The Confidence Map: Navigating Investor Sentiment (With Peter Atwater)

KATHY JONES: I'm Kathy Jones.

LIZ ANN SONDERS: And I'm Liz Ann Sonders.

KATHY: And this is On Investing, an original podcast from Charles Schwab. Each week we analyze what's happening in the markets and discuss how it might affect your investments.

Well, hi, Liz Ann. Last week, we discussed the reopening of the government, which I think in terms of data collection is a very good thing. But what is going on with the stock market since then?

LIZ ANN: Yeah, so, you know, we're in another interesting bout with some rotation happening with some weakness up the cap spectrum into some of the prior darlings.

You've had a pretty meaningful rollover in a good chunk of the Magnificent Seven—in particular, Nvidia. Always want to remind people that we don't cover individual stocks, but these days you can't talk about—air quotes around—"the market" without talking about a small handful of stocks because of just what powerful drivers they are in terms of contribution to returns.

And as you and I are taping this, we're in the part of the day where the market is open, but post-close today, as we're taping this, Nvidia will report earnings. So that could be a market mover in one direction or another. I'm not going to opine on whether they're going to beat or miss, or if they beat, by how much, or what the market reaction's going to be, but that certainly has represented a proxy for some of these prior high flyers.

But you've had some interesting rotations under the surface. You're seeing segments of the market that had kind of been left for dead during the period where tech and communication services and consumer discretionary, what I often call the growth trio of sectors, had been consistently in the leadership spot. And now on a month-to-date basis, the best performer is health care—so a little bit of a shift toward more classically defensive areas. I think a sector like health care maybe has garnered some attention because of an improving earnings profile looking ahead, and the fact that, by nature of just the descriptor "rotation," means you rotate into maybe areas that had performed and take profits in areas that had done well. Evaluation has been a broad concern for the market, and I think that's led to some of this skittishness. But the rotation story is not a new story. It's been going on for a while, and the concentration in the market is not a new story—a little bit of an improvement though.

One of the ways that I look at this is to look at what percentage of the S&P 500® as an index, what percentage of the constituents are outperforming the index itself over a variety of look-back time periods. And over the past six months, which essentially encapsulates the period since the, you know, early April initial announcement of tariffs, only 18% of the S&P 500's constituents have outperformed the index itself. But over the past one month, that's doubled to 36%. Now that's not a wildly robust number by any means historically, but certainly an improvement. So that's what can happen sometimes is you see very clearly weakness in the so-called "the market" when you've got some of the high flyers having a bout of some weaker performance, and that adds to the downside at the index level because of the multiplier of their cap size—yet some interesting opportunities present themselves under the surface. And you see that the market is more than just a market of five or six stocks, but a market of 500 stocks in the case of the S&P 500. So I think these bouts of rotation, I think, are likely to continue. And a healthy backdrop could be a continued pullback phase in some of the high flyers, but more of the so-called "soldiers" kind of catching up to the front lines.

So that's what I'm thinking of most recently in the market. How about you? What's been going on in your world?

KATHY: Yeah, well, in the fixed income world, the only real news we've had, because the data flow has been so light, is the change in tone from the Federal Reserve. And that happened, of course, after the last Fed meeting last month. And I think that there's a growing realization from the various speeches from various people on the Fed that the push to lower rates is going to be slower rather than faster. And that may have contributed to some of the stock market declines—maybe the idea that this was all going to just keep going with the Fed cutting rates real rapidly. And I think that we've a little bit of a wakeup call there in the sense that, you know, inflation is still too high. It's still 3%-ish. Now we'll get some new numbers coming out. Maybe that will change the picture. And that means the Fed has kind of got its hands tied until it really gets evidence of whether or not that's going to come down or whether the employment picture is really deteriorating as much as some believe. But we don't have good numbers on that. We'll get some more pretty soon.

But even when we get those reports, I think we have to take them with a grain of salt because, you know, the process of collecting the data has been interrupted for so long that we don't know if it's really good clean data yet or if it's going to be subject to some big revisions, which it normally is anyway. But this time we could get even bigger revisions. So getting a clear picture of the labor market is going to be really tough, and I think that that holds back the Fed from cutting aggressively—and inflation holds the Fed back. So I think that's permeating the market.

