Sleight of Hand: The Market Isn’t At All-Time Highs

The S&P 500 keeps printing new highs.

Headlines celebrate “breakouts.” The internet loves it, claiming, “Stocks only go up!” in my comment section.

And who wouldn’t want to cheer?

Most investors feel fully invested by default, not because they made an active decision, but because being long stocks is the baseline state of modern portfolios and retirement savings.

That’s the surface narrative.

But my whole line of inquiry started somewhere else.

I was looking at the S&P priced in high-yield currencies (places like the Mexican peso and Brazilian real), trying to understand how much of the U.S. equity rally was really equity strength, and how much was just the dollar doing the work.

In those currencies, the S&P didn’t look like it was ripping. In several cases, we actually finished down in 2025, far from the +16% headline. That’s when the question shifted.

Now, markets don’t exist in a vacuum. Price only has meaning relative to the unit you measure it in. And if changing the currency already altered the story, what happens when you remove fiat from the equation entirely?

That’s when the picture changed dramatically.

In gold terms, U.S. equities are not at all-time highs. They are back at cycle lows, retesting levels last seen in 2016 and 2020.

In Bitcoin terms, the picture is even more extreme when zooming out.

The same market that feels like it’s breaking out in dollars is, in scarce-asset terms, still digging out of a hole.

As always, there’s an opportunity here.