Global Market Comments
February 14, 2025
Fiat Lux
Featured Trade:
(FEBRUARY 12 BIWEEKLY STRATEGY WEBINAR Q&A),
(MCD), (FSLR), (META), (GOOG), (AMZN), (JNK), (HYG), (F), (GM), (NVDA), (PLTR), (INTC)
Global Market Comments
February 14, 2025
Fiat Lux
Featured Trade:
(FEBRUARY 12 BIWEEKLY STRATEGY WEBINAR Q&A),
(MCD), (FSLR), (META), (GOOG), (AMZN), (JNK), (HYG), (F), (GM), (NVDA), (PLTR), (INTC)
Below, please find subscribers’ Q&A for the February 12 Mad Hedge Fund Trader Global Strategy Webinar, broadcast from Incline Village, NV.
Q: Can Nvidia (NVDA) go to $200 in the next three years?
A: I would imagine probably, yes. They still have a fabulous business—enormous orders and record profits. But it's not going to happen in the next six months. You need to get us out of the current stock market malaise before anything moves dramatically one way or the other, except for META, which is at an all-time high. Their basic business is still great, and the threat posed by DeepSeek is wildly overblown.
Q: Why is McDonald's (MCD) seeing declining sales?
A: Partly, it's because they have been cutting prices. So, of course, that automatically feeds into declining sales. Also, I think the weight loss drugs Mounjaro or Ozempic are having an impact. People just don't go in and eat three Big Macs for lunch anymore. They may not need any Big Macs at all. And forget about the fries and the super-size high fructose corn syrup drink. When these drugs first came out, it was speculated that fast food companies would be the number one victim of these drugs, and that is turning out to be true. Some 15.5 million people in the United States suddenly aren't hungry anymore; they just take one bite of a meal and then push their food around the plate with their fork. That’s better than taking amphetamines, which people like Judy Garland used to take to lose weight. I think that will affect not only McDonald's, but all fast-food companies which I avoid like the plague anyway because my doctor says I shouldn't eat that food.
Q: Should I buy First Solar (FSLR) based on the revised higher sales outlook?
A: I don't want to touch alternative energy anything right now. I think the government will eliminate all subsidies for all alternative energy—be it solar, windmills, hydrogen, nuclear, whatever—and turn us back into an all-oil and coal economy. That is the announced goal of the new administration. So that eliminates the subsidies for sure. It certainly will be a blow to the earnings of all solar-type companies. If you are going to do an energy form, I would do nuclear, which benefits from deregulation, if that ever happens.
Q: Do price caps fix supply problems? Because Europe is thinking about capping energy prices in the short term.
A: Price caps never work, nor does any other attempt to artificially control prices, because all it does is dry up supply. If you cap the prices, and therefore the profits that energy companies can make, they'll quit. They'll abandon the energy business, or they'll pare it down, or they won't expand. One way or the other, you reduce the return on capital. Capital is like water; it will go where it gets the highest return, and price caps certainly are not part of that formula. But what do I know? I only drilled for natural gas for six years.
Q: What's your top AI choice?
A: Well, I would say it's Nvidia (NVDA) still, and the big AI users which include Meta (META), Google (GOOG), and Amazon (AMZN). Nothing has changed here.
Q: Is there any chance that Ford Motors (F) will be bought out anytime soon or never?
A: My view of all of the legacy car companies, including Stellantis, which is the old Chrysler, Ford (F), and General Motors (GM), is that they are basically giant mountains of scrap metal and only have a scrap metal value, which is about 5 cents on the dollar. That's what they fell to in the 2008 financial crisis, and all of them except for Ford went bankrupt. So I am not a big fan of the legacy auto industry now. And now, they have a trade war. They happen to be one of the biggest victims of trade wars because to stay competitive with Tesla, they moved a lot of their production to Canada and Mexico, and now those plans are going up in flames. So it seems like they're damned if they do and they're damned if they don't. I'm happy driving my Tesla, but I'm wondering if my next car is a BYD. Prices are so low, it might even be worth paying 100% duty just to get a cheaper car that has better self-driving capability. But the future is unknown, to say the least.
Q: Is the next big rotation out of Silicon Valley and into Chinese tech stocks?
