Joel Elconin – Are We In A Sideways Trend With Regards To Interest Rates, PE Ratios, And General US Equities?
Joel Elconin, Co-Host of the Benzinga PreMarket Prep Show joins us to recap a wide range of market moves kicking off 2023, and proposes we may in a new normal where interest rates, P/E Ratios for company valuations, and even the trend in general markets may be sideways for a period of time.
We start with US markets, where investors seem to have more of a risk appetite for tech stocks and sectors that have sold off harder, and less of an affinity for the value sectors like healthcare, utilities, and energy stocks at present. Q4 earnings season is the main thing investors are focused on at present.
Joel mentions that the financial stocks have held up better than many anticipated, focused on JP Morgan as a key bellwether stock in that sector, which has kept him less bearish than many commentators in the main stream financial media. He sees key support in the S&P 500 around the $3800 price level, and mentions that the markets could just trend sideways in range trading for much of the first part of this year.
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Barrick gold – so far so good!
https://stockcharts.com/h-sc/ui?s=GOLD&p=D&yr=0&mn=10&dy=0&id=p62971168941&a=1326498395&r=1673378106134&cmd=print
Since Joel mentioned his JP Morgan indicator in the financial sector today, it seems fitting to post a few thoughts from Jamie Dimon…
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Jamie Dimon: ‘Retirees, Grandmothers, Lower-Income Folks’ Have Been Hurt By Crypto
Alexandra Semenova · Tue, January 10, 2023
The Wall Street boss, who in September famously called the digital tokens “decentralized Ponzi schemes” at a regulatory hearing, again reiterated his criticism of crypto assets during an interview with Fox Business Network.
“I called it a decentralized Ponzi scheme because people were just hyping it – hyping it, and hyping it – and they’ll write tons of books on this, the money that was stolen out of it, what people knew and didn’t know,” he said when asked about what lessons were learned on crypto after the collapse of FTX.
“The JPM CEO said in a televised interview Tuesday that it was the government’s responsibility to protect investors.”
I’d submit that is actually investors job to protect themselves from their own silly actions and be more cautious about truly understanding what they are speculating in from the start. Most of the momentum traders and people with fear of missing out, that jumped in blindly to a sector they didn’t really understand, into joke altcoins, NFTs, and other such digital garbage, or didn’t take a moment to consider the 3rd party exposure they were taking on by using crypto exchanges were their own worst enemies. No amount of government regulation can cure stupid speculative behavior.
Most retirees have little or no control over pension funds: those who direct them.
Pension funds are one thing for retirement accounts, but that is not who Jamie is talking about getting hurt and they were largely not involved, except maybe through Bitcoin.
It’s the individual speculators that made the really poor choices and got burnt, and didn’t take time to understand what they were even throwing their hard-earned money into. It wasn’t pension funds that were investing in altcoins like Shiba Inu or Dogecoin or even the garden variety better known altcoins like Polkadot, Solana, Cardano, Litecoin, Ethereum, etc…
It was individual speculators that got everyone and their grandmothers into crypto, defi, NFTs, hyping it like few sectors have ever been hyped, and the fallout and people that got slaughtered was from all the digital garbage being revalued back down once gravity took hold. The reality is that it was all their own decisions to follow the herd over the cliff, to have the FOMO, and to ultimately have made the poor investment decisions. No government regulation can fix stupid choices.
Ex, I have read that some pension funds got burned in the recent fiasco, but agree with you on the due diligence aspect. However, much of the insanity since 2000 has been driven by destruction of the best securities law to come out of the depression years: Glass-Steagall. This made a massive amount of OPM in the form of collateral credit available.
Glass-Steagall may not have been able to restrain the excesses of crypto directly, but the casino mentality engendered by its loss has affected most sectors. Too many fiduciaries fall prey to greed, the ultimate intelligence failure, and have traversed from investing to speculating to gambling.
Yes, there has been a loss of fiduciary restraint, and an increase in greed for sure, and policies have only accelerated after the removal of Glass-Steagall. There likely were some pension funds that took it on the chin with the recent implosion in the cryptoverse, but the vast majority of pension funds were not in the riskiest garbage, and had minimal exposure if any.
For me the main takeaway was the speculative greed bubble being blown to such frothy levels in late 2020 and into 2021.
I kept asking people on our show an in private conversations at what point are the valuations in cryptos, crypto mining stocks, NFTs, and all the growth decentralized finance stocks had reached or exceeded the point where the greater-fool theory would collapse upon itself?
So many people responded back with trite answers like “the trend is your friend” and “prices don’t lie” and “the market is always right” and “have fun staying poor” and “HODL” and “Diamond Hands”…. It wasn’t just that, but also the cockiness crypto investors had in their own new-found brilliance, just because price was going up in frenzy.
It was clear the bubble was going to burst hard, and so I sold out of the half dozen crypto miners I held in 2021, and had sold my GBTC back in 2020 (a bit too early but I had a nice double on one part and a trip on the other portion of it). So to be clear, I participated and made good returns on my crypto speculations, but not without shaking my head the whole time.
Sorry, but the writing was on the wall, and I’ve got little sympathy for investors that kept plowing into these with reckless abandon, in the ultimate FOMO trade we’ve ever seen, only to then see it collapse by 80%+ in most areas. That’s what happens when hot air bubbles finally burst.
The vast majority of participants were individual retail punters or hedge funds, that jumped onto 3rd party exchanges that have gone belly up, or jumped into cryptos they didn’t even begin to understand, just because they were greedy and didn’t want to miss out… but this lack of due diligence is what exposed them to insane levels or risk.
So many people could not be reasoned with as prices on their screens kept screaming higher. Again, it was also the overwhelming general disdain and arrogance crypto and defi investors had towards all other asset classes, and in particular, towards precious metals investors. It is all forgivable, but certainly not forgettable. When the other shoe dropped, and the wave of carnage began in late 2021, it didn’t come as a surprise to anyone with a functioning brain.
Belief is a most powerful force, and can be deadly when wrong.
Agreed BDC. Amen to that.
AMZN probably gunning for that gap fill
https://stockcharts.com/h-sc/ui?s=AMZN&p=D&yr=0&mn=10&dy=0&id=p09653837445&a=1326495885&r=1673377656896&cmd=print