Category Archives: internet bubble

the current market: apps vs. features

May 12, 2020 By in administration economic strategy, internet bubble, Strategy, Uncategorized Tags: , 2 Comments

sizing up the market

In some ways, current trading in tech stocks reminds me of the internet boom of 1999.  To be clear, I don’t think we are at anything near the crazy valuation levels we reached back twenty+ years ago.  On the other hand, I’m not willing to believe we’ll reach last-century crazy, mostly because nothing in the stock market is ever exactly the same.

On the (sort-of) plus side, three-month Treasury bills back then were just below to 5% vs. 1.5% today and 10-year Treasury notes were 4.7% vs 1.9% now.  If we were to assume that the note yield and the earnings yield on stocks should be roughly equivalent (old school would have been the 30-year bond), the current PE supported by Treasuries is 50+, the 1999 equivalent was 21 or so.   This is another way of saying that today’s market is being buoyed far more than in 1999 by accomodative government policy.

On the other, the economic policy goal of the Trump administration, wittingly or not, seems to be to follow ever further down the trail blazed by Japan during the lost decades starting in the 1990s.  So the post-pandemic future is not as cheery as the turn of the century was.

what to do

I think valuations are high–not nosebleed high, but high.  I also know I’m bad at figuring out what’s too high.  I started edging into cyclicals a few weeks ago but have slowed down my pace because I’m now thinking that cyclicals might get weaker before they get stronger (I bought more MAR yesterday, though).

With that shift on the back burner, what else can I do to make my portfolio better?

features vs. apps

Another thing that’s also very reminiscent of 1999 is today’s proliferation of early-stage loss-making companies, particularly in software.

The 1999 favorites were online retailers (e.g., Cyberian Outpost, Pets.com, eToys) and internet infrastructure (Global Crossing) whose eventual nemesis, dense wave division multiplexing, was also a darling.

The software losers were by and large undone, I think, not because the ideas were so bad but because they weren’t important enough to be stand-alone businesses.  They were perfectly fine as features of someone else’s app.  A number were eventually bought for half-nothing after the mania ended, to become a part of larger entities.

 

One 2020 stock that comes to mind here is Zoom (ZOOM), a name I held for a while but have sold.  The video conferencing product is inexpensive and it’s easy to use.  It’s also now on center stage.  But there are plenty of alternatives that can be polished up and then offered for free by, say, Google or Microsoft.

 

Another group is makers of meat substitutes (I bought a tiny amount of Beyond Meat on  impulse after reading about 19th-century working conditions in meatpacking plants).  Same issue here, though.  Where’s the distribution?  Will BYND end up as a supplier, say, to McDonalds?  …in which case the PE multiple will be very low.  Or will it be able to develop a brand presence that separates it from other meat substitutes and allows it to price at a premium?  Who knows?  My reading is that the market is voting for the latter, although I think chances are greater for the former outcome  …which is why I’m in the process of selling.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Square, venture capital and the late-1990s Internet bubble

November 20, 2015 By in Industry Analysis, internet, internet bubble, stock market, Technology, Transport, Utilities Tags: , , , , , , , , , , 1 Comment

a bubble deflating

Internet payments company Square came to market yesterday.  It has a two-letter symbol, SQ, and trades on the NYSE, not NASDAQ.  But the most salient fact about the offering is that the IPO price was a lot below the private market value that venture capital investors had placed on SQas little as a year ago.

At the same time, the small number of mutual funds which have been aggressive venture capital buyers in Silicon Valley have been, more or less quietly, writing down the carrying value of their non-public company holdings.

What we’re seeing is, I think, a smaller and much more benign–both for the economy and for us as stock market investors–analogue of the deflation of the Internet mania of the late 1990s that started in early 2000.

the late 1990s and the internet

I remember noticing in 1998, that earlier- and earlier-stage companies were coming to market successfully.  Some were little more than concepts.  Take Amazon (AMZN), for example, which IPOed in mid-1997.  The pre-offering roadshow that I saw emphasized that investors had made gigantic fortunes on buying unknown companies like Microsoft during the personal computer era and that AMZN was a lottery ticket to a similar outcome in the Internet Age.  Of course, even a success like AMZN didn’t turn profit for its first eight years as a public company, surviving on the proceed from the IPO and follow-on debt offerings.

I thought at the time, and unfortunately committed my theory to writing, that we were seeing a fundamental change in the role of the stock market in capital formation.  Portfolio managers were gradually taking on the role previously played by venture capital.  So, I mused, managers of mutual funds like me might have to think about reserving a small place–no more than, say, 5%–of their portfolios for developing companies that they normally wouldn’t have touched with a ten-foot pole.

Not my finest intellectual hour.

today’s bubble deflation

The slow escape of air from the venture capital bubble that is now going on will not have much effect on publicly traded companies, I think, for several reasons:

–the amount of money involved in this speculation is much smaller

–investors of all stripes still wear the scars of 2000-2001, so they haven’t been anywhere near as crazy this time around

–the people who are losing money now are, or represent, wealthy, seasoned speculators, not retail investors

–maybe most important, much of the original internet froth surrounded highly capital-intensive efforts to build a global physical internet transport infrastructure.  Names like Global Crossing and Worldcom come to mind.