A: Over the long term, that may happen, but with the current administration and China (the number one target in restraint of trade and trade wars), I don't want to touch anything Chinese. There are too many better things to do in the U.S. Imagine you buy a Chinese stock, and then the administration announces a total cutoff of trade with China the next day. Not good. Chinese stocks are incredibly cheap. Most of the big ones are now single-digit multiples compared to multiples in the 20s, 30s, and 40s for our stocks. But they come with a very high political risk, and that has been true for several years now. There are better fish to fry than in China. I'd rather buy Europe than China right now if you really do want to go international. But I have no idea why they're going up unless they're discounting an end to the Ukraine War.
Q: Are junk bonds (JNK) and (HYG) a good play?
A: I would say yes. Their default risk has always been over-exaggerated thanks to their unfortunate name. They're yielding 6.54% and change, but it's a very slow mover. If we do get any improvement, any economy without inflation junk will go to $100. It's currently around $96. And you know, yield is a nice thing to have these days since the capital gain side seems to have dried up and turned into dust on almost any asset class.
Q: How can I decide when to sell the stocks that we bought on your recommendations?
A: Well, our trade alerts always have a buy recommendation and a sell recommendation or an expiration date. If you bought the stocks and kept it, just read Global Trading Dispatch for an updated market view. Watch our Mad Hedge Market Timing Index. When we get up into the 70s and 80s, that is definitely sell territory. It's hard for individuals to have an economic view going out to the rest of the year, but even the people who are economists have no idea what's going to happen right now. As I said, uncertainty is at an 8-year high, and that is being reflected in the market. So nothing beats cash, especially when you can earn 4.2% on 90-day US treasury bills. No one ever got fired for taking a profit.
Q: Can Intel (INTC) make a comeback this year?
A: No. I'm sorry, but they won’t. They had a horrible manager. They dumped him after a couple of disastrous years. I knew he was a horrible manager. I fought off all the pressure to buy Intel. So far, that's working. I mean, the stock has been terrible, so it is very cheap, but there is no guarantee that they will ever recover and, in fact, may get taken over by somebody else. So—too many better things to do. I'd rather be buying more Nvidia right now at these prices than sticking my neck out and praying for a miracle at Intel.
Q: A couple of years ago, I bought a bunch of Palantir (PLTR) on your recommendation for the next 10 bagger. I now have a 10 bagger. What should I do?
A: You know, we did recommend Palantir about 10 years ago, and it did nothing for the longest time. And then last year, it just took off like a rocket—I think it's up 400% last year. Price-earnings multiples are insanely high now. So what I would do is sell half your position. That way, the remaining half is all profit. You're playing with the house's money, and you're reducing your risk in a high-risk environment. Sell half, keep the other half. If it looks like it's starting to roll over and die, then you sell your remaining half.
Q: What's your favorite currency this year, and what should we do about it?
A: My favorite currency is the US dollar. If we're not going to get any interest rate cuts this year, the dollar will remain the highest-yielding currency in the world, and then everybody wants to buy it. It's really that simple. It’s all about interest rate differentials. Everybody else in the world has low interest rates, so stick with the dollar and don't touch the foreign currencies yet.
Q: Inflation expectations have exploded higher in view of today's number. Do you expect it to get worse?
A: If the trade war continues, it will absolutely get worse. 25% price increases are inflationary—period. End of story. A price increase is the definition of inflation, and right now, we are increasing the number of countries subject to high punitive tariffs, not decreasing them. You can expect markets to worry about that. And even if they put a temporary hold on these, people are raising prices now. They are not waiting for the actual tariff to hit; they are front-running that right now. So if you don't believe me, go to the grocery store where prices are through the roof. I actually went to a grocery store the other day, and I couldn't believe what things cost.
Q: I'd like to hedge my Nvidia (NVDA) position with a covered call. Which one should I do?
A: Well, it's not actually a hedge. What a covered call does is reduce your cost price and increase income. Right now, we have NVDA at $135. If you shorted something like the February $145 calls, you might get a dollar for that. That reduces your average price by a dollar. If you shorted the March $145 calls, that'll bring in probably $5, reduce your costs by $5, or bring in an extra $5 in income. And if you keep doing this every month and Nvidia stays stuck in a range, you can end up taking $10, $20, or even $30 in premium income over the next six months. And I have a feeling that will be the winning strategy for the first half of this year, using rallies to sell covered calls. You really could get your average cost down quite a lot; that way, if we have a massive sell-off, a lot of that loss will already be covered. If we get a massive rally, your stock just gets called away, and you buy it back on the next dip. The only negative here is the tax consequences of taking capital gains on the call-aways.
