Are we in a bubble?

[brobro777]

Come on guys my EWY short is the first real short position I've had in many years

 

I'm betting, shooting from the hip - you can't ask me for math

 

No math, all instinct and impulse baby!

[Paarslaars]

That is because the US debt jumped from 5.7T to 38T during that period.

[mengan]

Rocket Lab (!!) to the mooon!

[vinod1]

17 hours ago, Blake Hampton said:

Any valuation math?

Or do you believe valuation doesn't matter?

 

I have a dream that one day companies will not be valued by the yardstick of earnings, nor by the rivers of cash they return to shareholders, but by the share of the companies market cap to the US GDP...

 

 

Edited May 16 by vinod1

[Spooky]

9 minutes ago, vinod1 said:

 

I have a dream that one day companies will not be valued by the yardstick of earnings, nor by the rivers of cash they return to shareholders, but by the share of the companies market cap to the US GDP...

 

 

 

. Well played

[73 Reds]

12 hours ago, DegenerateGambler said:

By the measure of total US stock market capitalization / total US money supply, we are now at 94% of the dot com bubble.  But this one does not feel as outrageous as that one for some reason.

Speculating on sustainability of earnings is not the same as speculating on *any* earnings or sales at all.

[frommi]

I found a bubble!

[Spooky]

3 hours ago, frommi said:

I found a bubble!

 

Super interesting. Despite the huge run-up all my gold bug / hard money friends still think this is just early innings. No one talks about a bubble in gold despite the fact that there is no way to tell if gold is cheap or expensive. 

[Paarslaars]

2 minutes ago, Spooky said:

 

Super interesting. Despite the huge run-up all my gold bug / hard money friends still think this is just early innings. No one talks about a bubble in gold despite the fact that there is no way to tell if gold is cheap or expensive. 

Gold run up is due to China buying and retail follow-up. Will rotate to BTC as it always does.

[Gregmal]

LOL yea, gold with no intrinsic value has gone parabolic and people like Blake are worried about chip stocks at single digit PEs. 

[Spooky]

7 minutes ago, Gregmal said:

LOL yea, gold with no intrinsic value has gone parabolic and people like Blake are worried about chip stocks at single digit PEs. 

 

I mean it is shiny.

 

It's crazy to me that we are in the middle of a technological revolution on the scale of the printing press and people want to bet on a rock.

Edited May 16 by Spooky

[Blake Hampton]

It's kind of funny how offended some people get on here simply by hearing someone else's opinion. The internet is a bad place for that.
 

The math looks incredibly bad to me. Market bubbles are also largely behavioral, so when you find large groups of people harping on you for not being fully invested, while at the same time refusing to back their arguments with any sort of logic or fundamentals, I don't think it's a good indicator.
 

I'm investing my money in a way that'll do well in the future I see. Maybe you disagree and see the future differently than I do, and that's fine. That's what makes a market. But there's only one future, and we're all going to have to live through it. What's said here means nothing. What matters is being right over the long-term and making sure your money is invested in a way where you can profit from it.

[Blake Hampton]

And stop making it so personal you big babies.

[Spooky]

7 minutes ago, Blake Hampton said:

Market bubbles are also largely behavioral, so when you find large groups of people harping on you for not being fully invested, while at the same time refusing to back their arguments with any sort of logic or fundamentals, I don't think it's a good indicator

 

No one is saying you need to be fully invested in the S&P 500. In fact, most people are saying to pick certain parts of the market to focus on. There are lots of great companies available at reasonable prices.

 

Given what is happening with AI I would be terrified to be completely out of the market.

 

Trying to time the market is a fool's errand and pointless in the grand scheme of things.

Edited May 16 by Spooky

[DegenerateGambler]

Total Margin Debt as a percent of total money supply is at 5.74%, at the dot com bubble peak it was 6.14%, so we are 93.5% there in terms of speculation on margin relative to the dot com bubble.

 

Now, this speculation could get much bigger than the year 2000 tho, so I wouldn't short this yet.  If this number increases to 8-9% it would be way bigger than the speculation of 2000.  I would say with inflation being persistent and fed likely to raise rates, at 8-9% margin debt to M2 money supply ratio, the market will become a good shorting opportunity.  Remember Fairfax made a boatload of money by shorting the market via CDS during the GFC, and generational wealth will be made by traders who can catch the downside of the burst of the great AI bubble.

[NnnnotSoSmart]

Not sure this is relevant but...

Edited May 16 by NnnnotSoSmart

[WayWardCloud]

4 hours ago, Spooky said:

 

I mean it is shiny.

 

It's crazy to me that we are in the middle of a technological revolution on the scale of the printing press and people want to bet on a rock.

 I shed a tear laughing too hard, thank you.

