Ask HN: Are we in tech-stock bubble?

No one ever answers a question like that to a satisfying degree.

I made a bunch of money speculating on the swings of stocks. Not with options, just patience, and it enabled me to make wild returns. For example, I bought and sold Virgin Galactic 3 times over the past 13 or 14 months, which tripled my initial capital. I did similar but with a risky few pharma stocks. PLTR tripled since IPO (and unlike AirBNB it wasn't rigged to benefit banks-and-friends) so that's another 200% return. While many people dump their capital into index funds, I keep most of my money in cash and speculate wildly with a fraction of it, and my returns over the past 5 years exceed what many large funds do. I also learn about industries and follow news that I wouldn't otherwise. Stock market index funds terrify me because I want to use the cash in the coming years for property.

I don't know, but none of this seems healthy and normal. I've been following the financial press for a long time almost daily, and I'm pretty confident no one's proclamations of the bottom or top can be trusted in advance. We'll know in months or years whether we're in a top.

Another commenter mentioned this, but it's important to understand the net present value calculation, which is:

NPV = Rt / (1 + i)^t

Rt is the incoming cash flow at time t, and i is the discount rate. This is the "theoretical" way that businesses should be valued: estimate their future cash flows, then discount them back to the present to take the time value of money into account (of course, in the real world, there is a lot more that goes into the price of stocks).

The issue is that as the discount rate approaches 0, the net present value then equals the same as ALL future positive cash flows. For large, perpetually operating businesses, this can then turn into something between "a lot" and "infinity".

Again, there are lots of other things that go into actual stock prices, but our economic system really is in new territory when the discount rate approaches 0 (or heck, goes negative!)

The Fed has flooded the financial sector with cash. That cash has to go somewhere. Every security with a CUSIP and a price tag is getting inflated as a result.

TSLA? Not justifiable from a pure numbers standpoint.

But - other tech stocks? Arguably justifiable. Since the risk free rate (treasuries) has cratered, this has altered the DCF calculation that analysts use to value a company (the outcome is essentially this: the company is worth more, because this risk free rate is used in discounting the PV vs FV of the company’s cash flows).

Thus, it makes sense to have companies worth more (compared to historical price-to- earnings comparisons).

Then on top of this, there is a somewhat deflationary force of tech companies providing more efficient means and processes to things - which further perpetuates the cycle of these companies being worth more (their inputs cost less and are less labile, and their outputs are greater than say, a mining or oil company)

TSLA? No idea.

But I think there's often some hidden game going on with tech companies that go well beyond selling more sugar water and expanding overseas to places that haven't seen sugar water before.

Amazon is the best at this... using one business to launch a second.

So what I'd look for with TSLA is not whether cars can ever justify this price, but whether there is an adjacent business that is actually bigger than cars. Is there? I have no idea.

Not sure about Tesla, but for the tech industry in general a lot of companies/startups have been propped up by other startups having near-infinite VC cash to spend on them so the profit made by these companies wasn't actually correlated with the value they provide. The market will have a big wake-up call when the VC money dries up and these companies will be in serious trouble.

I think advertising and marketing is a good example of this. The amount of advertising a typical person is exposed to has increased by orders of magnitude but the amount of disposable money people have hasn’t followed. Given the primary objective of advertising is to drive a purchase (either directly or indirectly through brand awareness), an adjustment is bound to happen. Currently a lot of advertising & marketing is propped up by VC-funded companies who burn unreasonable amounts of money on customer acquisition in an attempt to monopolise their market, but these attempts are petering out which in turn means the advertising companies’ revenue would diminish and get closer to the true value of their services. We’re already seeing this on major platforms where they cram more and more ads in, in an attempt to maintain their revenue despite the declining value of their ad slots.

Responding to the question, and the comments:

It could be worse. Much worse. It could be the great depression, caused by massive shrinking in the money supply. Nobody likes growth in the money supply (well, ok, debtors do). But, it's better than a shrink. Or as Ray Dalio sorta says, a beautiful deleveraging.