Q: You mentioned that the US has a demographic problem coming up; how will that affect the market in the short term?
A: It doesn't affect the market in the short term. Demographics are a long-term game. You have to think in terms of a generation being the round lot, which is about 20 years. Suffice it to say, when demographics go against you, like they did in Japan for 30 years, markets are horrible. Demographics are going against China now, and you're getting horrible markets. Demographics are good now in the US because we have millennials just entering their peak spending years, and that's when economies boom, and that should continue up to 2030. That is how to play demographics, and we keep updated here, although the government has suddenly ceased making available all demographic data to the public—I don't know why, but it's going to make the science of demographics much more difficult to follow without the government data. I don't know why they did that. I don't know what they hope to gain by clouding the demographic picture. Maybe it has to do with the allocation of congressional seats to the states or something like that.
Q: Do you have information on how to place a LEAPS order?
A: Just go to www.madhedgefundtrader.com, go to the search box, put in LEAPS in all caps, and you will find an encyclopedia of information on how to do LEAPS or Long Term Equity Anticipation Securities.
To watch a replay of this webinar with all the charts, bells, whistles, and classic rock music, just log in to www.madhedgefundtrader.com, go to MY ACCOUNT, click on GLOBAL TRADING DISPATCH, TECHNOLOGY LETTER, or JACQUIE'S POST, then WEBINARS, and all the webinars from the last 12 years are there in all their glory.
Good Luck and Good Trading,
John Thomas
CEO & Publisher
The Diary of a Mad Hedge Fund Trader
Global Market Comments
December 26, 2024
Fiat Lux
SPECIAL ISSUE ABOUT THE FAR FUTURE
Featured Trade:
(PEAKING INTO THE FUTURE WITH RAY KURZWEIL),
(GOOG), (INTC), (AAPL), (TXN)
This is the most important research piece you will ever read, bar none. But you have to finish it to understand why. So, I will get on with the show.
I have been hammering away at my followers at investment conferences, webinars, and strategy luncheons this year about one recurring theme. Things are good and about to get better, a whole lot better.
The driver will be the exploding rate of technological innovation in electronics, biotechnology, and energy. The 2020s are shaping up to be another roaring twenties, and asset prices are going to go through the roof.
To flesh out some hard numbers about growth rates that are realistically possible and which industries will be the leaders, I hooked up with my old friend, Ray Kurzweil, one of the most brilliant minds in computer science.
Ray is currently a director of Engineering at Google (GOOG), heading up a team that is developing stronger artificial intelligence. He is an MIT grad, with a double major in computer science and creative writing. He was the principal inventor of the CCD flatbed scanner, the first text-to-speech synthesizer, and the commercially marketed large-vocabulary speech recognition.
When he was still a teenager, Ray was personally awarded a science prize by President Lyndon Johnson. He has received 20 honorary doctorates and has authored 7 books. It was upon Ray’s shoulders that many of today’s technological miracles were built.
His most recent book, The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology, was a New York Times best seller. In it, he makes hundreds of predictions about the next 100 years that will make you fall out of your chair.
I met Ray at one of my favorite San Francisco restaurants, Morton’s, on Sutter Street. I ordered a dozen oysters a filet mignon wrapped in bacon, and drowned it all down with a fine bottle of Duckhorn merlot. Ray had a wedge salad with no dressing, a giant handful of nutritional supplements, and a bottle of water. That’s Ray, one cheap date.
The Future of Man
A singularity is defined as a single event that has monumental consequences. Astrophysicists refer to the big bang and black holes in this way. Ray’s singularity has humans and machines merging to become single entities, partially by 2040 and completely by 2100.
All of our thought processes will include built-in links to the cloud, making humans super smart. Skin that absorbs energy from the sun will eliminate the need to eat. Nanobots will replace blood cells, which are far more efficient at moving oxygen. A revolution in biotechnology will enable us to eliminate all medical causes of death.
Most organs can now be partially or completely replaced. Eventually, they all will become renewable by taking one of your existing cells and cloning it into a completely new organ. We will become much more like machines, and machines will become more like us.
The first industrial revolution extended the reach of our bodies, and the second extended the reach of our minds.
