Tag: stock-market

Categories
401k and Personal Finance Stocks

My quick thoughts on the US stock market

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(Update 11-23-2025) YT – 隐枫视野 – 【第448期】AI泡沫崩盘，死得最惨的会是这个巨头

(blog.wenxuecity.com) 我对最近AI泡沫的思考 by lionhill

(fortune.com) Analyst who called the dot-com bubble says Americans are turning a deaf ear to AI warnings—and a worse meltdown than 2008 looms

(Update 11-06-2025) This indicator hasn’t flashed this red since the dot-com bubble

Shiller PE Ratio – Multpl

(Original) It seems to me the US stock market is defying the gravity and common valuation metrics, and going up higher and higher everyday, with the booming of AI.

Personally I tend to agree with Warren Buffett, the Oracle of Omaha and the greatest investor of all time, that the market is overvalued. He sits on the sideline with over $300 billions cash (technically, it’s the 3 month US treasury bonds). And btw, I own some Berkshire Hathaway B shares – my goal, is to own enough of those for my kids college and my own retirement 🙂

I remember the bubble during the dot com days (1999). The Dot-com bubble. And the burst afterwards. In fact I got my 1st job offer on March 2020, and I remember the Nasdaq hit all time high (over 5,000) in that same month. It took many years for Nasdaq come back to that level, after the crash.

I also remember in 1999, when I was a graduate student in Rolla (now Missouri S&T), once I was traveling with an engineer from DayCo. DayCo is the sponsor of our research project. And this engineer has his training and specialty in mechanical engineering, but he was buying some fiber optics or networking companies left and right. That’s what Greenspan (the fed chair then) called Irrational Exuberance: “The phrase was interpreted as a warning that the stock market might be overvalued.” (from Wikipedia)

Another old story or tale is probably around 1929, when the shoe-shining man started to tell the pros what stock to buy. I had a similar experience recently: not from shoe-shine man, but from a friend whom I believe has more limited experience on stocks and markets. The friend is suggesting buy AI stocks, all-in, don’t use the brain 🙂

Personally I felt we are in the melt-up phase. The recent deals around OpenAI all sound quite fishy. And someday the judgment will come (as said in the Bible, or if we put it in the biblical perspective). I just don’t know when. In the mean time, I will sit tight, save some dry powder (cash), and act when that opportunity presents itself.

Categories
Fun Investing

Rough day and week, student loan forgiveness and math is brutal too

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First: I am happy to say the kids to back to school. In the last 2 weeks before school starts, some days Sophia really got bored, and she let me know that. She asked me to to buy the humming bird feeder, among other things.

I recall the days I shopped at Sears (hint, a while ago, not much since Sophia was born, aka from 2014).

https://twitter.com/JonErlichman/status/1563598300372254720

The stock marker of last Friday and the week can be better summarized in the two tweets below. I do understand the economy usually has cycles and the federal reserve has a tough job to balance the employment and inflation. But at the same time it seems sometimes things are so obvious and I just don’t understand how they could miss the most recent inflation cycle by dismiss it as “transitory”. They are paid to do that job. Or sometimes it’s the politics got in the way? Nobody wants to be the boy who cries wolf coming (and it turns out to be false).

https://twitter.com/WallStreetSilv/status/1563262458764046337

and this one on tech stocks in particular, as they are under assault from the fed raising the interest rate.

https://twitter.com/buccocapital/status/1563549513633386497

I noticed CNBC did another special Friday evening too. Personally I no longer pay attention like I did back in 2008/2009 the financial crisis days. Maybe a good sign as I no longer tune much into the “market turmoil” and I am more calm and doing my own research now.

https://twitter.com/CNBC/status/1165005039586500608

There are tons of tweets, and controversy on the federal student loan forgiveness. Legality, fairness etc. aside, personally I think it can potentially help out quite a few people, and many of them are hard working and earned this. One interesting and probably more meaningful policy is the capping of loan interest and payment tied to a person’s income. Also the WH “this you?” series of tweets.

https://twitter.com/WhiteHouse/status/1562916200866267138

And when I am searching through my tweets archive, I happened to find this one too.

https://twitter.com/stlplace/status/1528560337968152578

As I said in my previous post on compounding, the debt piled up via the snowball effect too. So anything we can do to minimize or reduce the debt, it could have impact on people’s real lives.

