And then, for the cherry on top, you now have an investor herd that saw stocks go up despite living through a pandemic, massive civil unrest, and a full economic shutdown for 3 months....you will literally now have an investing world that believes that stocks cannot go down, that the Fed truly has made stock markets risk free.
You're missing a critical point in your cynicism.
The fed has basically nuked any safe investment option. I can't get a 1 year CD better than 1% even to shove some emergency fund money into. For 3 month CDs I'd be luck to see 45 basis points. Bond rates are in the toilet - the 10 year is returning 66bp and the 30 year is at 1.46%.
The result is obvious. People aren't blind to the risk nor do they see the stock market as a risk-free investment. They see it as the only investment that can beat inflation at this point. As it stands money is virtually on fire if it's not invested into an index fund at least. The majority of people can't afford to buy rental properties (probably the only semi-safe investment that could return over inflation) so indexing it is. Naturally this drives a small segment of stocks (the big swinging dicks) up sending indexes higher.
The indexes are divorced from reality. I'm not really using them anymore in my macro analysis of the market.
Last edited: