Fundstrat's Tom Lee explains why he sees the S&P 500 hitting 15,000 by 2030

Let's ask the man himself because he's sitting right next to me. Tom Lee, good to see you. Great to see you. Brian. You have not been drinking? No, not recently. Not not not recently, 15,000. I'm just going to sit here and listen. OK. Well, there's a couple of reasons behind this. One is this would be the third time that stocks entered a cycle where annual returns compound at high teens. You know, you had the roaring 20s, and then you had the 50s through the late 60s. And this is a third cycle. They all coincided with a surge in the number of people aged 30 to 50. So in other words, the number of prime age adults. And this time, it's powered by millennials and Gen. Z. So is this the law? OK, so math, I wasn't not great at math, but I'd like to think I know a little bit. Big numbers get bigger faster that that compounding. That's right. And you think there's there's that, but there's also this massive wave of people about to enter their peak earnings years. Yeah. So it's a demographics. Exactly. It's a demand story, meaning when you get to your prime years, 30 to 50 year, you know, Urban Institute shows you start to borrow more money, you're making big life decisions. This is what powers the economy. On top of that, we have a, A really a big opportunity for US technology companies because of AI, which is supplying the global digital labor, because there's a global labor shortage. So these two forces are combining to I think power almost a decade of extraordinarily good stock returns. Do you have a view? Is this because we're the United States? I mean, and do you expect that a lot of money from around the world because they've got China's got massive demographic issues. Germany shot itself from the put foot with all of its energy problems. Will we be helped by a lot of money coming into America or does that have nothing to do with it? It's actually both. There's, I think that there's going to be a lot of dollars spent on US technology product because the world is short 80 million workers by the end of this decade. That's roughly 3 trillion of Labor shortage of Labor salary that's turning turning into silicon. So that means US suppliers of silicon and AI are going to, you know, have a $3 trillion revenue run rate. On top of that, if the US companies are growing earnings at this speed, the PE multiple, the US should go up. And that's exactly your point. There's going to be capital flows into the US. And, you know, where else in the world do you find the best and most important technology companies? They're all basically in America. They're all here. I mean, we, it's amazing to me that that NVIDIA alone, folks, NVIDIA by itself is worth 50% more than the entire German DAX index of stocks combined. The 30 biggest companies in Germany or have 33, however many are in the DAX combined are half the size of NVIDIA because we have liquid capital markets, We have American ingenuity. We have an amazing workforce. 25% of of company founders, by the way, are not born here because we allow a lot of immigration. It's a bold call. What's the risk when you look at you've always got to analyze, say, well, where can I be wrong? Right? Yep. Well, I think there's a risk that we could have a global recession, a global recession. AI, of course, could become an ad, an adversarial development and you know, up end state nations and cause chaos. But we could also have a risk that it's a bubble and it peaks a lot sooner. Yeah. You wonder, by the way, this a little bit off topic, but I saw some huge bets being placed. And there was a note today, like you, forgive me, senior moment. I can't remember exactly who put it out there, but that there was a huge bet placed in the interest rate market that the 10 year would be at 2.25% in by like next March, that there'd be this massive decline in yields either because of the Fed recession, whatever. You have a take on that. I mean, that's that obviously is a very cheap bet because I'm sure the skew is for higher rates lower. So it's got like a high, you know, high risk but high reward bet. Yeah, with not, well, not high risk because you're not betting a lot of money, but the odds are you're going to lose. Yeah. It's like a Black Swan kind of trade. I think it's possible because, you know, inflation internals are collapsing. I think the, the headline core CPI and we'll get Friday PCE, they're being propped up by housing and auto insurance, which are two components. But the rest of the CPI index, you know, 55% of the CPI basket is below pre pandemic inflation rates. Now it's the highest in four years. The 20 year average is 50%. So inflation is tanking except for the home and auto insurance. That's a big deal. But by the way, I heard there's going to be some big rate increases coming to New Jersey, folks, by the way.