Make-or-break for the market; Twitter; Reduced SaaS multiples; 12% of stocks trading below cash; Housing prices; Worst year ever for bonds; 12-year anniversary of Tesla's IPO; Food tour of Chinatown in Flushing, Queens
1) The next several weeks could be make-or-break for this market...
A huge swath of companies are to report their quarterly earnings. Some big ones are coming up – including Microsoft (MSFT), Alphabet (GOOGL), Amazon (AMZN), Tesla (TSLA), Meta Platforms (META), Johnson & Johnson (JNJ), and UnitedHealth (UNH).
As these earnings roll in over the next few weeks, we'll learn a lot about the health of these stocks and the economy overall.
As such, I just put together a new presentation to outline a roadmap that you can follow for the rest of this crisis – a "portfolio reset" for this new investing paradigm. Learn more right here.
2) While I've been pounding the table for Twitter (TWTR) the stock, I can't stand the app/platform because I have to wade through so much garbage to find anything interesting.
That said, some really smart people tweet some really interesting things, so I have my longtime analyst Kevin DeCamp scan Twitter every day and send me things he thinks I'll find interesting.
He's a good judge of that since he's been working for me part time ever since we met on the chairlift at Jackson Hole in March 2015 – here's a picture from that day:
Here are five tweets he sent me recently that caught my eye...
3) The first was posted by my friend Marcelo Lima, showing how price-to-sales (P/S) multiples have contracted severely among the stocks of Software-as-a-Service ("SaaS") companies:
My take: I'm not much of a SaaS expert, but my colleague Enrique Abeyta is... and he's sharing his best ideas with long-term triple-digit upside potential in his Empire Elite Growth newsletter.
You can learn more about it – including how to gain access to the entire portfolio of open recommendations – right here.
4) This tweet shows that one in eight public companies are trading below cash and short-term investments:
My take: Yet another indicator that there are a lot of interesting opportunities in this beaten-down market!
5) The chart in this tweet appears to show that home prices are dangerously high:
My take: It's a highly deceptive chart. When you look at the y-axis, with the ratio ranging from 6.5 to 9.6, today's 10.3 isn't nearly as scary as it looks.
6) As bad as stocks have been this year, the bond market, relative to its historical performance, has been far worse thanks to rising interest rates, as this tweet shows (the year-to-date number through yesterday was negative 11.2%):
7) Lastly, while I've been very critical of the many juvenile and/or sleazy shenanigans Tesla CEO Elon Musk has engaged in, what he has accomplished over the dozen years since the company went public (and what the stock has done) is simply extraordinary, as this tweet notes (with a 41-second video):
8) A week and a half ago I went to a part of New York City I'd never been before – Chinatown in Flushing, Queens – with seven other folks: my running coach Alan, two of the other runners in my group and their husbands, Karen and Pat and Gursev and Anthony, and the latter's son, Dillon and his friend, Sinan.
We started by ordering street food – fish balls and noodle dishes with pork and shrimp.
Anthony also ordered pig stomach, which I tried – too spicy and rubbery for me.
Then we walked to the New World Mall and went to the huge food court downstairs, where we all ordered a bunch of different dishes: dumplings, spring rolls, fish, clams, tofu, etc. It was cool seeing the staff make the food right there!
Then we walked to a dessert place where Alan goofed around as the server poured the chocolate sauce onto the ice cream in the warm cookie.
Overall, it was great fun hanging out with friends on a beautiful day, and quite an interesting cultural experience!
Here are some pictures, and I posted more on Facebook here:
Best regards,
Whitney
P.S. I welcome your feedback at WTDfeedback@empirefinancialresearch.com.