Yes, too much physical capacity did get built back then, and some builders were highly financially leveraged.  But also dense wave division multiplexing, a technological breakthrough in technique (basically, putting glorified prisms on each end of a cable), made it possible for each fiber optic strand to carry 2x, 4x, 8x, 16x ( in 2015 the number is 240x)…  more traffic than initially anticipated.  Thanks to DWDM, suddenly, despite the rapid growth of internet traffic, an acute shortage of signal transport capacity turned to mind-boggling glut.  The transport industry was facing collapse as customers played a ton of potential suppliers against each other for lower prices.  Naturally, new construction–and related orders for all sorts of high-and low-tech components, dried up completely.   So did investment, employment in civil engineering   …and the stocks.

In today’s software world, there’s no equivalent, other than perhaps the market for software engineers.  And there are no signs I can see of recession in this arena.  Quite the opposite.

 

when the gold mine opens…

August 14, 2014 By in Current Market Thoughts, internet bubble, securities markets, stock market Tags: , , , 1 Comment

…the company’s stock falls apart.

a Wall Street parable:

A group of geologists forms a gold mining company and raises money from investment managers at $8 a share.  It goes public a few months later at $10 a share, having bought a bunch of mineral rights with the initial seed money.

Shortly thereafter, the company announces it has identified a potentially attractive ore body on one of its leases and has begun drilling to confirm the presence of gold ore and the extent of the find.  The stock rises to $15.

The company announces that has found gold.  Rumors begin to circulate that the ore body is much bigger than expected.  The company is sending ore samples to a laboratory for analysis.  The stock goes up to $20.

It turns out the ore samples are richer in gold content than initially thought.  Rumors circulate that the ore contains significant byproduct amounts of silver and other metals–which would imply that mining costs will be unusually low.  The stock reaches $30.

The company begins to build a processing plant and says production will commence in six months.  The stock rises to $40.

 

During this entire period, very little hard and fast information is available.  Analysts fill the void with bullish speculation about the extent of the find, the high purity of the ore grade and the possibility of very high byproduct credits.  Their spreadsheets show “best case” profits rising to the moon as each analyst tries to out-bullish his rivals.

Then the mine opens.

There are initial teething problems with the mine, so production is low.  The ore grade is high, but less rich than analysts’ speculations would have had it.  Byproduct credits are not as great as analysts had typed into their spreadsheets.

The stock falls to $20, as actual data puncture the speculative balloon Wall Street had inflated.  Where the stock goes from there depends entirely on how the numbers pan out.

relevance?

This is an extreme example of investors letting their imaginations run away with themselves in advance of, and in the absence of, real operating data.

It happens more often than Wall Street would like to admit.   Euro Disney is a perfect example of this phenomenon in action in the non-mining arena.  The stock peaked just as the park opened and the turnstiles started recording actual visitors.  (Note:  if you check out a Euro Disney chart, remember that the stock had a 1-for-100 reverse split in 2007, which the online charts I’ve checked don’t adjust for.  So that 3.4 euro price is really 3.4 euro cents!)

To some degree, every growth stock eventually gets overhyped and reaches an unsustainably high price-earnings multiple.  Normally, the inevitable multiple contraction begins as investors sense the company’s growth rate is slowing.  But sometimes–as in the case of AAPL–it happens earlier.  In the fictional case above, the overvaluation happens right out of the box.  This is also what the 1999 Internet stock boom was all about.

In today’s world, I think Amazon (AMZN) could be another potential case in point.    …attractive concept, lots of whispers, little hard data, a multiple that–even adjusting the company’s (conservative) accounting to make the financials look more comparable to other publicly traded companies–looks very high to me.

Among the “big data’ recent listings, more 21st-century gold mines may also be lurking.

Caveat emptor, as they say.

 

 

economic/stock market cycle: 4 years or 8?

June 14, 2013 By in Current Market Thoughts, internet bubble, Inventory Cycle, Portfolio management, Presidential election cycle, securities markets, stock market, Strategy Tags: , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

phone call from sunny CA

My younger son called the other day to talk about the stock market.  He reminded me that I had often spoken as he was growing up about the four-year stock market cycle seen in the US.  It’s sometimes called the presidential election cycle, from the belief that the sitting president injects PEDs into the economy in the fourth year of his term to aid his reelection bid.  It’s also called the inventory cycle.

the traditional four-year market cycle

The idea behind this is that in the post-WW II US the typical period of business cycle expansion, during which government policy is to stimulate growth, has lasted about 2 1/2 years.  As we reach full employment and upward wage pressure commences, the policy stance reverses.  Interest rates rise; the economy slows–and sometimes contracts.  This latter period lasts around 1 1/2 years.