And, oh yes, prostitution will be legalized and move completely online. Sound like a turn-off? How about virtually doing it with your favorite movie star? Your favorite investment advisor? Yikes!
Ironically, one of the great accelerants towards this singularity has been the war in Iraq. More than 50,000 young men and women came home missing arms and legs (in Vietnam, these were all fatalities, thanks to the absence of modern carbon fiber body armor).
Generous government research budgets have delivered huge advances in titanium artificial limbs and the ability to control them only with thoughts. Quadriplegics can now hit computer keystrokes merely by thinking about them.
Kurzweil argues that exponentially growing information technology is encompassing more and more things that we care about, like health care and medicine. Reprogramming of biology will be the next big thing and is a crucial part of his “singularity.”
Our bodies are governed by obsolete genetic programs that evolved in a bygone era. For example, over millions of years, our bodies developed genes to store fat cells to protect against a poor hunting season in the following year. That gave us a great evolutionary advantage 10,000 years ago. But it is not so great now, with obesity becoming the country’s number one health problem.
We would love to turn off these genes through reprogramming, and we are confident that the hunting at the supermarket next year will be good. We can do this in mice now, which, in experiments, can eat like crazy but never gain weight.
The happy rodents enjoy the full benefits of caloric restriction, with no hint of diabetes or heart disease. A product like this would be revolutionary, not just for us, health care providers, and the government, but, ironically, for fast food restaurants as well.
Within the last five years, we have learned how to reprogram stem cells to rebuild the hearts of heart attack victims. The stem cells are harvested from skin cells, not human embryos, ducking the political and religious issues of the past.
And if we can turn off genes, why not the ones in cancer cells that enable them to pursue unlimited reproduction until they kill their host? That development would cure all cancers and is probably only a decade off.
The Future of Computing
If this all sounds like science fiction, you’d be right. But Ray points out that humans have chronically underestimated the rate of technological innovation.
This is because humans evolved to become linear-thinking animals. If a million years ago, we saw a gazelle running from left to right, our brains calculated that one second later, it would progress ten feet further to the right. That’s where we threw the spear. This gave us a huge advantage over other animals and is why we became the dominant species.
However, much of science, technology, and innovation grows at an exponential rate, and this is where we make our most egregious forecasting errors. Count to seven, and you get to seven. However, double something seven times, and you get to a billion.
The history of the progress of communications is a good example of an exponential effect. Spoken language took hundreds of thousands of years to develop. Written language emerged thousands of years ago, books in 100 years, the telegraph in a century, and telephones 50 years later.
Some ten years after Steve Jobs brought out his Apple II personal computer, the growth of the Internet went hyperbolic. Within three years of the iPhone launch, social media exploded out of nowhere.
At the beginning of the 20th century, $1,000 bought 10 X -5th power worth of calculations per second in our primitive adding machines. A hundred years later, a grand got you 10 X 8th power calculations, a 10 trillion-fold improvement. The present century will see gains many times this.
The iPhone itself is several thousand times smaller, a million times cheaper, and billions of times more powerful than computers of 40 years ago. That increases the price per performance by the trillions. More dramatic improvements will accelerate from here.
Moore’s law is another example of how fast this process works. Intel (INTC) founder Gordon Moore published a paper in 1965 predicting a doubling of the number of transistors on a printed circuit board every two years. Since electrons had shorter distances to travel, speeds would double as well.
Moore thought that theoretical limits imposed by the laws of physics would bring this doubling trend to an end by 2018 when the gates become too small for the electrons to pass through. For decades, I have read research reports predicting that this immutable deadline would bring an end to innovation and technological growth and bring an economic Armageddon.
Ray argues that nothing could be further from the truth. A paradigm shift will simply allow us to leapfrog conventional silicon-based semiconductor technologies and move on to bigger and better things. We did this when we jumped from vacuum tubes to transistors in 1949 and again in 1959 when Texas Instruments (TXN) invented the first integrated circuit.
Paradigm shifts occurred every ten years in the past century, every five years in the last decade, and will occur every couple of years in the 2020s. So fasten your seatbelts!
Nanotechnology has already allowed manufacturers to extend the 2018 Moore’s Law limit to 2022. On the drawing board are much more advanced computing technologies, including calcium-based systems using the alternating direction of spinning electrons and nanotubes.
