Tag 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.