The stock market exhibits the same behavior–2 1/2 years of up followed by 1 1/2 years of down–but leads the economy by about six months.

a rule of thumb

The four-year cyclical pattern generates a practical rule for investors:

–when the stock market has been rising for two years, start thinking about becoming more defensive, and

–when the market has been falling for a year, think about becoming more aggressive.

the eight-year cycle

The point of my son’s phone call is that this traditional pattern can’t be found in charts of market action for almost two decades.  It has been replaced instead by an eight year cycle–5 1/2 years of up, followed by 2 1/2 years of down.  More importantly, two months ago, we entered the fifth year of rising market.

His conclusion from looking at the charts:  early in 2014 the S&P will hit the skids.

 

This is a very interesting thought, even if it turns out not to be correct.  It makes you stop looking the leaves on individual trees and start to think about the shape of the forest as a whole.

differences?

Is the stock market situation today substantially different from the tail end of the internet bubble of 1999, or of the emergence of the mortgage fiasco/financial crisis of 2008?  If so, what are those differences?   …can we conclude that today’s story will end up any better than those two did?

I think there are key differences.

More about this on Monday.

 

 

a blast from the past: eToys and the IPO market

March 11, 2013 By in internet, internet bubble, Investment firms Tags: , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

In yesterday’s New York Times, business reporter Joe Nocera wrote an opinion column about investment bankers’ behavior in bringing companies public.  It’s based on documents from an ongoing lawsuit between 1999 IPO star, eToys (which went into Chapter 11 in 2001), and its lead underwriter, Goldman Sachs.  Mr. Nocera got the data from the New York County Clerk’s office, where they were supposed to have been under court seal, but weren’t.

eToys

No, it’s not the one with the sock puppet.  That was Pets.com.  eToys was an online toy retailer.  Both made it into CNET’s Top Ten internet bubble flops, though.

The pricing range for eToys shares in the initial prospectus was $10-$12.  The final offering price was $20.  The stock closed on its opening day at $77.  It peaked a few months later at $84.  It was trading at $.09 when it went belly up.

The lawsuit:  eToys contends that Goldman failed in its fiduciary duty to get the best price for eToys shares.  Although it was losing money at the time of the IPO, eToys thinks that if it had raised, say, $400 million (an offering price just north of $50) instead of the $155 million it got, it would have been able to stay alive long enough to become profitable.  This was basically the AMZN strategy.  In eToys’ case, who knows what might have happened.

Goldman’s defense is apparently that it had no such duty.

the documents

Grammar and spelling errors aside, the Nocera documents shed some light on less well-known aspects of the IPO process.  No one comes out looking especially good.  For example:

–Goldman allocated 20% of the offering to “flippers,”  that is, to brokerage clients who had no interest in owning the IPO companies.  They just wanted to sell, or “flip,” the stock during first-day trading.

–one investment manager said he did large amounts of trades with Goldman simply to get IPO allocations.  He also appears to me to have paid commissions at almost twice the then going rate.  A cynic would say he got no services for this extra payout;  he just wanted to make the payments fatter–and thereby get a bigger IPO stock allocation.

–an internal presentation argues that Goldman should look at first-day trading gains in an IPO stock as being an asset of the firm, one that Goldman should seek to maximize the return on.

–Goldman regarded first-day gains as a quid pro quo for two things–the size of a client’s commission business and his willingness to participate in “cold” IPOs.  (“Cold” IPOs are ones with little or no upside; participation allows the underwriting syndicate to earn IPO fees at lower risk.)

–Goldman kept track of the first-day gains achieved by each client and informed at least some that it expected to receive 20%-30% of that figure back in increased trading commissions.

the underwriting fee/trading commission tradeoff

In the eToys IPO, the underwriters (I’m including the selling syndicate in here, too) received fees of $11.2 million, or 6.75% of the offering price of $20 a share.  If we assume they received from all brokerage clients what amounts to a kickback of 25% of the first-day gains of $53 on 8.2 million shares, that would have amounted to $108.7 million.

If, on the other hand, the IPO had been priced at $50, the underwriting fees would have been $28 million.  The commission “kickback” would be $47 million.

The total investment banking take at an IPO price of $20 a share would be $119.9 million; at $50 it would be $75 million.

This is Mr. Nocera’s point, and eToys lawsuit contention–that Goldman had every incentive to underprice the offering.

on the other hand…

…let’s suppose that the underwriters could only collect from flippers, who made up 20% of the eToys offering.  SEC-regulated money managers, after all, have a fiduciary obligation to get the lowest possible commissions.  If so, the “kickbacks” would have amounted to $21.7 million and $9.4 million.  The total investment banking take $20 a share would be $32.9 million; at $50 a share it would be $37.9 million.  Not a huge difference.

And I suspect this is closer to the true state of affairs.  Still, the tone of the documents Nocera unearthed suggests to me that Goldman felt it was missing a golden opportunity by not exploiting its underpricing better–not that there was something wrong with the underpricing strategy.  It may also be they knew that firms with more Internet cred, like Merrill (whose famous analyst, Henry Blodget was subsequently barred from the securities industry for fabricating his research reports) or Morgan Stanley (Mary Meeker apparently convinced the SEC she really believed the crazy stuff she wrote) were better able to cash in.