Nasdaq 10,000 – Here We Are …And The Uniquely Risky Future

I celebrated Nasdaq 10,000 today by selling a little Apple and Google. I consider it a little gift to the profit gods for the good luck of my readers. Let my sales be your gains…

I started on the Nasdaq 10,000 train in 2014 after a dinner with Yoni Assia – At the dinner Yoni also called for Bitcoin 10,000 which was a crazy Meshugenah good call as well.

From the post:

At Nasdaq 5,000 in the year 2,000, mobile phones were all Nokia. There was no mobile web. Eighty hipsters were stealing all the dial up from CD ROMS.

Cramer was somewhat interesting. Now Josh Brown and Joe Wiesenthal get Charlie Rose face time. Everyone is a curator and the celebrity and in charge of filters.

Taxi drivers were giving stock picks in 1999, now they are entreprenuers driving Uber’s, trying to figure out Google Maps to earn their keep.

Steve Jobs was about to rock Apple’s world and ours. Google was not public. Zuckerberg was in high school. Social and sharing on the web, now fabric, were not in the vocabulary of the web.

Yoni’s grandfather has lived past 100 which is a miracle, but all three of his young kids could make it easily.

Software, 3D printers, plunging oil prices…

China, India and a new financial system built around the blockchain that takes global trading to the next level, leaving America in the dust as a global financial superpower.

The year 2016 came and went without Nasdaq 10,000 but I continued to believe it was right around the corner. Each year I updated my thoughts on the big round number.

In February of this year I thought it would happen and wrote ‘Tesla, Tesla, Tesla‘ and then COVID-19!

By March I was ‘Panicking With Friends’ (on my podcast) and while I was excited to buy stocks I never thought Nasdaq 10,000 would arrive by June.

But…here we are.

Now that we hit the number, what is the lay of the land?

Tesla is at all-time highs this morning trading at $994/share as I write.

There are FOUR trillion dollar companies:

The Nasdaq has made Warren Buffett look washed up:

Warren Buffett is being dunked on by the ‘Robinhood Day Trading Deplorables’. This is all in good spirit from the internet meme generation and it is hysterical:

Of course the media is spinning this out of control and an older generation sees a crash immediately ahead. For the last month, the elder hedge fund statesmen have been drawing lines in the sand at S&P 2,800 as a place to short the markets. Today we are S&P 3,200 and they have been awfully quiet.

The media has as usual missed the story. For years they thought social media and Robinhood were dumb toys to waste time and piss away your money. Now they think Robinhood traders are actually moving the market.

In actual fact, interest rates are basically zero, global monetary easing is in full force and the ‘professional hedge funds’ are on record as short the market or at best ‘confused’. The technology revolution is relentless and the trillion dollar companies just might be undervalued.

In bulls favor, the cynicism has quickly risen to all-time highs with the froth.

Even I joke that we greeted Nasdaq 10,000 with all time highs in fake meat (Beyond Meat) and fake Tesla’s ($NKLA). If we do quickly plunge again, it will be easy to point back to the froth and stock chasing. Charlie shared this on Nikole:

While Nasdaq 10,000 comes with smartphones, cheap oil and electric cars, we also have a huge unemployment and underemployment problem, a broken education system, a lot of government and corporate debt, useless and selfish short term thinking government leaders and a lot of rage.

My new favorite term for the current moment in time for stocks and markets…’Uniquely Risky‘ (do listen to this podcast).

At Nasdaq 10,000 my money and time continues to be focused mostly on venture capital. I remain extremely bullish on the business of building companies.

I live in a world where I get to talk to people that have seen financial/growth miracles. It has been such a great boom that even I have had some great outcomes as a venture investor, but as much success as I have had and the big wins I have seen, there are hundreds if not thousands of angel investors who have seen orders of magnitude larger winners and while I am suspect the scale of returns can’t continue, I won’t bet against the cloud, software, human ingenuity and peace.

Nasdaq 20,000 is next.

Maybe next month, maybe 2030 and maybe Nasdaq 5,000 again first.