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Tech bubbles are bursting all over the place

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Re: Tech bubbles are bursting all over the place

#571

Post by NordSteve »

Robotbeat wrote: post #202
kurthr wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is "the market" working for you! We could allocate resources to productive assets by fiscal spending, but that is prevented by politics. Only when "the market" gets its cut can any infrastructure be built in the US. That's also true for much of the medical establishment and pension/retirement systems. If the market was efficient, we wouldn't be complaining about it. Unfortunately, a "free market" and an efficien…

What sucks is that fiscal policy, ie government spending, is also often not very efficient. Even when rampant corruption doesn’t destroy efficiency, crushing bureaucracy or just plain incompetence will. (Is the DMV a model of efficiency?) So you need a smart balance. And you need competent, honest people in both business AND government. I don’t think that government necessarily is inefficient. The DMV could be a very…

I know people reactively complain about Comcast, but in my area they do a great job. It's not cheap due to lack of competition, but no complaints about service.

Re: Tech bubbles are bursting all over the place

#572

Post by WWLink »

xxpor wrote: post #531
Thlom wrote: post #468

Earlier quoted context omitted.

WTF? This must be because of willful political sabotage? The license plate should follow the car and ownership should be changed online as part of the transaction. It sounds incredibly wasteful that every time a car changes ownership the seller must hand over the plates in person to the DMV. And is there no national registry of cars or data sharing between states? Strange that a car can be registered twice. If your d…

>The license plate should follow the car and ownership should be changed online as part of the transaction. It sounds incredibly wasteful that every time a car changes ownership the seller must hand over the plates in person to the DMV. There's too many personalized plates and other exceptions in the US to make that viable.

The plates go with the vehicle in California most of the time. It just gets complicated when you sell to someone out of state because you have to turn the plates in yourself. If you a used car in CA, it's not unusual for the plates to be the same plates the car had since it was first registered in the state.

We bought our last family car from enterprise and one day this family walked by while my mom was waiting for me in the store parking lot. The kid recognized our car as a rental they had on a road trip once and got excited about it. Awkward. xD

Custom plates are weird. You can either give them to the new owner or transfer them to another vehicle or return them to the DMV.

Re: Tech bubbles are bursting all over the place

#573

Post by scarface74 »

cercatrova wrote: post #84
MAGZine wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the fact that you stopped to ask those questions makes me think that you're at minimum, an above average developer. caring about the business and its fundamentals is important beyond just slinging code.

Interestingly, I've heard many instances where interviewees asked startups about their revenues and the startups just wouldn't tell them, saying that it's growing, or some other vague nonsense. Even in the case of inquiring about the amount of equity one gets, many startups would not tell them the actual percentage of the company they'd get, instead opting to tell them the number of shares, without actually telling t…

Ok. They tell you their revenues. What good does that do if they don’t have a profitable business model?

Re: Tech bubbles are bursting all over the place

#574

Post by elihu »

legitster wrote: post #75

This has been a long time coming. Back in the day, there was an inherent understanding that a stock price is supposed to reflect "the fundamentals" - present value of the company + future earnings. And of course there was some amount of speculation around future earnings, but for the most part companies at least tried to be profitable. But if you look at the share price of like, Tesla - it's completely insane. There…

I'm not any kind of stock valuation expert, but I figure a big part of Tesla's share price (and GME's for that matter) is just the natural market consequence of too many short positions and someone calling their bluff. The current valuation might not be rational, but that's beside the point. A lot of money was invested betting that Tesla would fail (or at least, the stock value would fall), and the consequence of them losing the bet is that they have to buy stock at whatever the price happens to be, thus driving it higher. I see it as just the market correcting itself, not some inherent bug in the system. (There's an argument that maybe allowing people to short stock in the first place is a regulatory bug.)

Re: Tech bubbles are bursting all over the place

#575

Post by dreamcompiler »

abzolv wrote: post #289
legitster wrote: post #75

This has been a long time coming. Back in the day, there was an inherent understanding that a stock price is supposed to reflect "the fundamentals" - present value of the company + future earnings. And of course there was some amount of speculation around future earnings, but for the most part companies at least tried to be profitable. But if you look at the share price of like, Tesla - it's completely insane. There…

If average Jane, who is not a raving Tesla fan, wants to spend circa $140K on an EV, and she has to choose between the Mercedes EQS 580 and the Tesla Model X, which one would you say is the no-brainer (better value for money)? https://www.mbusa.com/en/vehicles/class/eqs/sedan https://www.tesla.com/modelx That is the future of Tesla. Increasing competition by better products offered by manufacturers with far more expe…

It is indeed a no-brainer. The Tesla wins hands down.

I've owned many very good German cars for the last 30 years and loved them, but my Model Y makes them all seem quaint and obsolete.

--Electric cars don't need dealers. I want to be able to buy a car online without spending an hour kicking gravel and haggling with some commissioned salesperson over the price.

--Electric cars don't need as much service as ICE cars, and it doesn't need to be done at a dealer's high-profit service bay. When my Tesla needed its rear seat coat hook replaced, a technician drove to my house and replaced it. For free.

