I got a call last night from my friend Brian Lund.
He said, “We’ve never seen another market like the one we had in the late 1990s… but are we starting to see it again?”
He didn’t know. That’s why he was asking me—because I was there. I traded through it. And he’s reaching out to others who were there too.
Truth is, I don’t know either.
But I’ll admit, he got me thinking.
Then he asked a deeper question: “If this is like the late 90s, then how far along are we? What would we need to see?”
My answer—just a wild guess, really—was this:
We’d need a theme or sector to run absolutely wild. In the late 90s, it was the internet. Dot com everything. IPOs going parabolic. Every day a new mania.
But we’ll need to see more. More names. More insane moves like this one in $QS blasting off in recent weeks...
I told him: “We might only be in the summer of ’98 right now.”
For context: in 1998, Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM)—a massively leveraged hedge fund—blew up. Took markets down with it. It was scary.
The government stepped in, stabilized the system… and then the Nasdaq doubled in under two years.
Could this recent tariffs panic be this cycle’s LTCM moment?
I don’t know. It doesn't feel as severe to me (though the news media will convince you otherwise). And honestly, it probably doesn’t even matter.
Could the Nasdaq double again from here in the next two years?
It could. It wouldn’t surprise me.
We’ve got the ingredients. We’ve got the right kind of pumpers and useful idiots in the White House. We’ve got speculative energy building. The question is: do we have the imagination to believe it could happen?
Stay open.
It’s a bull market, you know…
Sean McLaughlin | Chief Options Strategist, All Star Charts
