In the summer of 1987, when I was an intern at Apple Computer (NASDAQ:AAPL) (as it was known at the time), the company had just issued their stellar earnings report and news of a stock split, and to everyone’s amazement, the stock went down. I remember my boss whining to his colleagues, “Record earnings, a stock split, what else do they want from us?”
Well, I think we’ve come back to that. Because, as in the summer of 1987, when things get insanely overvalued, it really doesn’t matter what good news you have because the juice has all been squeezed out of the lemon.
I offer below a vastly larger high-tech company, Alphabet (NASDAQ:GOOGL), which shocked the world only a few weeks ago with just how gargantuan their revenue and profits were. The stock gapped higher to a price never seen before in history.
The stock market is full of ironies, and this was another one: the greatest time in your life to buy every single put options you could locate on GOOGL was, indeed, the day when there was absolute mayhem about what a money-making machine the company was. It has done almost nothing but drop ever since.
Thus, I suspect the dweebs are wondering, what do they want from us to make our stock price go up? Well, fellas, everything is overvalued by about ten-fold, so… there’s nothing to be done.
And, of course, if the earnings were BAD, then God help you.
As we approach the trading day, things are surprisingly quiet. The big equities are up anywhere from 2/3rds of a percent to a single percent, and I have 20% of my portfolio in cash, waiting for new opportunities. I am in 40 different bearish positions, and as with yesterday, I suspect my main role is going to be housekeeping.