Alina Khay

Every time the S&P 500 hits a new record, the same people come out of the woodwork: “Dot-com 2.0. It’s 1999 all over again. Get out now.”

Eleven days. That is how long the S&P 500 needed to repair a 9.1% drawdown after the Iran shock — a hole filled and forgotten before most macro desks had finished writing about it. The same depth of pullback in 2000 took eleven hundred days to mend. Same country, same index, three orders of magnitude apart in healing speed.

Volume confirms price moves. That’s the first thing most traders learn, and it’s not wrong — it’s just incomplete. The more useful question isn’t whether volume is rising with price. It’s whether the volume justifies how far price moved. Those are different questions, and the gap between them is where the edge lives....

For the first time in history, the S&P 500 breached the 7,500 mark. The index’s market capitalization swelled by $10.9 trillion in just seven weeks — a pace of wealth creation with no modern precedent. The rally was not built on euphoria alone, anchored by AI-driven earnings beats, a geopolitical pivot in Beijing, and a structural technology spending cycl...

Markets rarely move on cold rationality alone. They pulse with the collective nerves of their participants — where anxiety feeds on itself and optimism snowballs into euphoria. Any quantitative model that pretends otherwise ignores something essential about how markets actually behave.

Crowd psychology is a latent variable with measurable proxies. The ...