Yes it's a bubble, defined by everyone saying it's not a bubble. Is TSLA justified - no and yes. Purely monetarily, no. But in relation to all it's competitors yes. They're all FUBAR. Most of them don't have a clue about either EVs or self-driving. They are horse carriage companies in the age of the Ford Model T.

Relative to their competitors, yes, TSLA should be ahead as a measure of future growth, or future ownership of the transportation sector. There is little doubt how clueless their competitors currently are. But it's still arguable TSLA is ahead of the curve a little.

Will TSLA come down? Different question. Now they're in the S&P 500 this isn't simple. Probably not. If you transpose or invert the question - who will challenge TSLA? Crickets. Silence. That's why TSLA is so highly valued. There is nobody even close. LOL NKLA.

Will tech stocks come down? Yes, but there's many ways to think of it. Will covid end? Yes, this too shall pass. tech stocks will come down but relative to what? The dollar? Maybe. But more likely everyone else will catch up a little.

Stepping back - let's ask a better quesiton. Who's long tech stocks? What would you bet tech stocks go up (a dollar? 10 dollars? 100 dollars..?). These questions are better asked as bets or about current positions.

Every single person has no simple way to save money anymore. Savings accounts, CDs, and money markets - even high-yield online ones like Ally and Goldman Sachs - pay zero interest or close to it. Simultaneously the government has printed an absolutely incredible amount of money this year that has almost exclusively gone to the wealthy. This is because the fed is buying treasuries / corporate junk bonds and backstopping our entire economy while the actual economy has shrank maybe 10%. A tiny amount of the printed money is airdropped to citizens with direct checks or extended unemployment but this is a tiny amount that is primarily to buy off the commoners so they don’t complain about the enormous wealth transfer happening right now.

What this means is scarce financial assets are going to go up, and up, and up. Every person who doesn’t want to lose money needs to become a risk manager and start investing because there is no other option.

I think we are at an inflection point. We are about to see an increase in productivity and innovation due to the technologies (AKA tools) that have been created in the last few decades. That has sparked the buying euphoria that has driven many stocks to extra ordinary levels. Is it a bubble? Maybe, we really won't know until after the fact.

I believe that if it is, it's only the start. We will be seeing higher highs for at least a few more years. The euphoria has just started. I believe it so much that I think we will see the 1st Trillionaire with in the next 15 years.

These innovations plus our positive progressive social views will improve the standard of living for many and that in effect will help many others.

Good days are in our future.

There are a variety of comments saying that discount rates are going to 0 because of fed actions which therefore justifies high asset prices. Another version of this story is “the fed printed cash and it has to go somewhere”. While it is true that discount rates are being suppressed by fed action, risk free rates are only one portion of what flows into the discount rate of a DCF. Market risk premium is another component that seems to be completely ignored this HN thread.

The google search term to get your feet wet is “CAPM”. I personally think that risk free rates being 0 is not sufficient to justify some of the valuations we’re seeing in the technology sector.

I came across an article recently which talked about how current accounting standards don't portray an accurate picture of many tech companies due to "intangible assets". I wonder if or how much this shows up in the current feeling of many tech stocks bring overpriced?

https://tanay.substack.com/p/the-rise-of-intangibles-and-the... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25556726

We're probably in a cryptocurrency bubble rather than a tech bubble. Blockchain.com and Crypto.com look like Pets.com.

Unlike the dot-com era, Tesla makes real things.

The valuation is unimportant as long as there isn’t something else for cash rich people to put their money into. Same for BTC or beach property.

TSLA? Entirely justified. I think we're headed to $4400/share by 2024. (See Cathie Wood's "golden goose" bull case for details.)

I laid out my reasoning for getting in back in May 2020. I raised my position to 86% a month after writing this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22970810