And what we've seen is 10-year Treasury yields just bouncing around 4.10-ish for the longest time. The shorter end of the curve is bouncing around. Every data point that we get moves it on expectations of what the Fed might do. And then we have the various speeches from various Fed officials, which are … some pushing back, some pushing for cuts, some in the middle. And then the question marks around the rotation of voting members of the Fed, Fed Chair Powell's retirement, who will replace him. So it seems like a market that's kind of on hold—kind of on hold, very uncertain, very unsure of where to go next. And I think that it's going to take a little time to get there.

The good news is, if you're a bond investor, these yields are still pretty attractive, and you're just clipping the coupon, and volatility's been low, and it's actually not been a bad year.

LIZ ANN: Even if you're an equity investor, those yields are pretty nice …

KATHY: Yeah, yeah.

LIZ ANN: Without some of the headache. Haha.

KATHY: Exactly, exactly. So I do think we're kind of sitting here, and being calm is a good thing for investors in the bond market. I'm not sure that's going to persist. I feel like as we get into the new year in particular, we start to get up to date on data, the chances for some volatility picking up are pretty good. But at the moment, we're kind of in this in-between world, which seems to be OK.

With that, Liz Ann, you've got a very interesting guest today on the podcast. Why don't you tell us about him?

LIZ ANN: Yeah, I'd love to. So our guest this week is Peter Atwater.

Peter is president of Financial Insyghts and an adjunct professor at William & Mary and the University of Delaware. He studies the impact of changing confidence on consumer decision-making and advises investors, businesses, and policymakers.

He popularized the term "K-shaped recovery." That's something that has been very much part of our work over the past five post-COVID years. And it helps to describe what initially was the pandemic's effects on the economy, but we continue to see a lot of those bifurcations.

Atwater previously ran JP Morgan's asset-backed securities business and served in executive roles at First USA, Bank One, and Juniper Financial.

Peter is the author of several books on investing confidence, most recently a great book called The Confidence Map: Charting a Path from Chaos to Clarity, and we'll have a link to that in our show notes.

LIZ ANN: So Peter, I'm so thrilled. Thank you for being here today.

PETER ATWATER: Thanks so much, Liz Ann. It's great to be here.

LIZ ANN: And thank you for sending me your book, The Confidence Map, which was so fantastic.

And I just want to sort of tee up the book a little bit and let you explain what exactly the Confidence Map is. But I want to weave a thought that I have that … you had written about it, and I've heard you speak about it—it so resonated with me.

So you argue in the book that our sense of confidence and how much control we have, how certain we feel about the present and the future is obviously fundamental to how we make decisions, how we respond to risk, how we perceive opportunities, but you do it in such a unique way. So I want you to lay out what exactly this Confidence Map is, but you also … you address it in the book, but you said it in a recent interview, and it was one of those moments where I said, "Oh, that's what I've been saying." I've been saying that I hate the word "uncertainty." And I think it's such a silly descriptor, especially when the market hates uncertainty, as if there's ever a moment of certainty where we wake up and the news is "Everything is known. Everything is certain." And I've been saying that I think that maybe the more applicable "un-" word in the current environment is "unstable."

So first, just lay out the Confidence Map, but then maybe weave in your thinking on maybe the silliness of this notion of uncertainty.

PETER: Great. So I started teaching a class on confidence and decision-making and realized shortly into it that I didn't know what confidence actually was. I knew what it looked like. I knew sort of the confidence theater that dominates culture today. But I had to take a step back to say, "What is this thing that gets so much attention in our lives?"

And ultimately, I concluded that, to feel confident, we need two feelings at the same time. One is that we need to feel that things are certain, that we feel there's predictability to what is ahead. But that's not enough. I can know that the road is straight ahead of me, but if I don't know how to drive the car, I'm not going to feel good behind the wheel. And so to feel confident, I need that predictability, but I also need a sense of control, that I have the skills I practiced, rehearsed, trained. I'm ready for what comes in the future that I imagine. And from that, it became very easy to see that when we have confidence, we feel certain and in control. And when we don't, we feel uncertain and powerless.

In this process, I concluded that the opposite of confidence is actually vulnerability. If you think about when we feel vulnerable, it's because we don't have certainty. We don't feel like we have control of the situation. I often talk not about overconfidence, but about feelings of invulnerability because it gives me a much better sense as to what's going on in people's heads.

What I didn't expect was that there are these fascinating environments where we have either certainty or control. And so if I plot certainty on the x-axis and control on the y-axis, I now have a two-by-two chart. Upper right-hand box, certainty and control, I call that the "comfort zone" because we feel relaxed and easy. Lower left-hand corner, stress center, it's where all anxiety rests because we don't have certainty and control.

