ght. Are there any Trump supporters who are gonna say, "Well, that was impossible. No, no, there's not a single Trump supporter who's gonna say, well, that was impossible. I don't know how it happened." They all think it's possible because they all think that the polls are wrong, pretty much universally. So poor Democrats are going to have a tough time if it goes that way.

So the stock market pulled back quite a bit at the end of the week. Especially, was that predictable? Did you predict that the stock market would have a big pullback the week or so before the election? The election's already going on, but did you predict that? I did.

Now, I don't know if it happened because of the following reasons, which were the basis of my prediction, but you decide. Here's why I believed the stocks would pull back. Number one, obviously Pelosi was going to keep killing the stimulus bills with poison pills so that the economy would be frightened by not getting these relief packages. Essentially. And so since Pelosi had the power to stop that legislation, you knew that that was one reason that the stock market would get skittish. Right? So that part everybody knew about. That part.

But here's the part that I submit to you was obvious and predictable if you understood how the world works. You know, if you had enough of a talent stack to understand everything from persuasion to politics to business. Here's what you would see. The stock market is tied to CEOs predicting how they will do next year. Are you with me?

The main driver of the stock market, there are lots of externalities like interest rates and outside shocks. But primarily, primarily, despite all those outside things, primarily the stock market works on what the CEOs say will happen next year. Which is, is that a fact? When CEOs say, "I think that our earnings next year will be up 10%," is that a fact? No, it is not. It's an opinion and it's subjective and it is subject to a wide variety of possible things a CEO could say. And indeed they could have one opinion and yet express it an infinite number of ways depending if they wanted you to feel a little bit optimistic or a little bit pessimistic. Am I right?

And let's say those CEOs were mostly anti-Trump. Let's say. And I'll just pick one as an example, and this is not an accusation. I'll just use it as an example. Suppose you were the CEO of a major tech company and let's suppose that you did not like President Trump and did not want him to be reelected. And suppose you looked at your earnings and there were two ways that you could describe them. One was really optimistic, and let's say the data supported that. But the other was less optimistic, and let's say the data also supported that. Which would not be unusual because remember it's very subjective. It's how much optimism you're going to put on and what kind of assumptions do you make, etc.

So now you're a CEO of a major company and you don't want Trump to get elected. How do you frame your earnings? You frame them a little bit ambiguously and you say we can't tell what's going to happen next year. We'd like it to go well but so much uncertainty. We certainly can't tell.

Now when the market hears the CEO say that they have uncertainty, what do they do? They sell their damn stocks. Because you don't want to own stocks when there's great uncertainty. Certainty is the best thing you can have, as long as it's a positive certainty, of course.

So all of your CEOs who are reporting earnings in this week before the election, do you think that they chose to describe their earnings in the future, the ones that are subjective, that are an opinion? Do you think that they maybe took a little off it, just pulled back a little bit on the optimism? Because if you don't think they did that, you don't know anything about people. Even if they didn't want to do that, even if they didn't consciously say to themselves, I'm going to go out there and I'm going to try to move the stocks because that'll hurt the president. Even if they weren't thinking it, if they were anti-Trump, they knew which answer was the good one for their team. Right?

So if you have enough CEOs who have this bias, which is I don't want to make it look like it's too much good news. Now normally you'd want your CEO would want to say good news so the stock would go up and they'd look like a star. But keep in mind they only have to keep this illusion of bad news or ambiguous news or a lack of clarity. They only have to maintain this for about a month, just to get past the election, and then say, well, I guess we got some new information and it looks like things are better than we thought. Very easy to adjust