--Electric cars need very good batteries. Tesla has a 10-year, several-billion dollar lead over every other car manufacturer on battery technology. Everybody else is playing catch-up. Ditto for motors and single-piece castings.

--Electric cars need very good UI software. The Germans make the second-worst automotive UI software of anybody (only the Japanese do an even worse job). Tesla's UI has elements I don't like, but every other car's software experience is so bad it's not even worthy of criticism.

Mercedes, Porsche, and Audi are all offering electric cars with specs inferior to Tesla at much higher prices. This will be unsustainable after they stop coasting on their reputations and the supply of German car snobs who refuse to try a Tesla dries up.

I'm sure the Germans will eventually catch up; Mercedes invented the ICE car after all. But Tesla invented the modern electric car and it's a whole different beast.

Re: Tech bubbles are bursting all over the place

#576

Post by [deleted] »

throwaway14356 wrote: post #554
Animats wrote: post #551

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Back in the day, there was an inherent understanding that a stock price is supposed to reflect "the fundamentals" - present value of the company + future earnings. And of course there was some amount of speculation around future earnings, but for the most part companies at least tried to be profitable. Yes. And after each crash, people have to re-learn that.

to the moon and back

[deleted]

Re: Tech bubbles are bursting all over the place

#577

Post by Firmwarrior »

rvz wrote: post #232
screye wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My intuition is that those are 3 of the select few companies that are not in a bubble. I would add Google and Amazon to that list too. They make insane amounts of money and continue growing at a steady pace. Apart from Facebook, they have all shown the capability to expand into other verticals and successfully end up as major player on a consistent basis. This sets a high ceiling on growth despite being country sized…

> Nvidia, Unity, Cloudflare and similar companies with products with tangible value will survive most downturns. Non-ads based companies that extract value on the margin will struggle in this bear market. Yes. Cloudflare was a very good buy signal 2 days ago. [0] Now it has gone up again. Most likely a short term upwards side, but I wanted to tell everyone about it, but I was downvoted to hell and beaten up for my co…

I hate downvoters and hiveminds and sheep as much as anyone, but your comments had no substance whatsoever

For all I know, you kicked off 100 sock puppet accounts saying stuff like "Is this a buy signal?" "This looks like a sell signal. Thoughts?" about various companies at random, then picked a winner afterward and use it as proof that you're an investment genius

Maybe it'd be a different story if you said "I just threw $100k (50% of my portfolio) into Cloudflare shares, since this shows that they're a whatever, poised to blah blah blah"

Re: Tech bubbles are bursting all over the place

#578

Post by hodgesrm »

prepend wrote: post #86
avgDev wrote: post #2

I work for non-tech generating 100million+ in revenue. Cushy job, fully remote, good pay and full autonomy with flexible hours working as an IC. I recently talked to a startup, similar pay, culture would be a better fit since it was mostly techies and I'm a nerd by nature.....but things just got awkward as soon as I asked about their revenue....they were bleeding money and I was told they were being acquired by a big…

It’s funny as that was my experience interviewing with companies between 1998-2000. Just insane business models but brazen confidence in themselves. I remember interviewing with a company in 2000 that had burned through like $40 in two years. This was New York and they hired IBM. I don’t remember their product but it was stupid. They had paid IBM to build their own custom app server for Java because their requirement…

Building a custom server does not sound so crazy. If you ever used Websphere you would probably think the same. I was at one of those crazy Internet startups you referred to and we ran a trial of Websphere for a while. It was some of the slowest, most resource-intensive software I've ever used. By the end we all referred to it as "the pig."

Re: Tech bubbles are bursting all over the place

#579

Post by Firmwarrior »

JamesBarney wrote: post #422
drexlspivey wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They do, but the biggest way this happens is investors shifting their asset allocations into bonds. The opposite is true actually, when rates go up there is a sell-off in bonds which is exactly what is happening right now where bond prices are down 10%-20%

You're saying if interest rates increased and stock price P/E remained the same most funds would allocate less money to bonds? I don't understand why that would be. If the expected future cash flow of one asset increases (bonds), and remains the same for another (stocks) why would you allocate more money to stocks and away from bonds?

Bond trading is super complicated and unintuitive the way it's normally described

You're right though IMO, but people should be careful about trading on that knowledge until they're up to speed on how bond trading works

Re: Tech bubbles are bursting all over the place

#580

Post by seattle_spring »

david927 wrote: post #481
lumost wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Across every investment class there has been a trend of buyers needing to become more financially irresponsible in order to participate in the market. Need to buy a house? bid 20% more than asking, if you don't - someone else will.. in cash. Need to build a ride-hailing app? prepare to pay people to ride indefinitely. Need to own a growth stock? prepare to pay upwards of 100x multiple on revenue. All around, there ha…

> Need to buy a house? bid 20% more than asking, if you don't - someone else will.. in cash. Buying in cash is being done to skirt the tightened up lending standards that followed the 2008 Crisis: https://www.reddit.com/r/Superstonk/comments/uflzht/the_2022...

It's being done to win bidding wars, because it's much less risky for a seller to choose a cash offer over financing.
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