October is the month that professionals starting thinking about risk– not necessarily portfolio risk, per say, but rather career risk. In investing, the professional game is not so much risking client assets to deliver performance above the crowd. The reality, GMO portfolio manager Jeremy Grantham notes, is that “the ultimate job description becomes ‘keep your job.’” To Raymond James Chief Investment Strategist Jeffrey Saut these “sage words” are endemic and “are particularly cogent now that we have entered the month of October.” But that doesn’t mean that stocks are expensive just because a herd mentality might be the result of bowing to the demands of career risk over investment risk.

It can be argued that it doesn’t pay to stand out in investment management. Outsized investment returns on a consistent basis are often questioned by professional allocators. And it is often the fund manager who takes a risk and loses that is the one who is on the street looking for a new career.

So why take career risks?

Jeremy Grantham, portfolio manager and co-founder of GMO, notes that traveling with the herd is what leads to portfolio management longevity. “Efficient career-risk management means never being wrong on your own, so herding, perhaps for different reasons, also characterizes professional investing,” he wrote, connecting dots to explain the phenomenon of following a trend that is not universally accepted. “Herding produces momentum in prices.”

Saut, in an October 2 report on “Career Risk vs. Portfolio Risk,” doesn’t disagree with Grantham on the point about career risk. “There is much angst regarding performance risk, bonus risk, and ultimately career risk (loss of job),” in investing he wrote. But it is Grantham’s second component of the thought to which disagreement is found.

Grantham says that because of career risk concerns and investor herding, this is pushing equity valuations “further away from fair value as people buy because others are buying. That, ladies and gentlemen, is a perfect description of what the professional money-management business has become.”

Momentum begets momentum which begets anomalistic valuations, is the thesis.

Hold on just one minute, says Saut. This is a bridge too far. Because pension funds and others need to hit annualized returns goals, they are increasingly looking towards equities:

Now we are not so sure this herding trend has “pushed prices further away from fair value” for as we have argued in past missives we don’t think stocks are all that expensive. To wit, given there are more high growth companies in the S&P 500 than ever before, the tectonic shift from tangible assets on corporate balance sheets to intangible assets, and the fact that since 1990 the S&P 500’s average P/E ratio has been over 20 times earnings; but, we digress. Despite these end of the quarter machinations, the more strategic theme is that pension funds, endowment funds, sovereign funds, etc. are figuring out the only way they can ever achieve their targeted annual return of say 7.5% is to increase their exposure to equities. To be sure, there is no way to get to that return in bonds because it is mathematically impossible. So their sole focus is to attempt to get back to a 7.5% annualized return.

This bull market isn't over and it hasn't stopped since the Lehman Moment, he says.

Saut believes the bull market started October 10, 2008 and, while it had meaningful pauses, such as from May 2015 to February 2016, overall the bull has been running strong – and is likely to continue to do so because we are in unprecedented times. This is because of the rise of tech-based stocks, without significant tangible assets, are a world of difference from the clunky old industrial stocks of the past.

Saut shares this belief with Dallas-based Frederick “Shad” Rowe of Greenbrier Partners, who thinks technology changing the rules of the game means that stocks have a longer runway ahead. “Behind the political noise of the day, our companies are participating in one of the greatest growth and productivity surges the world has ever seen,” he wrote.

Rowe says the bull market could be extended for a significant period of time as the dictums of technological efficiency combine with “even a small shift toward more ethical behavior opens up an even bigger opportunity for American companies operating throughout the world.”

This bull market isn’t over, they say, a thesis that generally plays into herd thinking which means it has less career risk.