Separately, I had discussion with Serenity on student loan too: I said I will pay for her college.

Last but not least, I googled why there is no term limits to the legislators. It seems constitution related.

Categories
401k and Personal Finance

Market, corona virus, panic

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The US stock market started to feel the heat of corona virus in recent weeks. This week is the worst in term of the percentage loss (8%) and the fear of the market.

Along the same lines, so much fear among the ordinary people due to the news such as Tom Hanks got infected, NBA / NCAA games cancelled, Italy was getting into situation like Wuhan (healthcare system was overwhelmed), and the quarantine / shutdown of the whole country. I can feel the fear of the market as my friends talked much more about the market on wechat.

Last time things were like this, in terms of both the percentage drop (and the speed of the drop), CNBC running extra evening shows, and friends got excited and discussing stocks nonstop (at mitbbs, trader1688, gutone etc websites, no wechat app yet). Then comes the craziness of the stocking things from grocery store or drug stores, from hand sanitizer to toilet paper, from food to drinks. I do understand the situation in Italy and other countries. I also understand the “under-test” of US sick population. It’s improving as time goes, just as the WH made announcement this afternoon. As to the “buying craziness”, I still think it’s unnecessary. When this thing first started in Wuhan, China, friends here asked about buying face masks. I did not listen. I may still a few left in my year 2017 trip. But I am not overly worried. I am cautious though: try to stay away from the crowds, including office. I think we will likely to overcome this.

While for me compared to 2008/9 financial crisis, I am both older and have 2 young kids, I am not overly scared. I do have some savings and lift insurance. I will try my best to keep myself from getting sick. Short term it will be horrible for many people who have less meanings. We should try to help if / when we can.

Last but not least, I maintained a wiki page for the corona virus at github. You may also note I made some changes to this wordpress website recently. Started about a year ago to upgrade the WP to 5.0 (manual) to the upgrade a day ago. I am still trying to figure out things as I made changes, for example, I found out the comments not longer show: I likely did intentionally a while ago to battle the spams, but I could not put it back as the stlplace.com/uudaddy has. Also note uudaddy.com is moved under stlplace.com/uudaddy (site consolidation, I don’t want to pay $18 for the uudaddy.com domain name). I had the domain in 2010 when my first daughter is born, and I think going forward I am ok with the stlplace.com only. A lot has changed since I have the stlplace.com domain, with the virus I think longer term we will use more internet, web, devices and virtual learn / interaction instead of physical. This is a bit unfortunate, but we live in ab “adapt, or die” world.

Categories
Stocks

Is this sucker’s rally ?

Reading Time: < 1 minuteFrom Yahoo Tech-ticker. I don’t necessarily agree his view (but it’s always good to listen to both sides of the arguments).

Categories
Life Stocks

Step back

Reading Time: < 1 minuteThe market is full of news these days, and it looks like the drama will be on for a while. But will “tape reading all the time” be helpful for investing? Interestingly I read an abstract of an article on this topic (written by a finance professor at Wash. U.), his conclusion is no. In other words, step back from the market may work out better. But the human nature of “making quick money” can be felt everywhere, especially in China these days. Do we really want to miss the next big thing?

As I was also reading Buffett’s essays (annual letter to his shareholders), I felt I need to learn systematically about finance. I also wanted to learn more about “how to valuate a business”, which is the key to long term investing.

Amid all these, I decided to scale back my blogging frequency a bit, from two posts a day to one post every 3, 4 or 7 days. This hopefull will also help relieve the stress of my hand. I wanted to save key strokes and mouse clicking, so that I can continue to work as programmer for the foreseeble future.

As a side benifit, I may be able to write better quality articles now that I’m scaling back…