OK, so my Detroit Lions aren’t going to win the Super Bowl this year, thanks to that teeth-gnashing final loss last weekend. But it was a heckuva ride, my son and I had a great time and built some great memories watching the season and going to a playoff game in Detroit, and it’s been the first really fun year of Lions fandom in almost a decade… though rising expectations meant that loss to the 49ers on Sunday was certainly more emotionally jarring than most of my 35+ years of following the Lions. It’s going to be strange to support a team that other people expect to be a winner, but I’ll learn to live with it.

The old saying may be true, “the secret to happiness is low expectations” … but raising your expectations really does make it possible to dream of greatness, and I do think that works out better in the end.  Even if it creates a lot more emotional turbulence.  Happiness and emotional stability are important, but they aren’t everything. At least some of us have to have crazy ambition, too, at least some of the time, or the world won’t keep moving forward.

We had both another Federal Reserve meeting this week, which turned out to be another “no real surprise” meeting (rates stay the same, they’ll probably cut at some point, but maybe the optimists got a little too cut-happy going into the meeting), but more interesting in real-world terms was our first really big week of earnings reports, with Microsoft, Alphabet, AMD, Meta Platforms, and Amazon all on tap to give us a better picture of the digital economy and the impact of A.I. on big-tech profits, along with a slew of other companies of interest.

There are not a lot of clear and super-discounted “buy” opportunities out there, which is probably why not many stocks are below my “preferred buy” price today, but that’s to be expected in a bull market where there’s still a fair amount of optimism in most share prices. Overall valuations are not at a multi-generational peak like they were two years ago, to some degree we’ve “grown into” at least a slightly more reasonable valuation, even with the AI surge and the tech stock recovery in 2023, but in the broadest terms, the market is still trading well above it’s historical average valuations… particularly ...