It’s feeling like a lot like… December 1999!

25 years ago there was a media-induced panic over “Y2K”, which was the perceived shutdown of global computer networks due to the historical coding practice of using two bytes for the year instead of four. For systems coded in the 1970’s it was a valuable savings of two bytes of storage that could be used elsewhere as nobody would be using these systems in the year 2000, right? Unfortunately re-coding ancient computer systems is very expensive (if it ain’t broke don’t fix it… unless if there’s Y2K and then you can justify an unlimited budget!). There were massive doomsday predictions, almost none of which occurred. All of these “experts” put in front of the camera predicting annihilation you don’t hear from today.

In addition to December 1999 being the 8th inning of the dot-com boom, stock markets (especially the Nasdaq) were seeing record inflows of demand and electronic stock trading and day-trading shops became completely in vogue. Back then, E-Trade and Ameritrade are the equivalent of today’s WealthSimple and Robinhood. Stories came about of dot-com instant millionaires with stock option packages, and companies were IPOing left and right and opening trading significantly above their offering price. Companies were trading at valuations that were sky-high and the mere mention of .com (Pets.com, EToys, and too many others to mention), business-to-business electronic commerce (remember Aruba and Commerce One?) or fibre optics (JDS Uniphase and Corning?) would cause stock prices to go even crazier. At your local McDonalds they were handing out free 3.5″ floppy disks or CD-ROMs to get onto AOL (through dial-up networking no less at the blazing speed of 33.6 kilobits per second – for those unfamiliar, that’s 4.2 kiloBYTES per second – about 200 times slower needed to stream a typical 1080p Netflix movie).

More relevantly, so-called “value stocks” were completely shunned and investors such as Warren Buffett (Berkshire was trading at US$51,000 at the end of 1999) were regarded as old news of a past generation, completely unable to cope in the new market of the information superhighway. Berkshire would bottom out at US$41,000 in March of 2000, the peak of the Nasdaq. Buffett even offered to buy back Berkshire stock in the year 2000, an unheard of capital allocation decision for him back then.

There are parallels to the markets of 25 years ago – the election of Trump in some sense portrays the start of a new era in America similar to the dawn of a new millennium (half the voters clearly wanted a change in the presidency), and the mere mention of the nebulous phrase of “AI” would be enough to cause a stock to skyrocket like a dot-com company. The S&P 500 is trading +28% year to date (Nasdaq +32%), while Telsa is up 76%, NVDA up 175%, and I won’t name the additional usual suspects – they are all entirely up. Tesla alone has doubled since the middle of October.

One big difference that does not fit the parallel is that most of today’s high flying companies are profitable with competitive advantages of such companies being perceived to be quite high. Surely there are a lot of AI and blockchain trash out there, but the major corporations are all making solid amounts of profit – the stratospheric valuation for these companies is definitely a parallel, however.

I will insert the concept of the mean value theorem, while somewhat complicated to explain in its full form, has a simple meaning relevant to this conversation – if the average you are seeking is +28%, that means that some components of the set (in this case your stock portfolio) must perform at or greater than +28% in order to achieve a mean of +28%.

Any equity fund manager is measured against the S&P 500 and if you had the fortitude of holding these high-flying companies you could make the average. Unfortunately, when doing a simple stock screen, approximately twice as many US-domiciled entities are trading under +28% compared to above +28%. Due to how typical portfolio allocation works, it is quite unlikely that managers will “let it ride” and instead trim the position along the way – so even the portfolio managers that have the NVidia’s and the like in their portfolios will be diluting their YTD performances unless if they are allowed to run concentrated positions.

As central banks are dropping interest rates and capital once again is rushing its way into the market to make a yield (or more likely – a capital gain) compared to the risk-free rate which appears to be heading well below the “real life experience” rate of inflation, there appears to be a huge gambling urge where once again, “cash is trash” – there is a huge sentiment out there it should be deployed in AI companies and cryptocurrencies. Margin rates for CAD are once again below 4% for institutional level investors and since the whole country is clearly going to the toilet (along with its currency), why not lever up and place a bunch of it in ethereum? This is the type of thinking that I think is going on out there – people are making fortunes with Tesla and Microstrategy, so those holding onto dogs such as Bell Canada and scratching their heads and questioning their existence in life.

I still don’t think this fever pitch has reached its peak. The difficult trade at this point is to buy into these all-time highs. What if Tesla goes to $550, $650 or an Elon-favoured number such as $690.69 per share, and what if this happens in less than three months’ time? What if Bitcoin goes to $150,000? Once the valuations get this high, the valuation itself has long since ceased to be irrelevant – it is the euphoria and psychology of competing alternatives to capital that dominate – until it doesn’t. This is probably why Warren Buffett is sitting on a huge cash stack in Berkshire along with many other so-called “value-oriented” managers – looking at amazement of the valuations ascribed to these entities. I have not seen enough evidence of people capitulating and bragging that they sold BCE to go buy some AI company. It is definitely getting close but not quite yet. Without pressure on equity holders to simultaneously liquidate into cash, prices have no reason to drop.

I look at my own portfolio and ask myself why I even bother to do market research anymore just to underperform people letting it ride on Tesla. For instance, Corvel (Nasdaq: CRVL), by virtue of appreciation, has morphed into my largest position in my portfolio. By far, it is has the most lofty valuation in my portfolio with a trailing P/E of 75. At the time I invested the trailing P/E was around 25 which (especially during the Covid blowup) I thought was rich, but I qualitatively allowed for an adjustment due to its competitive position in the industry. I did unload about a third of it slightly over a year ago at a then-56 P/E, something I thought was quite frothy but so far has turned out to be a negative value portfolio decision. Finally, just today, they announced they were going to do a 3:1 stock split!

One of the reasons why I have not unloaded the whole position (at the 75 P/E level) is an inherent skepticism of my own valuation metrics in this marketplace. Rationally speaking, I should get rid of the position. While I like to think I have a good grasp on the downside metrics, the upside metrics I have been terrible at judging.

Had my Covid-19 strategy simply been to put 100% of my portfolio in this company it would have been quite an acceptable outcome and would have saved me a lot of hassle. Had my Covid-19 strategy simply been to put 100% of my portfolio into Tesla, it would have been an even better decision.

I look at the rest of my portfolio and it is a smattering of companies involved in fossil fuels, manufacturing companies in various industries, and a so far ill-timed retail investment in the left hand side of the USA’s bimodal wealth distribution. These are relatively ‘boring’ and acceptably levered companies that trade at price-to-earnings ratios of around 10-15x, and should, in theory, provide a reasonable return if I slip into a coma and don’t wake up in a couple years. However, I’m becoming less confident over time this relatively conventional thinking is going to outperform or even generate 10%+ returns given what happens to markets that melt down like they did after March of 2000.

I do think holding half cash in the portfolio was a bit too aggressive. You end up looking like a genius if you get a market crash. However, crashes do not happen very often and with the short term interest rate clearly heading below 3% with little evidence that the “street level” of inflation is abating, the cost of cash is becoming a little too expensive for comfort, so I have mildly loosened the purse strings into a few smaller positions. I just might get my secret wish to get back to half cash again, if the existing equity in my portfolio decides to plummet!

The remainder of 2024 will likely not involve much in the way of fireworks. There will likely be a bunch of tax loss selling at year end (look BCE investors!) but the real action is likely to start on January 20, 2025 with the inauguration of President Trump and also later in the year, some speculation on what a change in the Canadian government would entail.