The S&P 500 has held its 50-day moving average through a Middle East reescalation, higher oil, higher rates and a more hawkish Fed — and Cameron Dawson says that resilience comes down almost entirely to one thing.
Most strategists would call a market trading at 19 times earnings, down from 23 times a year ago, cheaper. Dawson's point is that the multiple compressed for a reason, and the reason is the quality of what's underneath it.
"Always remember price leads data."
Dawson is Chief Investment Officer at NewEdge Wealth, named Institutional Investor's RIA Intel CIO of the Year for 2024, and a returning guest of the show.
I listened to the full interview so you can skip it. 47 minutes of audio, 15 minutes of reading.
Here are the 10 calls that matter.
👤 Guest: Cameron Dawson, Chief Investment Officer at NewEdge Wealth, named Institutional Investor's RIA Intel CIO of the Year for 2024
🎤️ Host: Daniel Moses, a former hedge fund manager and institutional broker whose call on the 2008 housing bubble was chronicled in Michael Lewis's The Big Short
📰 Published: 10 September 2026 on YouTube (On The Tape with Danny Moses)
🔴 YouTube | 🟣 Apple Podcasts | ⏱️ 47 min | ✅ Time saved: 35 min
Key Takeaways
The market has held its 50-day moving average through war, oil spikes and a hawkish Fed purely because earnings have stayed strong, even as the multiple compressed from 23x to 19x
Market breadth has cracked underneath the index, and Mag 7 is the only thing hiding it
The share of stocks above their own 50-day average fell from 70% to 37% in a month; Mag 7 hasn't made a new high since May
Earnings quality inside Mag 7 is deteriorating through accounting choices — reclassified leases, extended payables, and one-time gains on stakes in companies like Anthropic and SpaceX
Her rule for calling a top: "price leads data" — the market starts pricing in falling earnings estimates before the estimates actually roll over
Credit is still telling a positioning story, not a growth-scare story — but CCC spreads have already widened 300 basis points this year
There's little room left to shift Treasury issuance from long bonds into bills, because bills already make up 21% of debt outstanding, near what she calls crisis levels
The median voter has stopped punishing politicians for deficits, and she says fixed-rate mortgages are the reason — 93% of mortgages are still fixed, so most homeowners don't feel higher rates the way they did before 2008
Both the bond short and the dollar long are the most crowded they've been in years, and a Middle East détente pushing oil down $30 a barrel is her scenario for unwinding both at once
Gold trades on technicals and momentum, not on the debasement narrative — it had a blowoff top and a bear market this year while every fundamental "reason" to buy it stayed in place
The Fed decision next week hinges on one distinction: a hike read as one-and-done doesn't move long bonds much; a hike read as the start of a tightening campaign could trigger a flight-to-safety rally in them
1. Earnings, and Nothing Else
Daniel Moses opened by asking Dawson to size up a market that keeps absorbing bad news without breaking. Her answer starts with what the index has survived, not what it's done.
"Yeah, I think first taking a moment to appreciate that effectively we have held so resolutely this 50-day moving average over the course of the last couple of months."
The list of things the market shrugged off is long: a reescalation of war, higher oil prices, higher interest rates, a more hawkish Fed repricing toward more hikes, and large rotations beneath the surface, including bear markets in high-beta momentum names
The 50-day average held even through a dip below it in July, and the index never even tested its 100-day average despite all of the above
The reason, in her account, is not that stocks got cheaper. Valuations actually fell "quite materially" — from about 23 times earnings a year ago in October to 19 times now — while the market kept climbing because earnings growth did the work valuation multiples usually do
She frames the open question for 2027 around whether there's more room for earnings estimates to rise. If the earnings story frays, or even just goes sideways, the macro headwinds — oil, rates, the Fed — lose the buffer that's been absorbing them
2. Mag 7 Is Hiding Bad Breadth
Moses pushed on why mega-cap tech specifically can't repeat this year's earnings growth next year. Dawson's answer reframed the question around what's happening beneath the index rather than within the seven stocks themselves.
Breadth has deteriorated sharply in a single month. "Take for example the statistic where at the beginning of August 70% of names were above their 50-day. Today that number is 37%"
The index hasn't cracked only because Mag 7 has become its ballast. But those same stocks "hasn't made a new high since May" — the "sitting, waiting, wishing" line from her own research note, borrowed from a Jack Johnson song
Where the multiple has compressed most is inside Mag 7 itself, and she ties that directly to a change in earnings quality rather than to sentiment
3. The Accounting Behind It
Asked to connect the dots between accounting choices and valuation, Dawson laid out specific mechanisms rather than a general complaint about "quality."