There's a lower right-hand box where we have certainty but no control. And that one I think of as the passenger seat. That we hope we have certainty, we hope things resolve well, but we know we don't have control. And interestingly, that environment also characterizes a prison, which is why when you get on the roller coaster, some people are excited and optimistic. They're cool with the uncertainty …

LIZ ANN: That's me.

PETER: … and then there are others who feel like they're trapped. So this is a really fragile environment, and we can talk more about that.

But the more interesting environment I think is the one that you and others in the investing world are involved in every day—and I call this the "launch pad," where you have control but no certainty. And every financial decision in our lives is made there—investing, saving, lending, borrowing. What makes finance unique is we're making decisions today where the outcome is unknown.

And so to your point, I hate the word "uncertainty." It's like fingernails on a chalkboard today.

LIZ ANN: Haha.

PETER: But what that word says to me is not that the world is uncertain. The world is always uncertain, as I remind my students. Anytime we're talking about the future, we have to imagine it. But what uncertainty says is that we feel uncertain, not that the world is uncertain. And so that level of uncertainty that we feel begins to impact the kinds of choices we make. If you're a CEO facing uncertainty, you now need to overcompensate for that by taking control of the things you can control.

LIZ ANN: There was a couple of quotes on this subject of confidence, and I am going to read for our listeners one of them that I thought sort of brilliantly laid this out about confidence being finite: "Our range of confidence is finite, and if we can look at panic, powerlessness, and extreme uncertainty objectively, we can avoid getting caught up in the high emotions that accompany them. Rather than fearing what is next, we can prepare for the better times that are likely to be ahead. Moreover, if we can adopt a vulnerability first mindset, we can more effectively lead others through these challenging times." Talk about that in the context of the act of investing living in that launch pad zone.

PETER: So investors feel like they're either in the comfort zone or the stress center, and they never are. And so they need to remember that that's all a function of your feelings and the stories that you then associate with it.

I joke that panic is God's way of telling us that the worst is behind us. That whenever I see panic occurring, I immediately visualize someone rapidly approaching the end of that finite spectrum. The trolley car is about to hit the bumper and reverse. And so whenever we sense panic, or we see panic in the markets, we need to recognize that, "Oh, that only happens near lows in confidence." That's a low in confidence expressing itself. And if you can look at panic and all of extreme emotions objectively, then you can be clear about your decision-making.

And I think that we see the same response at the other end of the spectrum where people feel invulnerable. Invulnerability has lots of indicators to it. And so we need to be careful because investors make their worst decisions at the extremes. They pile in at the top and they run away at the bottom.

LIZ ANN: Again, you know, growing up in this business in the school of Marty Zweig and understanding the power of sentiment at extremes, couldn't agree with you more.

More recently, there doesn't seem to be a lot of panic. There's a lot more sort of speculative fervor, enthusiasm. But it's also become a very narrative-driven backdrop, a narrative-driven market.

And you talk a little bit about … what you say are, "The stories we tell ourselves, like popular narratives, these stories to exist in equilibrium with our own feelings and actions. Moreover, they feel the same kind of virtuous and vicious cycles leading to simple, powerful, and over-extrapolated narratives that exist at both extremes in confidence. We tell ourselves we are invincible at our peaks in confidence and that we're worthless at our lows." What specific times in various cycles do you think about or were you thinking about when you wrote that particular comment?

PETER: I look at narratives almost like tiles in a mosaic. And at extremes in sentiment, the crowd has a consistent narrative. The narrative is loud. And it's powerful. And you can feel the energy to it because there's an implied word, "will," in it—that "this will happen." It's not, "it should, it might." No, "it will happen." And markets have always been social networks and narrative-driven.

What's different about the markets today is the narratives are on constant display. When you and I started our careers, you would see the narratives every morning when you picked up TheWall Street Journal or the Financial Times. Then we sort of moved to CNN, but now the narratives are everywhere. And as a researcher, it's what makes social media such a valuable tool to me, because it just pops off the screen.

LIZ ANN: But that's one of the perils. I have a, I would say, maybe a like-hate relationship with social media, not a love-hate relationship. I think it's great for dissemination of information if you, to put it in simple terms, if you know how to use it. It's understanding that separation between noise and purpose and what matters.