 

It reminds me of five years ago when the government sent everyone a check and people exchanged those dollars for imaginary dog money and monkey jpegs. I used to be enthusiastic about the idea of universal basic income until then.

[SharperDingaan]

56 minutes ago, WayWardCloud said:

It reminds me of five years ago when the government sent everyone a check and people exchanged those dollars for imaginary dog money and monkey jpegs. I used to be enthusiastic about the idea of universal basic income until then.

 

Very good  

 

Around that time, I pitched a sizeable local art gallery on putting on a display of NFT's; using donated hardware (on its way to schools); all they had to do was put up the space, pay the electric/set-up, and lease a few of the NFTs for a few weeks. Sell some T-Shirts/Mugs in the gift-shop, and maybe a short lecture outlining the mechanics of blockchain/NFT, to offset the very modest outlay. I was treated as though I had laid a very large and odious turd on their carpet   

 

Most would simply divide the closing USD price of BTC by the closing USD price of gold, to get the BTC/Gold equivalency. Thereafter, track it, and flip between the two as soon as equivalency is within a range (version of bollinger band).

 

SD

Edited May 16 by SharperDingaan

[NnnnotSoSmart]

 

Kai Wu interviews Edward Chancellor a financial historian who, among other things, published Devil Take the Hindmost: A History of Financial Speculation.  Great book.

 

Interview covers the following topics.

00:00 Edward Chancellor on capital cycles, bubbles and AI

04:42 Why the railway mania became a classic overinvestment cycle

09:00 Why markets fund technology booms but often miss the winners

13:19 The prisoner’s dilemma behind AI spending

17:30 Will AI demand justify the supply being built

20:00 How capital spending can inflate profits before the bust

25:08 The AI Hindenburg moment and the limits of large language models

30:55 Why AI hype may exceed the proven technology

35:55 Why the anti-bubble may matter more than shorting AI

40:00 The energy transition bubble and the opportunity in overlooked assets

45:08 China’s lesson on GDP growth and shareholder returns

49:27 Big Booze, GLP-1s and the Lindy effect

54:23 Can intangible capital have its own capital cycle

59:54 SaaS valuations and the index creation warning signal

01:04:10 Why bubbles can help society but hurt investors

01:09:09 Why long-term rates may be in a new multi-decade cycle

01:14:07 Why Edward Chancellor still sees a role for gold

 

[nsx5200]

I don't know about a bubble, but looking FTAI (they lease/maintain/service certain airplane engines):

The reason for that bump:

FTAI Power Initiative: The company launched an innovative platform to convert its extensive inventory of legacy CFM56 aircraft engines into 25-megawatt power turbines. This initiative capitalizes on the massive, rapid increase in global electricity demand from artificial intelligence (AI) hyperscalers and data centers.

 

I'm old enough to remember the dot-com days(but not old enough to benefit from it ) when all a company had to do was say they're doing internet stuff, and their stock price would sky rocket.  Not saying this is that, but it does share some of the same characteristic...  In the mean time, there seems to be a lot of stuff being discarded that I'm trying to pick up so I can watch my portfolio shrink.  Fun times.

[Parsad]

5 hours ago, Spooky said:

 

I mean it is shiny.

 

It's crazy to me that we are in the middle of a technological revolution on the scale of the printing press and people want to bet on a rock.

 

 

Rock good, stock bad!   Cigar and a waffle is even better!  Cheers!

 

[Parsad]

5 hours ago, Blake Hampton said:

And stop making it so personal you big babies.

 

More like big bullies...but babies fit too!  Cheers!

[Gregmal]

2 hours ago, Parsad said:

 

More like big bullies...but babies fit too!  Cheers!

Nah, like anything else, you gotta earn your stripes. Which ain’t done by bitching about valuations for half a decade and refusing to own pretty much ANY stocks. While lecturing everyone with out of context quotes and referrals to authority. 
 

I mean dude legit said it’s only MAGA mentality causing folks to be in the stock market right now lmfao 

[Spekulatius]

On 5/14/2026 at 5:05 AM, frommi said:

Maybe theres a bubble in semis, but outside of them? Quality stocks outside the Mag7 are cheap. In fact i never in the past 10 years had a time when ~100 of my 300 quality stock list offered forward returns of 15%+ over the next 10 years. So if there is a bubble, it is like 2000, which was a fabolous time to be long value/quality for the next 7 years.

Roughly 40 out of 500 stocks of the SP500 have driven all the returns and trade at high multiples. The rest not so much and many of the remainder trade at decade low multiples. It’s the same kind of bubble we saw in 1999 , when the market got top heavy to the extend it skewed the SP500. In fact some of the same stocks that went to sky high valuations in 1999 are back in the game again.

Edited May 17 by Spekulatius

[Paarslaars]

Yeah but this time there are earnings though...