Three accounting shifts are inflating free cash flow at the Mag 7 level: reclassifying operating leases as financing leases, extending payables — which she says shows up in Nvidia's numbers specifically as an extension of receivables — and booking one-time gains on stakes in non-marketable securities
She named the securities behind those one-time gains: "we know that that's SpaceX and that's Anthropic at least in the last quarter with Amazon and Google"
The scale of the distortion is large. Reported growth near 50% drops to about 30% once those non-cash gains are stripped out
Consensus estimates already embed a strange pattern: flat growth from 2Q26 to 2Q27 despite 2Q26 carrying a one-time gain, meaning real operating earnings have to grow just to offset the comparison — and consensus separately expects a "massive recovery" in hyperscaler free cash flow in 2028, not 2027, built on the assumption that AI capex starts paying off two years out rather than one
4. Price Leads Data
Dawson's central framework for timing a market top rests on a distinction between when earnings estimates peak and when the market itself peaks — and she says those two events don't happen at the same time.
"There will be a time where prices will peak before data. Price leads data. Always remember price leads data."
Her long-running rule has been that if 12-month forward earnings estimates make a new high, the market will too. That relationship is what's starting to fray, in her reading — not collapsing, but weakening
She's watching for the market to start pricing in peak earnings before the estimates themselves turn down, which is the mechanism by which a market can fall even while forward estimates are still rising
Her own house view is that 2Q was peak quarterly earnings growth and 2026 is peak annual earnings growth — and markets typically don't award a higher multiple to earnings everyone already knows are peaking, which she says is a second reason behind the multiple compression already underway
She combines that view with quantitative inputs she credits to Renaissance Macro's Jeff deGraaf — his yield-impact model, where yields are typically a headwind to six-month forward returns, and his market-cycle clock combining growth and inflation, both of which are "flashing below average returns"
Her PMI rule for cyclicals follows the same contrarian logic: buy cyclical stocks when PMIs are washed out around 45, not when they're hot above 55 — the same instinct that underlies watching for a peak while consensus is still optimistic
5. Positioning, Not a Scare
Moses raised credit spreads directly, noting they've stayed tight outside of triple-C paper. Dawson used the question to draw a distinction she said matters more than it sounds.
The key distinction is whether the market is repricing positioning and valuation, or pricing in an actual growth scare. "Positioning and valuation reratings are shorter and shallower. Growth scares are deeper and more protracted"
Investors are currently piling into high yield for the all-in yield, not despite higher rates but because of them — base rates moving up while credit spreads tighten is a signal that investors still trust the underlying companies to pay them back
Triple-C bonds are the exception, and the move there is real. Those yields have risen about 300 basis points this year, from roughly 600 to 900 basis points, which she called a possible "canary in a coal mine" without committing to that read
A second, equity-side way to watch the same question is the ratio of banks to utilities, since utilities are typically weaker when rates rise and banks typically benefit. That ratio is in an uptrend now, meaning the market is accepting higher yields without yet pricing real harm to growth — a reversal, she said, would signal yields have finally reached a level that hurts growth
6. Little Room Left for Bills
Moses raised the idea that the Treasury could simply issue less long-term debt to control long yields. Dawson said the room to do that through bills alone is already mostly used up.
Bills already make up 21% of Treasury debt outstanding, which she and Moses both characterized as near crisis levels, leaving little room to shift more issuance from bonds into bills
Issuing more bills also requires continuous growth in money-market balances to absorb them — one reason, she suggested, policymakers may be weighing proposals like $5,000 checks, which drove a surge in money-market balances the last time something similar happened
The alternative — the Treasury or Fed buying long bonds directly — only works when liquidity is already scarce and growth and inflation are weak, conditions that don't currently hold, so pursuing it now would add liquidity into an economy that doesn't obviously need it
7. Why Voters Ignore Deficits
Asked why persistent deficits and rising rates haven't become a political liability the way they did after the financial crisis, Dawson pointed to a specific mechanism rather than general complacency.
