Who knows but not many could have seen Amazon went from strength to strength to be one of the largest retailers in the world 18 years after the euphoria.
Yes that is sort of my point although I think Amazon and the rest of the FANGS are in a bubble of their own that's been created over this period. Call it a bubble, call it a bull market, call it whatever you like these companies don't earn enough (will never earn enough) to justify their prices. They are a product of a world gone mad. There is not enough long term consumer spending power to justify these valuations and at the end of the day a society can't last forever on unproductive spending, using credit to pay huge premiums for plastic junk that just ends up in landfill after a year or for the waste of time and money represented by the near infinite amount of idle, unproductive and useless communications that are made between people over social media, not to mention the ridiculous amount of communications infrastructure and energy that's required so humans can store these communications and endless streams of photos and videos of cats and the other inane photos we take. Hey there is another nice sunset, let's take 20 photos and store them in the cloud. Forget about the impact on the environment (if they even understood that) and hey I'll pay for my cloud storage with the credit that nice bank offered me. Wasn't that ad targeting my demographic great, all those young people living a carefree life down at the beach? How much can I get?
That's why I stick to the commodity sectors. People will stop spending money on junk when their earning capacity is eroded but they can't feasibly drop out of society and go back to living like cavemen. They will always need water and energy and ways to capture both and bring it to their homes and businesses. Tangible commodities will be required for as long as humans remain on earth whereas intangibles can disappear overnight. Take Lehman Brothers for example. A dominant global financial services firm (code for a company operating in the intangible financial sector...where nobody knew/knows wtf they actually did/do?) that disappeared down the gurgler overnight. Almost all that we see around us in these market places is intangible and can suffer the same fate as Lehman if the right triggers occur.
The markets are sitting on top of a figurative San Andreas Fault. Humans will be to blame when the dislocation happens and the collapse comes because they built their markets on weak foundations and in the wrong place. Stick to owning tangible assets and companies that produce tangible assets and you will be halfway to a more secure future IMO.
Gold will survive all. Esh
P.S. I realise the hypocrisy of my comment about endless inane communications on social media so please don't bother pointing that out. Here is a photo of some cute cats to top it off.
NST Price at posting:
$5.87 Sentiment: Hold Disclosure: Not Held