Hello Again,
Please note that Apple split 1 to 4 on 8/31/20 so our past records including the average cost and past purchase values have been divided by 4 to make it a simple adjustment.
"Irrational exuberance" is the phrase used by the then-Federal Reserve Board chairman, Alan Greenspan, in a speech given at the American Enterprise Institute during the dot-com bubble of the 1990s. The phrase was interpreted as a warning that the stock market might be overvalued.
We are in that same position now!
On 8/25/20, On the CNBC show “Mad Money” with Jim Cramer’s “Off the Charts” section, Jim featured the technical analyst for hedge fund managers, Tom DeMark who has a perfect record-especially from February 2020 to August 2020. According to Tom, US markets should peak within the next 2 weeks (by 9/16?). Technical signs are the same we saw in February 2020 before the peak. Comparing 1929/1930 to 2020, Demark stated that after the 1929 crash too we had an irrational market rally. Considering the time it took in 1929/1930, we are ripe for another crash. No one knows for sure that will happen or not but investors and traders are so irrational, it makes sense for us to have another crash.
Recently Josh Brown sold 20% of his holdings in Apple and Nvidia to reduce his exposure and manage his risk level and he quoted Warren Buffet to show that one has to walk away when the market is irrational-“ At the end game when the party is in full swing and everyone is drinking champagne it is very difficult to walk away from the party but to be prudent, one must get away from the party”. Japanese market topped in 1990 and it never got to that level over the past 30 years. What was the biggest crash? It was the Tulip crash. Tulips anyone? Tulip mania reached its peak during the winter of 1636–37, when some bulbs were reportedly changing hands ten times in a day. No deliveries were ever made to fulfil any of these contracts, because in February 1637, tulip bulb contract prices collapsed abruptly and the trade of tulips ground to a halt.
Over the course of 2019, Tesla's share of the U.S. automotive market gradually rose to roughly 1.3 percent. If only the U.S. electric vehicle (EV) market is considered, however, Tesla is the market leader in battery-electric car sales for the United States. On 8/21/20, market cap of Tesla is greater than all auto makers in the world! In June 2020, Elan Musk founder/CEO of Tesla stock was overvalued at $700 but on 8/21/20, Tesla ended at $ 2,1049 with a PE over 1,000! I remember in 1999/2000, Yahoo had a PE of 1,000 but they did not survive. This is all due to a stock split which adds no value to the company. When the Tesla IPO came out in 2010, if you had put $10,000 in to Tesla, on 8/21/20, you would have had $1.2 Million! If you had put $10,000 in to Apple in 2010, on 8/21/20, you would have had $103,000. If you had put $10,000 in to Netflix in 2010, by 8/21/20, you would have had about $600,000. Please note that Tesla had a 5 to 1 split on 8/31/20 and per presplit prices Tesla ended 8/31/20 at about $2,500!! This is a bubble!
When corporate insiders buy their own stocks with their money, it is a sign that the future for that stock and company is good; and the opposite is true when “insiders” sell their stocks. A few years ago when the CEO of JP Morgan Chase bank Jamie Dimon bought his bank’s stock with $20MM of his money all bank stocks rose and also the market bottomed. A few days ago (8/25/20) Apple CEO Tim Cook sold $131.8 Million of his own Apple shares. See what I mean?
Robert Prechter, using the Elliott Wave Theory was able to predict the future of the market for many years in the 1980s; and he predicted the 1987 crash 3 months before it took place. Here are some excerpts from his 8/14/20 newsletter:
When the mindset behind this correlation shifts, interest rates will rise, stocks and metals will fall, and the US dollar will go up.
As we have been reporting for several years, the two most important years indicated for the stock market turns are 2021 and 2022. The year 2022 unquestionably slated to mark a major low.
August 2020 was the best August since 1984 for the Dow and S&P 500 and the best August for the NASDAQ since 2000 !! Remember NASDAQ in 2000? When we had the dot-com crash and those stocks did not even come close to those levels since 2000. We are at the beginning of a great depression. All experts say that even with a vaccine, most of the jobs lost will never come back. How did this happen? I follow the markets closely. After the March 2020 bottom, all prudent professionals stayed away from the market and advised others to do the same but the market went up sharply; why? Due to the covid19 crisis, with no sports and casinos, and all working or staying home used the market as a gambling den. Then the professionals had a problem. When the market goes up and when their portfolios do not perform, they get fired by their bosses or from their customers. So the professionals came in to the market in droves. This kind of irrational exuberance can go on for a long time or it could crash tomorrow. No one knows what would be the catalyst for the next crash. Even prior to the February/March crash the market was way too overvalued and prior to January no one was able to predict that a pandemic would act as a catalyst for a market crash. An expert who has studied market for centuries stated that real crashes and deep recession come out of catalysts that no one was able to predict. Tulips anyone? (see above)
Have a great month!
Fernando