Perhaps the most promising is DNA-based computing, a high research priority at IBM and several other major firms. I earned my own 15 minutes of fame in the scientific world 40 years ago as a member of the first team ever to sequence a piece of DNA, which is why Ray knows who I am.
Deoxyribo Nucleic Acid makes up the genes that contain the programming that makes us who we are. It is a fantastically efficient means of storing and transmitting information. And it is found in every single cell in our bodies, all 10 trillion of them.
The great thing about DNA is that it replicates itself. Just throw it some sugar. That eliminates the cost of building the giant $2 billion silicon-based chip fabrication plants of today.
The entire human genome is a sequential binary code containing only 800 MB of information, which, after you eliminate redundancies, has a mere 30-100 MB of useful information, about the size of an off-the-shelf software program, like Word for Windows. Unwind a single DNA molecule, and it is only six feet long.
What this means is that just when many believe that our computer power is peaking, it is, in fact, just launching an era of exponential growth. Supercomputers surpassed human brain computational ability in 2012, about 10 to the 16th power (ten quadrillion) calculations per second.
That power will be available on a low-end laptop by 2020. By 2050, this prospective single laptop will have the same computing power as the entire human race, about 9 billion individuals. It will also be small enough to implant in our brains.
The Future of the Economy
Ray is not really that interested in financial markets or, for that matter, making money. Where technology will be in a half-century and how to get us there are what get his juices flowing. However, I did manage to tease a few mind-boggling thoughts from him.
At the current rate of change, the 21st century will see 200 times the technological progress that we saw in the 20th century. Shouldn’t corporate profits, and therefore share prices, rise by as much?
Technology is rapidly increasing its share of the economy and increasing its influence on other sectors. That’s why tech has been everyone’s favorite sector for the past 30 years and will remain so for the foreseeable future. For two centuries, technology has been eliminating jobs at the bottom of the economy and creating new ones at the top.
Stock analysts and investors make a fatal flaw in estimating future earnings based on the linear trends of the past instead of the exceptional growth that will occur in the future.
In the last century, the Dow appreciated from 100 to 10,000, an increase of 100 times. If we grow at that rate in this century, the Dow should increase by 10,000% to 1 million by 2100. But so far, we are up only 6%, even though we are already 14 years into the new century.
The index is seriously lagging but will play catch up in a major way during the 2020s, when economic growth jumps from 2% to 4% or more, thanks to the effects of massively accelerating technological change.
Some 100 years ago, one-third of jobs were in farming, one-third were in manufacturing, and one-third in services. If you predicted then that in a century, farming and manufacturing would each be 3% of total employment and that something else unknown would come along for the rest of us, people would have been horrified. But that’s exactly what happened.
Solar energy use is also on an exponential path. It is now 1% of the world’s supply but is only seven doublings away from becoming 100%. Then, we will consume only one 10,000th of the sunlight hitting the earth. Geothermal energy offers the same opportunities.
We are only running out of energy if we limit ourselves to 19th-century methods. Energy costs will plummet. Eventually, energy will be essentially free when compared to today’s costs, further boosting corporate profits.
Hypergrowth in technology means that we will be battling with deflation for the rest of the century as the cost of production and the price of everything falls off a cliff. That makes our 10-year Treasury bonds a steal at a generous 2.60% yield, a full 460 basis points over the real long-term inflation rate of negative 2% a year.
US Treasuries could eventually trade down to the 0.40% yields seen in Japan only a couple of years ago. This means that the bull market in bonds is still in its early stages and could continue for decades.
The upshot for all of this is that these technologies will rapidly eliminate poverty, not just in the US but around the world. Each industry will need to continuously reinvent its business model or disappear.
The takeaway for investors is that stocks, as well as other asset prices, are now wildly undervalued, given their spectacular future earnings potential. It also makes the Dow target of 1 million by 2100 absurdly low and off by a factor of 10 or even 100. Will we be donning our “Dow 100 Million” then?
Other Random Thoughts
As we ordered dessert, Ray launched into another stream of random thoughts. I asked for Morton’s exquisite double chocolate mousse. Ray had another handful of supplements. Yep, Mr. Cheap Date.
The number of college students has grown from 50,000 to 12 million since the 1870’s. A kid in Africa with a cell phone has more access to accurate information than the president of the United States did 15 years ago.
The great superpower, the Soviet Union, was wiped out by a few fax machines distributing information in 1991.
