everyone pulled back because everyone was in panic mode. People stopped spending money on ads. Then in 2021 we saw the bounce where people had a lot of money to spend. Then the crash and consumer confidence started in 2022.

The top two lines here are Google search ads and YouTube ads. You can see how the year on year growth went lower and lower and lower until it was negative in Q4. Last year and last winter I was making videos explaining why the data is pointing to a bottom in this drop. and here you can see a small Improvement in Q1 and then a small Rebound in Q2 and then the numbers suddenly are in double digit growth in Q3 Last night Pinterest published their data.

Here it is Revenue growth fell to 4% in Q4 last year, then went up to 5% then 6% and it's now at 11% Here is Facebook's advertising Revenue Q4 Last year it was a drop. year on-ear Q1 was a bit better. Q2 was even better than that and Q3 is up 23% but a lot of that rebound is not coming from advertising rates. Look at Facebook their user base Grew From 2.93 to 3.14 billion in the last year.

For a company that is so mature and already has that many users, this is a pretty big rate of growth. If you take that out, the growth in advertising spend is only up 15% year on year. Still pretty good compared to what happened last year though. Pinterest users grew by 8% year on year.

so if you normalize for that, the advertising Revenue there only grew by 3% Right now, we are seeing just the very start of the rebound in consumer confidence and if the advertising rates go back to anything like what they were before the crash that we started seeing in 2022, these companies are going to benefit a lot. On our website business, we are seeing ad rates start to slowly creep up back in October As as well all of these stocks are seeing their share price absolutely get destroyed because Revenue growth is down. But outside of the AI bubble in sectors like energy and food, the story is the same everywhere. Tesla has been cutting prices all year and investors were suddenly surprised when the quarterly data showed lower growth and lower margins.

Stock is now down 25% in just the last few days, but if you dive deeper into the macroeconomic data, it looks incredible the crash has already happened. Many stocks that aren't in inflation pump sectors or in AI are down 50% or more. You're looking at a stock market where stocks are being sold at a discount that only happens once a decade at best. And instead of buying these stocks as per usual, everyone is waiting for the biggest crash ever.

Everyone's waiting for the Big Recession. Everyone's waiting for the prices to go even lower. When your favorite chocolate bar is on sale at the shop with a 50% off sticker, You of course do not buy it and you wait to see if maybe it's going to be on sale at 60% off next month. But but don't worry, there is no rush in buying Tesla.

At below 200 or whatever price is going to go to in the next few days, there will be plenty of opportunities to load up like a boss at $500 when consumer confidence returns. Don't waste your money in the market when stocks are cheap and going down because you could be buying a falling knife the next day, the stock might be even cheaper. Instead, it's much better and much much safer to wait until we hit new all-time highs. After the stocks go back up 100 or 200 or 300 %.

because only then can you be sure that the stock market is doing well again and invest with confidence.