The Market Doesn’t Care What You Think Is “Too High”
Leadership persists until the data — not opinion — says otherwise.
Leaders Keep Leading
There’s an old conversation in Market Wizards that every trader should memorize.
Jack Schwager asks Paul Tudor Jones about how he “called the top” or “caught the bottom” perfectly. Jones laughs and explains that people love the myth more than the math:
“You always hear about the person who catches the top of the market, but you never hear about the four or five times they tried before and were wrong. Because it’s not as cool to say, ‘Paul Tudor Jones called the top on his fifth try.’”
That’s the truth.
No one knows when a trend will end. Not even the best.
The only certainty is that leaders keep leading—until they don’t.
And when you try to predict the end instead of following the strength, you miss the entire move.
Why We Study Leadership Every Week
At AAO, we track leadership across sectors, regions, and asset classes.
Not because we think we can outguess the turn, but because staying aligned with strength is the edge.
It’s not glamorous. It’s not heroic. It’s repeatable.
That’s why we revisit the same dashboards week after week—so we don’t confuse noise for rotation.
The International Leadership Dashboard
This table tells the whole story.
At the top of global performance, you’ll see China Tech, South Korea, Asia 50, and South Africa—all up 45–65% year to date, outperforming the S&P 500 by double digits.
What’s remarkable isn’t just the numbers. It’s the consistency.
Each of these leaders has held above its 200-day moving average for months. Every minor pullback has been met with buyers.
Markets are memory machines.
When an area starts leading—like Asia and Emerging Markets are now—it’s rarely a one month event. Leadership tends to persist because capital follows performance.
The more an area leads, the more money flows in.
The more money flows in, the more it leads.
That’s the positive feedback loop that fuels bull markets.
China: The Unloved Leader
Look closer at the dashboard and you’ll see China Tech ($CQQQ KWEB 0.00%↑ ) sitting near the top.
For months, traders called it “uninvestable.” Headlines were full of regulatory fear, demographic collapse, and real estate doom.
Yet quietly, Chinese tech stocks have outperformed nearly every developed market.
That’s not opinion—it’s price.
China’s leadership matters because it’s the foundation of a broader Emerging Market (EM) rotation.
As China stabilizes and strengthens, it pulls the rest of EM higher—Asia, Africa, Latin America.
This is what we mean when we say:
“Leaders keep leading.”
They also lift others with them.
Year-to-Date Performance
