The main issue are not household investors, the main systemic risks are in overleveraged hedge funds and banks (and a completely corrupted SEC and FINRA, with essentially 0 policing).

See Archegos Capital, Evergrande in China, 2008 financial crisis, Citadel (the hedge fund) with assets almost equal to "securities sold not yet purchased", etc.

Then there's just tons of crime like JP Morgan making 10 billy by spoofing gold prices and then paying a 1 billion fee to pay off the complicit regulator and be able to "keep playing".

It'll pop, the question of course is when? Ponzi's can go on for decades before something breaks.

Hedge Fund net exposure readings are available in Prime Broker reports. Currently, institutional net exposure isn't that high on a historical lookback. They've essentially been forced to chase since April (the market movement since then has essentially been a large front-run until recently). They are at high gross exposures though, so their contribution to the risk landscape has been, well, what we've seen in the past few days with a huge rotation/unwind under the hood, with mild net selling but large amounts of reshuffling.

Bank balance sheets are conservative currently.

>It'll pop, the question of course is when? Ponzi's can go on for decades before something breaks.

Tautological. Broken clock right twice a day, etc etc. We had a massive collapse in March 2020, and in 2022 when the banking system was pseudo-nationalized/backstopped. If you're still waiting for "the collapse", it begs the question about how one was positioned for those events. Frankly, I saw many people cruise right through 2022 without ever switching to bullish, even when Meta was single digit forward PE and such. As someone who was managing a portfolio that heavily deployed after the Fed backstopped the banking system, I clearly remember that this moment (which was one of the best moments to buy in the last decade, and offered a long list of ludicrously low valuations, especially on the fringes ex: I was buying Chinese companies for less than half of the valuation of the cash on their balance sheet, with the actual business with PE under 5 included for free), retail and institutional sentiment readings were the most pessimistic since the Great Depression. Likewise, stepping away from the AI bubble there is a long list of extremely low valuations in the current market (companies with PE under 8, buying back 15% of its shares every year, for example, or energy companies sub-10 PE with conservative balance sheet management, which has been a huge positive shift in the industry, yet everyone wants AI stocks at 300x forward earnings).