Company offices will become entirely virtual by 2025.
Cows are very inefficient at producing meat. In the near future, cloned muscle tissue will be produced in factories, disease-free, and at a fraction of the present cost, without the participation of the animal. PETA will be thrilled.
The use of nanomaterials to build ultra-light but ultra-strong cars cuts fuel consumption dramatically. Battery efficiencies will improve by 10 to 100 times. Imagine powering the Tesla Model S1 with a 10-pound battery! Advances in nanotube construction mean the weight of the vehicle will drop from the present 3 tons to just 100 pounds but will be far safer.
Ray is also on a scientific advisory panel for the US Army. Uncertain about my own security clearance, he was reluctant to go into detail. Suffice it to say that the weight of an M1 Abrams main battle tank will shrink from 70 tons to 1 ton but will be 100 times stronger.
A zero-tolerance policy towards biotechnology by the environmental movement exposes their intellectual and moral bankruptcy. Opposing a technology with so many positive benefits for humankind and the environment will inevitably alienate them from the media and the public, who will see the insanity of their position.
Artificial intelligence is already far more prevalent than you understand. The advent of strong artificial intelligence will be the most significant development of this century. You can’t buy a book from Amazon, withdraw money from your bank, or book a flight without relying on AI.
Ray finished up by saying that by 2100, humans will have the choice of living in a biological or in a totally virtual, online form. In the end, we will all just be files.
Personally, I prefer the former, as the best things in life are biological and free!
I walked over to the valet parking, stunned and disoriented by the mother load of insight I had just obtained, and it wasn’t just the merlot talking, either! Imagine what they talk about at Google all day.
To buy The Singularity is Near at discount Amazon pricing, please click here. It is worth purchasing the book just to read Ray’s single chapter on the future of the economy.
Global Market Comments
September 26, 2024
Fiat Lux
Featured Trade:
(AN INSIDER’S GUIDE TO THE NEXT DECADE OF TECH INVESTMENT),
(AMZN), (AAPL), (NFLX), (AMD), (INTC), (TSLA), (GOOG), (META)
Last weekend, I had dinner with one of the oldest and best-performing technology managers in Silicon Valley. We met at a small out-of-the-way restaurant in Oakland near Jack London Square so no one would recognize us. It was blessed with a very wide sidewalk out front and plenty of patio tables.
The service was poor and the food indifferent, as are most dining experiences these days. I ordered via a QR code menu and paid with a touchless Square swipe.
I wanted to glean from my friend the names of the best tech stocks to own for the long term right now, the kind you can pick up and forget about for a decade or more, a “lose behind the radiator” portfolio.
To get this information, I had to promise the utmost confidentiality. If I mentioned his name, you would say “Oh my gosh!”
Amazon (AMZN) is now his largest holding, the current leader in cloud computing. Only 5% of the world’s workload is on the cloud presently so we are still in the early innings of a hyper-growth phase there.
By the time you price in all the transportation, labor, and warehousing costs, Amazon breaks even with its online retail business at best. The mistake people make is only focusing on these lowest-of-margin businesses.
It’s everything else that’s so interesting. While its profitability is quite low compared to the other Magnificent Seven stocks, Amazon has the best growth outlook. For a start, third-party products hosted on the Amazon site, most of what Amazon sells, offer hefty 30% margins.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) has grown from a money loser to a huge earner in just four years. It’s a productivity improvement machine for the world’s cloud infrastructure where they pass all cost increases on to the customer, who once in, buys more services.
Apple (AAPL) is his second holding. The company is in transition now justifying a massive increase in earnings multiples, from 9X to 34X over the last several years. The iPhone has become an indispensable device for people around the world, and it is the services sold through the phone that are key.
The iPhone is really not a communications device but a selling device, be it for apps, storage, music, or third-party services. The cream on top is that Apple is at the very beginning of an enormous replacement cycle for its installed base of over one billion phones. Moving from up-front sales to a lifetime subscription model will also give it a he boost.
Half of these are more than four years old and positively geriatric in the tech world. More than half of these are outside the US. 5G will add a turbocharger.
Netflix (NFLX) is another favorite. The world is moving to “over the top” content delivery and Netflix is already spending twice as much on content as any other company in this area. This is why the company won an amazing 21 Emmys this year. This will become a much more profitable company as it grows its subscriber base and amortizes its content costs. Their cash flow is growing by leaps and bounds, which they can use to buy back stock or pay a dividend.