So talk about that in the context of the current market environment and whether you view it as maybe not all toxicity, but the narrowness and how it fuels our fears and our beliefs and the echo chamber and how that has impacted investing—not to mention the fact that we've just got … I agree that for the most part investment decision-making lives in that "launch pad" category, but there's also a lot of investors out there that are purely approaching this from a gambling perspective and a get-rich-quick and all the acronyms that have come about it.

So how can your work maybe help that newer, younger, trading-oriented, gambling-oriented folk?

PETER: So when I think about a topic on social media, by the time we see it, it's about 80% through its cycle. So appreciate that anything that is trending on social media is trending because 80, maybe 90% of the crowd is already into it. And so you need to be very careful with your time horizons and to realize that the louder that drum on social media is, the more likely it is to be followed by absolute silence. That the volume, the power of those messages, the breadth of them, they move so quickly that it becomes like serial dating for investors, not investing—that they're trying to pick this morning's trade, not thinking thoughtfully about an investment cycle and long-term consequences. And I think that implicit in a lot of market behavior today is what I call "me, here, now" thinking—that the focus is intensely narrow on the most obvious, and it's why you see this consequence with meme stocks where the crowd descends on one thing at once. But we also see that, moments later, those that are even hours late into it are devastated by the subsequent price declines. And I think social media needs to be treated, to your point, a lot more as noise than it is about an indication of where in an investment cycle the markets really may be.

LIZ ANN: You wrote in the book about a shortcoming to what might be considered standard portfolio construction processes. And I absolutely love this … as I was dog earing your book and pink highlighter everywhere and notes going, I have a triple star on this particular quote where you said, "To obtain the real benefits of diversification, investors should consider more than just historical asset correlations.[1] For an investment portfolio to be balanced, there needs to be confidence diversification. A well-diversified portfolio needs to hold a mix of assets where there is simultaneously rising investor confidence, falling investor confidence, investor euphoria, and investor hopelessness. And without that, changes in investment sentiment lead to lockstep movements in price. When constructing portfolios, investment managers should consider the investor sentiment, what they're buying, and avoid buying too much of one mood." Boy, that was brilliant, just phenomenal. So expand.

PETER: So what makes assets correlate up and down is the rise or fall in sentiment in similar things at once. And if you look at the time that I was writing the book, this was during COVID, coming out of COVID. And we could see this incredible correlation between bond yields going down, stock prices going up. It was an "everything wins" market. And then we had the offset in 2022 into 2023, where it was the "nothing worked" market. And nothing worked because mood was falling in everything at the same time. And I get into some pretty interesting arguments with professional investors who say that history matters when it comes to correlation. And I said, "No, current mood is what matters."

And we can see that, for example, today—if I look at the portfolio experience in AI stocks, with gambling stocks … very interesting to me that if you were to track the performance of the ETF that looks at the most popular things on social media, and you look at the ETF which looks at innovative technology, their performances are indistinguishable. And what it says to me is, "OK, we've identified where confidence is tightly tethered together, and so these ships will rise and fall as one." And for investors, it seems very counterintuitive to put something in your portfolio that you wince at, that you feel like you're lighting money on fire at a time when you have everything else in your portfolio doing really well. People think these multicolored pie charts are what creates diversification. And I encourage them, look at each slice. What's its temperature? If every slice in the pie is hot, you don't have the diversification that you think you do.

LIZ ANN: Yeah, and that's sort of at the heart, to mention a very traditional discipline, that's essentially a different way to think about what rebalancing is. Rebalancing, assuming you have a broadly diversified portfolio, you are going against the grain. You're going against human emotion by adding into where pockets of the portfolio have suffered greatly, and you're trimming away from …

And you know, in theory, we sit down and that makes sense. "Yep, I can do that. Let's absolutely establish that." But it goes against the grain where it's not human nature for us to lean into where there is not a lot of optimism. But that is ultimately one of the keys to success.

PETER: Yeah, portfolio rebalancing, and just remembering, it's great to plan for what you can imagine, but the role of an investor is also to be prepared for what you can't. And things like rebalancing put us in a position of having to be mindful of the future we can't imagine. Because more than anything, it is those circumstances—we saw this during COVID—where investors find themselves really offsides, that sentiment changes quickly and dramatically.

