Markets

Jeremy Grantham Predictions Reviewed

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Jeremy Grantham Predictions Reviewed 1

Updated 2/20/24 One year almost to the day, here we are with Jeremey Grantham predicting… wait for it… a bubble! Of course, a bubble. I guess we can call him a permabear now. He must not believe everything he says because his fund is still in business. Maybe he just says these things to get headlines. It works. Updated 02/01/2023 According to a Marketwatch article, “Man credited with calling the 2008 crisis says the next 20 years in the stock market will ‘break a lot of hearts.” Whew. That’s a lot to unpack. Take a closer look at Jeremy Grantham predictions. Let’s start with a 20-year call being virtually worthless. In the next 20 years, I too predict the stock market will have rough periods. I also predict growth, a big year, a terrible year, a sidewise year, and a general overall trend up fueled at some points by growth, and some points by inflation. I mean, seriously, pretty much everything will happen at least once during the next 20 years. Was The Prediction Really That Great? As I pointed out in an earlier article, there is a staggering amount of back-patting, and “See I was right!” when it comes …

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Uber Buys Drizly, Proves It Has No Real Value

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ubers-future

Uber Buys Drizly for $1.1 Billion Once upon a time, people believed that Uber had some form of value. Its app was revolutionary. Its concept of using ordinary people using their own cars to provide rides was revolutionary. But, it turns out that it wasn’t so much revolutionary, as just the first in an easily replicable line of use-your-own-car apps. Drizly Is Just GrubHub for Alcohol, Which Is Just Uber for Food Uber is paying Drizly $1.1 billion in a desperate grab for any shot at profitability and sustainability. Uber’s acquisition of Drizly proves that there is nothing special about Uber. A handful of engineers, a couple of months, and a few million of funding and anyone can copy Uber well enough. After that, the “special” comes from good old fashioned sales. Building Drizly was a lot less about building an app, and a lot more about signing up liquor stores, and then convincing people that it was worth shelling out $5 to stay on their couch instead of heading down to their favorite liquor store. This was a tough sale pre-Covid. Why pay $5 plus tip for a liquor delivery when you could just swing by your favorite liquor …

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Stock Trends Reversing to the Mean

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stock market revert to mean

Nothing makes a financial journalist salivate more than the sweet sound of statistics to make their stock market warning article sound more legitimate. Of course, numerous statistics are meaningless, others are easily cherry-picked based on data, and still others are far less useful or predictive than other statistics that might not say the same thing. Today’s fun example comes courtesy of MarketWatch and the gloomy warning that U.S. Stocks could be in for a world of hurt if this trend reverses to the mean. Check out my Rakuten rebates review. “World of hurt?” – Whew! Pulling hard on our masculine headline click bait phrase dictionary this morning are we? What Is Reversing to the Mean? Reverting to the mean is the statistical probability that for any observation away from the mean, the more likely the next observation will be closer to the mean. An easy way to think of this is if the mean speed of cars passing by on a road is 55 mph, and one goes by at 95 mph, statistically the next card that goes by will do so at a speed closer to the mean than 95 mph, that is 94 mph or less. Obviously, this …

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Stock Market 2011 Results

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The results of the stock market for 2011 are basically flat. While the Dow Jones Industrial Average can claim a small gain, the S&P 500 Index ended 2011 with a small loss. Likewise, the NASDAQ ended down for 2011 as well. 2011 Dow Jones Up The Dow finished up for 2011 thanks in part to the makeup of the index. The stocks in the Down Jones Industrial Average contain only large U.S. companies. While financial companies make up a significant number of the stocks, their impact is limited because the Dow Jones Average is a price-weighted index. That means that higher priced stocks have more influence on the average than lower priced stocks. Most financial stocks have very low share prices these days, and as a result, their performance doesn’t drag as heavily on the average. Bank of America was the worst performer in the Dow having lost 58.3 percent for the year. The Dow Industrials finished up 5.5 percent for the year. That is three consecutive positive years for the Dow, although nobody is dancing in the streets over this year’s performance, where many components had flat or down years. The top 5 Dow stocks for 2011 were McDonald’s …

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What Does the Election Mean for the Economy?

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Republicans Win House, Democrats Keep Senate – Gridlock? Traditionally, Wall Street and big business have favored gridlock in Washington D.C. The idea is that when Republicans and Democrats are busy fighting each other, they can’t be changing the laws and regulations that businesses already know. Theoretically, any currently successful business already knows how to earn money and make a profit under the current laws, but that may not be the case under new legislation that gets passed. The devil you know, is better than the one you don’t — so to speak. But, is political gridlock good for American business this time? Is partisan fighting a good thing or a bad thing for the U.S. economy right now? Is Gridlock Good for The Economy? With the 2010 U.S. economy in a fragile state, and major changes in the form of ending stimulus funds coming in 2011, the difficult question is whether the Republican takeover of the House of Representatives a bad thing for the economy, or is it good for the economy that Democrats have lost the House. The major concern to look for in 2011 is the end of stimulus spending and other U.S. Government spending to bolster the …

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Inflation Stays Tame – Fed Not Raising Rates Soon

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Everyone is worried about if and when the Federal Reserve will raise interest rates, even though the Fed itself continues to say that it is not considering doing so. That is what happens when interest rates are so low (basically just above zero) that everyone knows the only way they can go is up.

Abby Joseph Cohen Track Record Accurate As A Broken Indicator Light

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indicator light

I fired off a quick post yesterday about the “news” that Goldman Sach’s Abby Joseph Cohen declared the recession over.  If you missed it, I made the point that an arrow pointing up painted on a wall had just as accurate of a track record as Ms. Cohen did over the past decade or so.  For some reason, Cohen has a set of groupies, or fan boys, or whatever that always like to remind people of when she was “right” and, of course, always forget about when she was wrong. The truth is that Abby Joseph Cohen has never been “right”.  If your answer to a yes/no question is always the same, you aren’t getting the questions right.  You are just happening upon the questions that were written with a yes answer.  That isn’t intelligence or ability, that’s statistics. Still, so as to avoid anyone showing up and (publicly, so far, it’s only messages) saying that I have forgotten about all the really great “calls” she has made, I offer the following factual data as proof that any upward pointing arrow would have made, and lost, investors just as much money as Abby Joseph Cohen over the last 10 years. …

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