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Almost a decade ago, when DoorDash (DASH) was just getting started, I needed money and took a temp job at their small headquarters at the corner of Page Mill Road and El Camino in Palo Alto, CA. My job was to call local restaurants to get their hours for an upcoming holiday and enter that information into a spreadsheet. It was mind numbing work and it didn’t pay much.
The stock market has been very thematic since the March 2020 COVID lows as investors try to invest in an environment of extreme uncertainty.
As a generalist macro investor I focus on mega caps or stocks in the S&P 100. I look for high quality, reasonably valued stocks that express my macro views. This morning I feel like digging into a few stocks that recently reported earnings to see if any might be prospects for my portfolio as well as for the light they might shed on the market as a whole.
There is a debate among economists about whether we are on the verge of one of the greatest economic booms in history or whether the current market rally is the bubble of all bubbles. The consensus view reflected in market prices is the former. The latter is the correct one in my opinion…
Those who know me will be surprised to learn that I bought shares in Coinbase (COIN), the leading cryptocurrency broker, on Friday in the wake of its 1Q21 Earnings Report Thursday afternoon. That’s because my intellectual roots are in Ayn Rand, Ludwig von Mises, The Austrian School of Economics and therefore the gold standard. As a consequence, I’ve tended to be of the mindset of Warren Buffet toward Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies in general when he called the former “rat poison squared” at Berkshire’s 2018 Annual Meeting. However, that doesn’t mean I can’t trade it profitably.
I’ll never forget it. It was 11:50am Friday March 26, 2021. I was short stocks, mainly tech stocks, and doing quite well when, all of a sudden and out of nowhere, stocks started to rip higher. From breaking down they went to exploding higher without rhyme or reason. I believe the NASDAQ ripped higher by ~2% in that time period into the close
The catalyst for Wednesday’s selloff was a hotter than expected April CPI Report. Overall inflation came in at +4.2% year over year and +0.8% month over month. Core CPI, which excludes food and energy, was +3.0% year over year and +0.9% month over month.
Most analysts have been characterizing the current rotation in markets as from Growth to Value. However, while on Monday the S&P 500 Value ETF (IVE, -0.02%) outperformed the S&P 500 Growth ETF (IVW, -1.95%), on Tuesday growth (-0.43%) outperformed value (-1.35%). This calls into question the Growth to Value narrative.
A very important divergence is taking place in markets between the tech led NASDAQ and the broader market as represented by the S&P 500.