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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” [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 …

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 …

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.

“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

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!

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.

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,

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.

In our August piece, The Solvency Debate Continues, KCR updated our 2021 missive Junk Stocks Funded by Junk Bonds. We observed that 2023 had seen speculators return with a ferocious appetite for low-quality stocks. Our focus in that piece, and again today, will be on a group of companies that failed the Federal Reserve’s test for financial fragility as defined by interest coverage ratios (“ICRs”).

KCR has written a blizzard of material on the increasingly dire investment implications of market capitalization weighted index funds due to the outsized performance of large stocks that now sit at brutally high multiples. This is hardly a new topic for us. In 2014, as “smart beta” strategies became wildly popular, we penned Indexing Dilemmas, which laid out the following facts:

Hello everyone. This is Matt from KCR. Today we will do what is effectively a tardy half-year update. The speed and tone will be quick and sharp as the year has been challenging for evidence-based investors like us. The summary is that the sharp speculative rally we have seen YTD