LIZ ANN: Now, we touched a little bit on sort of the gambling mentality and the day traders, which tend to skew male and skew younger. So going back to your Confidence Map, do you find that there's a generational difference? You know, using maybe the generic generations of Silent, Boomers, you know, X, Y, Z—and where, as generations, do they tend to cluster in any of these boxes uniquely relative to other generations?

PETER: Yeah, so what is so interesting to me about the younger generation today is they were raised in a post-9/11 environment where uncertainty was viewed as unsafe. And if we look at this era of helicopter parenting, of all of the steps that well-intentioned parents took, they kept their kids out of the launch pad. In fact, I did a survey with a group of school administrators recently and I said … I asked them to plot, you know, drop a pin, where are your students? And very few suggested their students were above the midline, that students were either in the stress center or the passenger seat, where being compliant was a critical skill to success.

And I think of that as like learning to ski in a classroom and never getting out to the ski slopes. And this younger generation is inexperienced in the launch pad. Whether out of choice, out of culture, they don't have the "go outside and play and don't come back till dinner" upbringing that many of our generation did. And then you have a generation before that went to war, who experienced uncertainty and its consequences.

And so when I look at a lot of investors today, particularly the gambling ones, on the surface you would say that they are moving to the launch pad. In fact, it's all about social compliance. Their activity suggests a tremendous want to fit in. And so they will make financial sacrifices in order to be part of the crowd.

LIZ ANN: You know, speaking of that, you … and I don't remember whether you addressed it in the book, but your recent interview that did with our friend Grant Williams on his terrific, one of his terrific series of podcasts, you said that the motivation … I want to talk about the motivation now to leave the passenger seat. 

You said it's ultimately aided by and helped by, you get there by … when it's a crowd of people doing it. So it's not just the crowds and conformity kind of pigeonholing certain people into a box. What is it that gets people, those kind of people that have that connectivity with compliance, to get out of the … is it truly just when everybody else collectively is coming together to do it?

PETER: Yeah, I mean, the passenger seat is the land of the follower. You know, if you think about the rise of authoritarianism, you have a bunch of people in the stress center feeling powerless and uncertain. Our easiest response is not fight-or-flight; it's follow. "All I have to do is get in line. I don't have to be strong. I don't have to have resources. I just have to do is get in line."

And so we have a lot of followership as a key behavior in society today. But to move to the launch pad, to your point, they will go together. They'll jump off the bridge as a crowd. They will do things as a crowd. And we see this with a lot of social activism, where it takes a lot of people in a square to draw even more to overflowing.

LIZ ANN: Now I want to shift gears a little bit to something else that you have been speaking about, particularly recently, that I've also been writing about on and off for many, many years, particularly going back to the pandemic era, which is the whole notion of the "K-shape" and whether you define it as "haves" and "have-nots."

So lay out your perspective right now of how you view the K. You've also likened it to a Jenga tower. So I want you to give our listeners that perspective and maybe where you see us going from here in terms of some of these bifurcations and maybe which get worse from here or maybe where we start to see some convergence.

PETER: Sure, so I started writing about this bifurcation in March 2020. And the first thing I wrote was this very awkwardly titled "The Work-From-Home Confidence Divide." Because I saw white collar workers' confidence immediately rebound when they could work from home. Blue collar workers' life continued to get bad. Economists were grabbing letters. I grabbed the letter K because that seemed to capture it the best.

Since then, as has now become clear, those divides have widened. And I care as much about the confidence divide as I do the economic divide, because that confidence divide has implications politically, socially, lots of other important elements to it.

But what I think is so important right now is the term the "K-shaped economy" is now ubiquitous. It's easily understood. It's on the lips of policymakers, CEOs. At all levels of society, there is a recognition that this divided economy exists. And what I've learned is that when narratives become common knowledge, that's the beginning of the end for them. And so what I hear as people talk about the "K-shaped economy" is it's become so extreme, something needs to be done about it.

And so not surprisingly, you're hearing the word "affordability." And so I think those who are in a position to do something about affordability should be very attuned to that and responsive to that because if we can put a floor on the confidence level of those at the bottom, we will avoid outright desperation. And that's the danger in this, is that we have a very small population of people who feel invulnerable in a mounting sea of despair. And history's not kind to that. So it will also be interesting to watch those at the top because I use the term "the Jenga tower," and it's a top-heavy Jenga tower today. Greg Daco has a great sort of three-part … he calls them "pillars" of … that's sustaining our economy: AI, wealth at the top, a soaring stock market. I look at those as three interconnected log flumes because the liquidity is flowing from one to the other to the other. And that connectivity is important because it suggests that if one element of that stops, the risk is that all three of those stop at once.