Generally speaking, there is no doubt that the pandemic has pulled forward some future technology demand with the stay-at-home trend. But these companies have delivered normal growth in a hard world. Tech growth will accelerate in 2021 and 2022.
5G will enable better Internet coverage for everyone and will increase the competitiveness of the telecom companies. Factory automation will be another big area for 5G, as it is reliable and secure, and can be integrated with artificial intelligence.
Transportation will benefit greatly. Connected self-driving cars will be a big deal, improving safety and the quality of life.
My friend is not as worried about government-threatened breakups as regulation. There will be more restraints on what these companies can do going forward. Europe, which has no big tech companies if its own, views big American tech companies simply as a source of revenues through fines. Driving companies out of business through cutthroat competition is simply not something Europeans believe in.
Google (GOOG) is probably more subject to antitrust proceedings both in Europe and the US. The founders have both retired to pursue philanthropic activities, so you no longer have the old passion (“don’t be evil”).
Both Google and Meta (META) control 70% of the advertising market between them, which is inherently a slow-growing market, expanding at 5% a year at best. (META)’s growth has slowed dramatically, while it has reversed at (GOOG).
He is a big fan of (AMD), one of his biggest positions, which is undervalued relative to the other chip companies. They out-executed Intel (INTC) over the last five years and should pass it over the next five years.
He has raised value tech stocks from 15% to 30% of his portfolio. Apple used to be one of these. Semiconductor companies today also fall into this category. Samsung with 40% margins in its memory business is a good example. Selling for 10X earnings it is ridiculously cheap. It is just a matter of time before semiconductors get rerated too.
He was an early owner of Tesla (TSLA) back in the nail-biting days when it was constantly running out of cash. Now they have the opposite problem, using their easy access to cash through new share issues as a weapon to fight off the other EV startups. Tesla is doing to Detroit what Apple did to the cell phone companies, redefining the car.
Its stock is overvalued now but will become much more profitable than people realize. They also are starting to extract service revenues from their cars, like Apple has. Tesla will grow revenues by 30%-50% a year for the next two or three years. They should sell several million of the new small SUV Model Y. Most other companies bringing EVs will fall on their faces.
EVs are a big factor in climate change, even in China, the world’s biggest polluter. In Europe, they are legislating gasoline cars out of existence. If you can make money building cars in Fremont, CA, you can make a fortune building them in China.
Tech valuations are high, there is no doubt about it. But interest rates are much lower by comparison. The Fed is forcing people to buy stocks, enabling these companies to evolve even faster.
When rates rise in a year or so tech stocks may have to come down. They have a lot more things going for them than against them. The customers keep coming back for more.
Needless to say, the above stocks should make up your shortlist for LEAPS to buy at the coming market bottom.
Global Market Comments
September 5, 2024
Fiat Lux
Featured Trade:
(COFFEE WITH RAY KURZWEIL)
(GOOG)
After spending better than a half-century in the investment business, I see all decisions boiling down to a single issue: Artificial Intelligence.
Speaking to people at the local PTA, American Legion, the VFW, the Commonwealth Club, people sitting next to me at high school football games, and even my own readers, this is the impression I get.
AI is rapidly working its way into every aspect of our lives. But then I live in Silicon Valley where everyone works in tech or in supporting service industries.
Companies that lead with AI, such as NVIDIA (NVDA), Google (GOOG), Amazon (AMZN), Facebook (FB), and Microsoft (MSFT) will prosper mightily. Those that don’t will disappear.
Technology companies now comprise an amazing 30% of U.S. stock market capitalization and 50% of corporate profits. They are on their way to 100% on both counts. Other industries may see the occasional brief, frenetic stock market rallies, which will quickly fade away.
Investing now is really ALL about technology with the exception of biotech and health care, which you really can consider “soft” technology.
So, I thought it timely to catch up with my old friend, Dr. Ray Kurzweil, head of engineering at Google (GOOG), the co-founder of the Singularity University, and an early AI evangelist.
Some 25 years ago, Kurzweil pitched Google co-founder Larry Page for a venture capital investment in an AI start-up. Larry responded by buying the entire company, even though it was only two weeks old. That brought Kurzweil in-house and gave him the first call on Google’s prodigious resources.
