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Is The Market Dangerously Expensive Now? | Kevin Muir

Adam Taggart | Thoughtful Money® Jun 25, 2026

Summary

Kevin Muir argues record equity valuations have priced stocks for perfection, making a lost decade the sensible base case for future returns.

The AI build-out echoes the dot-com bubble; a token mirage of forced employee usage may have inflated demand signals, risking a sharp repricing.

Muir favors unloved real assets: oil producers benefit from strategic reserve restocking, while Chinese central bank demand keeps the gold bull intact.

Gold miners trade cheaper than the metal itself, and silver's slide looks like a cyclical shakeout inside a secular precious metals bull.

New Harbor's partners advise trimming equity exposure, stress-testing retirement plans against lost-decade returns, and holding silver through record ComEx physical deliveries.

Adam Taggart's takeaways

  • Top takeaway Adam's core warning is that today's prices have pulled tomorrow's returns into the present, so investors, especially those at or near retirement, should plan for a lost decade instead of betting on the anomaly.
  • He argues the AI build-out could stall on physical constraints even with funding in place: permitted land, municipal pushback, shortages of engineers and contractors, water, and copper.
  • He flags China's software-first efficiency push and newly released competitive models as a way the West could discover it built more compute than it needs.
  • He notes 45% of the S&P 500's market cap is now AI or AI-related, so an AI stumble would hit the whole market, not just tech.
  • On metals, he reports that ComEx silver deliveries in the first half of 2026 already exceed any prior full year (per his interview with Andy Schechtman), and explains he removed his silver laser-eyes image once the price passed $100 to signal it was time to take gains.

Mike Preston's takeaways

  • Top takeaway He argues current valuations make a lost decade likely and advises passive index investors to cut equity exposure below 30-40%, a level where even losing half the value leaves the plan intact.
  • He says New Harbor sits at about 50% equity, its ceiling, after adding a small slice in regional banks, sees breadth widening across banks, biotech, small caps, home builders, and REITs, but calls recent signals whippy after a 100-point S&P down day.
  • On silver, he says the pullback is gut-wrenching but probably not the end, and he thinks the metal could be within days of a reversal; he would doubt the bull case only if SLV retraced into the $40s.
  • He notes the firm trimmed 2.5% of its gold on a technical breakdown and runs a 10% bullion-and-mining allocation, citing 1973 and 2008 as roughly 50% drawdowns followed by new highs within about two years.

Kevin Muir's takeaways

  • Top takeaway Kevin says investors should simply assume a lost decade of low equity returns ahead, made worse by an S&P 500 so concentrated in volatile tech names that a 50% correction in the top 10 alone would take the index down about 20%.
  • He calls the AI rally a scarier remake of the dot-com bubble, with semiconductor and memory stocks adding $4 trillion of market cap in 2025 and $8 trillion more year-to-date in 2026, and argues a surge of forced, incentive-driven AI usage inside companies created a token mirage of false demand.
  • He reads new Fed chair Kevin Warsh as genuinely hawkish (the digit to the left should be a 2, the digit to the right a 0), and with PCE at 3.3% and December fed funds futures now pricing roughly one and a half hikes, he says equities are more vulnerable than investors admit because they still count on a rescue.
  • He is bullish oil: with China's strategic reserve drawdown ending and every country now needing its own SPR, he expects refilling demand to keep oil far above $40, and he prefers energy equities around 12 times earnings, especially Canadian oil-sands producers, to the crude itself.
  • He stays bullish gold on continued People's Bank of China buying, the only development that would turn him bearish, prefers cheap miners to the metal, and is eyeing agriculture, refiners, and biotech as the next of his rolling mini bubbles.

John Loder's takeaways

  • Top takeaway John presents GMO data showing 60/40 portfolios have repeatedly suffered lost decades since 1900 and says there is a good chance we are in one now, while stressing these valuation gauges say nothing about short-term timing.
  • He reminds viewers that lost decades are not gentle: the Nasdaq rose about 80% from October 1999 to its March 2000 peak, then fell more than 80% and took roughly 15 years to regain that high.
  • He shows a retirement plan for a hypothetical $2.7 million client that looks sound on average-return assumptions but runs out of money when replayed with the actual 2000-2025 return sequence, urging near-retirees to stress-test their plans.
  • He says New Harbor is near its 50% equity ceiling, would only consider 70-80% equity levels from much lower valuations, and recalls the firm began buying for clients in late 2008, ahead of the March 2009 bottom.