She cited Marko Papic's median-voter theorem from his 2020 book, "Geopolitical Alpha": politicians act on what the median voter cares about, and act on nothing else. Today's median voter, in her read, does not care about debt and deficits
The difference from the post-financial-crisis era is housing exposure to rates. Only 7% of mortgages today sit at something other than a fixed rate; 93% are fixed, so rising 10- and 30-year yields aren't hitting most households' monthly payments the way they did heading into 2008
The pain has migrated to credit cards and student loans instead, where she said delinquencies are running at financial-crisis levels among borrowers whose rates do reset
She separately flagged that corporate tax rates are near the lowest of her lifetime, with what she called only one realistic direction for them to move from here
8. Crowded on Both Sides
Moses asked how positioning looks in bonds and the dollar. Dawson's answer treated both as crowded trades that could unwind together on the same catalyst.
CTA positioning in bonds is very light, consistent with a large, persistent short. Her scenario for covering it: "Easily a rally in bonds driven [by] something like a détente in the Middle East that causes oil prices to fall by $30 a barrel," which would pull yields down and likely reprice equity valuations higher — from 19 times toward 20 or 21 times, in her estimate
Dollar longs, measured through international money-market futures, are the most crowded they've been in five years, which is why higher yields haven't been translating into further dollar strength — the buyers who would normally chase that move are already positioned for it
She said dollar-long positioning has partly unwound from its peak but is not yet short or underweight
9. Gold Trades on Technicals
Moses pressed Dawson on gold, noting he isn't fully convinced by her skepticism given the run from under $1,000 to roughly $4,400. Her answer separated the fundamental debasement case from what actually moves the price day to day.
Her core point is that gold's price action and its narrative can diverge for long stretches. "There are plenty of times where debt and deficits got worse... and gold price hasn't rallied and people scratch their heads and say I don't understand why"
This year is her live example. Gold had "a massive blowoff top at the beginning of the year and then had a huge momentum unwind that resulted in a bear market" — while debt and deficits didn't improve, fiscal discipline didn't arrive, dollar debasement didn't reverse, and inflation actually accelerated over the same stretch
Her firm's own view going into the year was that higher inflation would be the worst outcome for gold, because it forces the Fed toward a more inflation-fighting stance — and she said it's no coincidence gold peaked just as geopolitical tensions and oil prices were rising
She does not dismiss the fundamental case entirely — central-bank buying demand is real — but argues technicals have to stay "front of mind" for an asset with no income stream and no earnings to anchor a valuation
10. What the Fed Hinges On
With the Fed meeting the following week and markets pricing roughly even odds of a hike, Moses asked Dawson to walk through both scenarios. Her framework turned on how the market interprets the Fed's intent, not the decision itself.
The market's reaction depends on whether a hike reads as one-and-done or the start of a series. A single 25-basis-point move framed as appeasing markets, in her view, wouldn't do much to tighten financial conditions or move the long end of the curve
A hike framed as an explicit campaign to slow the economy and control inflation is the scenario that could rally long bonds — long-dated Treasuries benefit from a flight-to-safety bid when growth looks softer and inflation looks like it's actually being addressed
Financial conditions are currently the easiest they've been since 2021, which is her starting point for judging whether any Fed action this time actually tightens them
She invoked Jerome Powell's August 2022 "there will be some pain" speech as the reference case — a hiking campaign explicitly framed around inflicting pain to control inflation, whose aftermath, she noted, produced disinflation without the pain actually arriving, and which she credits partly to falling oil prices rather than the Fed alone
She does not expect forward guidance either way, since the current Fed chair has already committed to not giving it — leaving the post-meeting language, not the vote itself, as what actually moves the long end
Bonus Insights
Dawson flagged a warning sign in how policy has been communicated. She's writing a piece for her firm's Substack playing on the film 21 and the book Bringing Down the House, on the idea that telling markets exactly what you're going to do invites them to trade against you: "more information sometimes is bad"
She distinguished the current bond selloff from a genuine flight-to-safety setup. Investors haven't fled risky assets for Treasuries because strong earnings have kept them comfortable in credit and equities — that dynamic, in her framework, is what would have to change for long bonds to catch a real bid
She and Moses agreed the 2000s aren't a meaningful "normal" to compare today's yields against. Even the 2000s ran lower than the 1980s and 1990s; her argument is the trend in yields is higher now, not that levels are reverting to some historical baseline
Products, Companies & Tools Mentioned
Nvidia (Dawson's specific example of extended payables inflating reported free cash flow)
Anthropic and SpaceX (The non-marketable stakes behind Mag 7's one-time investment gains last quarter, alongside Amazon and Google)
Books & Resources Mentioned
Geopolitical Alpha: An Investment Framework for Predicting the Future – Marko Papic (Source of the median-voter theorem Dawson uses to explain why deficits haven't become a political liability)
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