This market is a mashup of so many ingredients, including monetary and fiscal stimulation, demographic, technological and speculative catalysts. After a few rounds of boiling and condensation, we have a potent, intoxicating, and volatile market for 2021 - just enough will revive and too much will be dangerous.
The market signals new highs on a broad expanding basis - it’s not just one corner, sector or country. Sentiment favors more new highs and wider trading ranges.
Let’s go through the updates as quickly as possible, some relevant charts and closing thoughts. As usual I try to keep it fast and stick to the essential for easy scanning.
The Top 20 line up as of this week.
The charts from this latest week include the following very familiar charts.
Snapchat’s AR/VR virtual world building potential is exciting and the price action has been stunning but it has caught me off guard just how pent up the sentiment was after its recent operating results. I volunteer that the real payoffs could be years off and that this chart could easily roll-over on a short-term time frame. I may participate and add more should it snap out of its current ebullient state.
Square, along with Paypal and other fintechs, may be the true inheritors (along with the “whale” to come, Stripe) of 2030 next mega-cap leadership. Right now these are all vulnerable to a re-rating and change in multiple expectations - which will be hard for impatient bulls. It’s going to be a difficult but massive secular trend to ride.
I’ve already covered these charts several times. These are the leaders to watch.
The next note is the worst performers as of this week on the long side.
What are some of the charts from this week’s “worst” list? A few winners getting reset.
The next lineup are the sells ideas. Again, it’s the same names from the last few weeks.
Too many leveraged ETFs are on these lists - yesterday’s financial products - and are out of season. It’s all about SPACs these days.
From the broader sell list, I found a much more representative “sell” chart - BP.
Did energy bottom? I don’t know - I will watch Brent contracts and distressed oil service plays outside the U.S. for trends and deep value but there’s no rush.
Lastly, new ideas as of this week include the following ideas.
A remarkable turnaround for a long suffering value play, General Motors at last leads again. And Google is back on the list. Pariahs into paragons. (No Nikola comment.)
Hudbay Minerals - if only all charts had such a stately march upwards. Its Manitoba Canada mining outshone its Peruvian operations. (Right now my mind is fixated on recent images coming out of Peru - the world feels like it’s busting at the seams at times in some places).
Meanwhile a winning bank in India is also doing this same stately march upwards.
Pinduoduo. Stunning. I recall briefly reviewing Turner Novak’s (of VC TikTok fame) coverage of PDD. If only we had all read it and put on size. If it was easy, we would have done it and not need to write and read investment content.
Personal note (no trading or investment ideas here, and NO need for you to read):
It’s hard to believe that a year ago it all came apart for Dad and by extension my family. Years of a deep-seated and unknown to us condition (related to his brain) plus a complex of age-related illnesses came to a head and came down like a 10 ton hammer.
I remember one brief distraction, while my father was in a hospital bed, when I helped my mother cook Thanksgiving dinner. It was just the two of us eating in silence the kinds of things you eat and being grateful for a brief respite. We were tired by then, after making it through the initial storm of those first few days which followed the ambulance ride to the hospital.
I learned things, including how important compassionate CNAs, experienced nurses and staff with seasoned communication-skills are to making modern healthcare bearable. You learn about the good - the power of dedicated medical professionals - and the bad - institutional blind-spots and perverse financial aspects of modern healthcare.
Just over two months after Dad became sick, there was a home invasion in early January, right after we started another day with Dad in his physical rehab room. The perps were caught but released, due to some rules about bail reform. All the meanwhile the world outside was quietly shutting down country by country, and city by city. We came home and brought dad home just as things shut down around us.
During this Spring the skies fell silent but for the birds. There were no sirens, no children on scooters and bikes barreling down the street. You could hear sounds from far down the street. The evening was quiet in a way that I wasn’t used to. My family had already been “on lockdown” for weeks for different reasons than the world but then suddenly the world around us fell silent. I remember how they shut down the rehab about 2 days before Dad was to be discharged home in mid-March. A very kind CNA turned on her phone and set up a video call and reassured me she was taking care of Dad (as she had been for months).
He was home at last in March but by then he hadn’t recognized he was home, after months of saying he was ready to go home, he was still “ready” but it was too late. I have given up in recent weeks of waiting for him to come back home - as he was over a year ago - that man is gone. I hold his memories for him and remind him, thanks to all those stories he told me. I am his memory now.
So, it’s been a year. Dad fell sick again in September - we thought it was just being sleepy but he was sick and in his state would have passed away. They caught it and he recovered but even less of him was “working”. His legs, already weakened, had given way - before he got sick again in September, he needed help just for transfers to wheelchairs. Less of his mind and less of his body remains. Just weeks before I had finally found the right vendors for a new ramp and a new sidewalk. (And a new set of doors to finally replace the ones destroyed by the January home invasion.)
Meantime when I turn on the news or go on social media, there’s a bonfire illuminating the rage inside of millions. Thankfully I was fortified by the good and the light from those who tried their best to help Dad and who reached out to my family. (Thank you to all, you know who you are.) I think more about these good things, and ignore the forever memewar feeding an ocean of dopamine for algo-serfdom.
2030 is coming. An important decade is ahead. I think it’s not too late. I’m alone but I must the fan the last ember left inside one more time. It’s time to rebuild.