And if I look down the economy, the foundation doesn't look stable. So we need to be very careful about how do we strengthen the core below and be cognizant of the interconnectivity that exists at the top, because trying to temper that runs the risk of tempering it all at once.

LIZ ANN: Do you have optimism on that front—strengthening the bottom, the lower part of the K, through strength of their own policy changes, playing a bit of catch up?

I read your post citing Greg Daco and how they're all interconnected, and they're sort of hovering over Main Street. So is there an optimistic convergence here that could happen without that little peg pulled out that topples the whole thing?

PETER: I hope so. I hope that those in Washington and in corporate leadership take the initiative to address it. What's been disheartening to me is, for the last five years, those on both sides of the aisle have appeared disinterested in addressing this. They need to.

And I think that both sides underappreciate how purple the bottom of our economy is. It's not a red or blue state issue. This is despair that transcends political affiliation, and the risk is that they will unite, with or without the two established parties acting. So to me, time is of the essence.

LIZ ANN: That's a great way to end—with reality, but maybe a tinge of optimism. That's what I try to bring into the mix every time I write and speak.

It is such a treat. I could spend another two hours talking to you about this, but we appreciate your approach to this, I think, which is extraordinarily unique.

I highly recommend the book, The Confidence Map. It's so fascinating to read. I don't have a lot of time to read books from beginning to end, and I pretty much read the entire book. But I highly recommend the book and so thrilled that you agreed to join us today. So thank you.

PETER: Thank you. It's wonderful to finally have a chance to speak with you.

KATHY: So Liz Ann, as we look ahead to the holidays next week, what do you think investors should be paying attention to?

LIZ ANN: Well, you and I are taping this in advance of the release of the September jobs report. The government wasn't shut down during both the collection period and the reference period to when the surveys were conducted and everything was tabulated. But of course, it's at least slightly rear-view mirror, but absent other official labor market data, that is interesting.

We get additional housing data. There's some slight improvements in some metrics within housing. I'd say it's fledgling.

We get the Conference Board's version of consumer confidence. That's in a similar survey as what UMich does to generate consumer sentiment. I guess the good news or bad news, whatever your perspective is, is consumer confidence doesn't tend to be as biased in terms of what political party you sit in—tends to be driven more by what's going on in the labor market. So I'll keep an eye on that.

And then we get a GDP reading for the third quarter, and that's been delayed as well.

And then I think at the end of next week, we get the PCE version of inflation, which is Personal Consumption Expenditures Price Index.

So aside from those, which, you know, certainly impact your world too, what's on your radar.

KATHY: Yeah, we'll be getting the minutes from the last FOMC meeting, Federal Open Market Committee meeting. And this is the one where we had those two dissents in both directions. So it's going to be interesting to see just the notes on that—how it's characterized in the minutes, and what the conversation was about around that. Normally the FOMC minutes are not too revealing. They give us maybe a little shade of bias one direction or another. This one's going to be interesting, I think, because you do have very different points of view on the committee. And it should be interesting to see where others kind of lined up around that. So waiting to take a look at those and see what the details are on that.

We did get news that the quarterly refunding composition is not going to change. The Treasury will still be issuing a lot of Treasury bills for the time being. So that's interesting to the bond market in the sense that we'll be watching some of those auctions to see how things go.

But really, we're all just waiting for the data flow to pick up. It's been such a strange time for us who live and die by these reports to be without it. So I think that that's going to be really important.

LIZ ANN: So that's it for us this week. Thanks as always for listening. As a reminder, you can keep up with us in real time on social media. I'm @LizAnnSonders on X and LinkedIn. Please remember to make sure you are following the real me. Still lots of imposters.

KATHY: And I'm @KathyJones on X and LinkedIn. That's Kathy with a K.

And you can also read all of our written reports, including charts and graphs, at schwab.com/learn.

And if you've enjoyed the show, we'd be really grateful if you'd leave us a review on Apple Podcasts or a rating on Spotify or feedback wherever you listen. Or tell a friend or two about the show.

We'll be off for Thanksgiving next week. So we'll be back in two weeks.

KATHY: For important disclosures, see the show notes or visit schwab.com/OnInvesting, where you can also find the transcript.

[1] Correlation is a statistical measure of how two securities move in relation to each other.