To understand the recent spate of AI breakthroughs you have to go back years ago and see how a computer beat a human in the traditional Chinese game of Go. Long a goal of AI developers, Go is the most complex game ever played by humans, with 324 squares (18 X 18) and 361 stones. That means there are 2.08 X 10 to the 170th power possible moves or more than double the number of electrons in the universe.
Scientists downloaded all known online Go moves in history, of which there were about 1 million. They then programmed a superfast mainframe to simulate 1 billion more Go moves. After that, beating all humans was a piece of cake.
You can apply this approach to more than just games. Google’s Waymo autonomous driving division let cars drive themselves 8 million miles and then simulated another 1 billion miles. That’s why they are so far ahead in the field. 1,000 robotaxis in San Francisco agree with this.
You can also employ the same strategy when asking computers to identify new drugs by running simulations against a decoded human genome. The possibilities boggle the mind.
And the stock market? How about the accuracy of the Mad Hedge Market Timing Index, which takes market data from the last 400 years and then simulates another 1,000 years on top of that? And you wonder why it’s always right, and why I’m up 60% this year.
The fruits of those labors are found today in many Google services, such as Google Assistant and Google Home, which are growing smarter by the day. “Semantic Search” is the order of the day whereby searches are made on the basis of meaning and context, instead of my keywords alone. I work with Google all day long and the progression has been nothing less than astounding.
Just around the corner are “Smart Replies.” Google will be able to read 120,000 books, or 600 million sentences, in ½ second, and come up with the best three possible answers to every question of yours. If you’re willing to wait a few minutes, you can get the best three answers from every book ever written.
The term “AI” was coined at a famed conference at Dartmouth College in 1956. Don’t be intimidated. AI is simply super fast pattern recognition that any off-the-shelf Excel spreadsheet can accomplish done on ever-faster supercomputers.
Kurzweil believes computers will pass the Turing Test by 2029 when their answers to any questions will be indistinguishable from humans. Miniaturization is another exponential trend that will place human intelligence on any smartphone by the 2030s.
Create a bionic link between your smartphone and your brain and the “singularity” is here, which Kurzweil believes will take place by the 2040s.
Kurzweil is a firm believer in the “Law of Accelerating Returns,” whereby the productivity of technology doubles every year. Costs drop by a similar amount, creating a radical deflation. So am I.
He argues that modern economic theories are broken, and I have argued this myself in the past. So much of technology’s output is free, and therefore immeasurable, that true GDP growth has been wildly underestimated.
And you wonder why inflation has been near zero for a decade, while the value of your home has doubled, and the efficiency of your cell phone has improved by a trillion-fold for a lower real price. Kurzweil expects 5 billion cell phones to be in circulation by 2025.
Moore’s law, where semiconductor price/performance doubled every year, reached its theoretical limits in 2016. All of the growth in processing power since then has been due to “3D Stacking,” where layers of processors are piled one on top of the other. The current generation of processors will see a once unimaginable 96 layers.
And if you think this is all very interesting, wait a few years until we get economic quantum computers, which will increase computing power by a trillion-fold at no cost. Quantum computers rely on the infinite number of directions electrons can spin, rather than the simple on-or-off gates of traditional legacy computers. To learn more about quantum computing, please read my last piece on the subject by clicking here.
Sometime in 2019, Kurzweil will publish a sequel to his last book called “The Singularity is Nearer.” It will no doubt be the AI blockbuster of the year.
Before then he is launching into fiction for the first time, publishing “Danielle”, which is about a girl who solves all the problems of the world by the age of 22 with the tools we have available to us today. To learn more about this project and to pre-order the book, please visit www.danielleworld.com .
Global Market Comments
August 29, 2024
Fiat Lux
Featured Trade:
(SEVEN TECH STOCKS TO BUY AT THE ENXT MARKET BOTTOM),
(AMZN), (AAPL), (NFLX), (AMD), (INTC), (TSLA), (GOOG), (META)
Global Market Comments
August 26, 2024
Fiat Lux
Featured Trade:
(MARKET OUTLOOK FOR THE WEEK AHEAD or BEWARE THE NEXT BLACK SWAN) plus (REVISITING UKRAINE),
(SPY), ($INDU), ($COMPQ), (FXI), (COPX), (NVDA), (GM), (GOOG), (FCX), (UUP), (FXE), (FXB), (FXC), (FXA)
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