Apple, Coke, Tesla, WorldCom & Warren Buffett: What Can We Learn?
April. Busy month. Let’s use numbers and history to make a powerful point with simple pictures. The cranberry bars show Apple’s price to sales (P/S) ratio by year. You can see AAPL’s valuation ballooned from 3x sales in 2014 to 7x sales today. The navy-blue bars show Apple's market cap from 2014 through today.
“Number Go Up” & The Ouroboros-Like Asset Inflation of the Post GFC Era
“Number Go Up” [is] one of the many memes that sprang up during a previous crypto surge, representing a similar vibe as “to the moon” or “hodl” – the idea that the faithful would keep buying in the belief that prices would continue to climb. … For active managers, the pressure is getting more intense by the day to ride the upward momentum across tech-powered indexes like the S&P 500 and Nasdaq 100 …
A Quixotic Crusade for Common Sense?
Yet after the world’s most valuable chipmaker smashed expectations with its blowout report Wednesday, the AI party is one nobody can afford to miss. Short interest is nearly nonexistent among tech behemoths. … For active managers, the pressure is getting more intense by the day to ride the upward momentum across tech-powered indexes like the S&P 500 and Nasdaq 100 …
KCR’s Dividend Portfolio: An Evidence Based Approach
Shortly after the trough of the Great Financial Crisis, this newsletter observed that Wall Street was selling “dividend investing” strategies to coax investors back into equities. In pieces ranging from The Dividend Deception to Rushing About: The Thirst for Yield, we pilloried what we felt were often deceptive marketing pitches that led investors into history’s biggest bubble in dividend stocks.
Diversifying with Dividends: Are Investors Ignoring a Free Lunch?
“One of our clients is a married couple with about $5 million in liquid assets. They are both 80 years old. 90% of their money is in equities. Most in US large cap index funds and then they own large single positions in Nvidia, Eli Lilly, and Tesla. The husband wants to be 100% in these things. The wife wants it all in CDs. Trying to walk them back from so much risk would seem easy but
The Great Growth Run & a Peek at Forsaken Dividend Stocks
Researchers in behavioral finance have documented the following three items: • Human beings have a nasty habit of extrapolating trends • Even worse, the longer a trend has been going on, the more likely we are to extrapolate it…. • …. which is terrible because the longer a trend has gone on, the more likely it is to revert!
KCR’s Top Charts of 2023 Updated
Every year since the launch of our website, we have posted a piece reviewing KCR’s work from the prior year. Today’s post continues that tradition. We would like to thank our rapidly growing list of readers for their support, engagement, and thoughtful kindness. KCR has updated all the charts below through December 31, 2023.
Monopoly Money: Big Business, Barbie & the Benefits of Diversification
“Small, independent, decentralized business of the kind that built up our country, of the kind that made our country great, first, is fast disappearing, and second, is being made dependent upon monster concentration.” “I think that we are approaching a point where
The Cheap, Expensive and Unfortunate (Stocks > 10x P/S)
History rhymes. Doesn’t repeat. Valuation doesn’t matter until it is all that matters. Stocks valued at 10x price to sales (P/S) are difficult to justify. The CEO of Sun Microsystems made the merciless math of 10x P/S easy to understand after the dot.com bubble imploded. We have reprinted his quote here again for the sake of convenience.
Everything AI: An Update on Machine Learning & Multiple Expansion
In our June piece External Obsolescence: Tech Investors’ Newest Nightmare, we explained how the consensus view on AI stocks might simply be misplaced confidence that had sent multiples soaring. We highlighted that investors had anointed Microsoft, Apple, Google, Nvidia, and Amazon as the “sure-fire” winners of all things AI.
The Anxiety Opportunity from FOMO Sufferers
FOMO includes both the perception of missing out, which triggers anxiety, and compulsive behaviors … it is closely related to the fear of social exclusion or ostracism, which existed long before social media. -Natalie Christine Dattilo, Ph.D, Harvard Medical School, 2023 Recall that the second line of defense of the efficient markets theory is that the irrational investors,
The Politics of Profits, Volatility Laundering & All-Alts are not Equal
In our piece, Economic Cycles and Mean Reversion, we demonstrated that corporate profit margins had risen to levels above the prior century's peak in 1929. We have updated the chart used in that piece. These margins have been and continue to be the fundamental bulwark on which any bull case for US equities rests.