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Tech bubbles are bursting all over the place

economist.com

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Re: Tech bubbles are bursting all over the place

#691

Post by adam_arthur »

paulpauper wrote: post #624
adam_arthur wrote: post #555

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which tech stock was valued at 100x sales in the 80s? I'm sure there are plenty of examples from 1999, though.

what were interest rates in 1998-1999?

You implied the tech stock boom wasn't due to a low discount rate, yet the valuations today are far higher than tech stocks in the 80s, even at comparable growth rates.

Which makes it plainly obvious that a lot of the valuation gains are, in fact, due to the discount rate, and not organic growth.

3x of Apple's market cap growth since 2018 is a change in valuation multiple, and nothing to do with actual growth of its revenue/profits, for example. Is it a boom if a majority of your gains are due to changing the valuation peg and leaving the rest the same? Sounds more like a bubble to me

Though my point is more directed towards the 100x PS companies, which are a far more egregious example of overvaluation

Re: Tech bubbles are bursting all over the place

#692

Post by patrick451 »

dangrossman wrote: post #348
SauciestGNU wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People keep using the DMV as an example of government inefficiency, but my state has made it run so painlessly I don't think I've spent more than 15 minutes in an office over the last 5 years. I think government can be efficient if you put technocrats in charge of implementation rather than elected officials who are subject to the electoral whims of the uninformed masses. The problem with the above is it weakens demo…

The DMV in my state requires you make an appointment 4-6 months out right now. Walk-in appointments are unavailable or only available during a few hours a few days a week, if they happen to have staff that day. Good luck if you have your drivers license stolen. I sold a car of mine to Carvana in October. I returned the license plate to the DMV immediately, which is how they're notified that you no longer own the vehi…

What state is this? I always thought it was illegal to drive on public roads without insurance, not simply own an uninsured vehicle. From the farm, to the drag strip to the 4x4 trail, tons of people own uninsured vehicles that are not driven on public roads.

Re: Tech bubbles are bursting all over the place

#694

Post by askonomm »

MAGZine wrote: post #16
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…

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.

I don't really "care" about the business, not in any sense similar to the founder or CEO at the very least, but as a contractor who usually works long-term for one client, I always make it a point to ask what their runway is during the interview process as that will pretty clearly tell me how long, in the worst case scenario, I will have this client for.

Re: Tech bubbles are bursting all over the place

#695

Post by pingeroo »

prohobo wrote: post #111
triceratops wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's your project? $100k seems like an odd amount of money to ask for, to me. You can't staff up very much with that, but it seems like a lot of money to pay for AWS/hosting-type bills when you're just starting out ($10-30k should be more than enough). It only makes sense (again, to me) if what you really want is access to the VC and their network. But again, I don't know shit about VC and angel investing.

It was odd, but my envisioned development window was about 3-4 months (planning for 6) and I had potentially high upkeep after launch ($500-$1000pm for production ready servers). I could have found a co-founder or two and funded them for that period as well. So it would have been just enough + a buffer. At least in my mind. I realize you need more runway than to just get to launch and survive 2-3 months now. The idea…

I think Google/YouTube is already doing this. For example when you Google search "how to reset a Macbook", the top result is a video that jumps to a particular highlighted section that answers the question.

This isn't the best example of this feature, but it sure has saved me a lot of time in other queries that I can't recall at the moment.

Re: Tech bubbles are bursting all over the place

#696

Post by chrisseaton »

lumost wrote: post #7
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…

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…

Saying that paying 20% more than asking is irresponsible depends on whether asking was a fair price. If someone was always willing to pay 20% more then it wasn’t a fair price in the first place, and really people are just under listing for some reason.

Re: Tech bubbles are bursting all over the place

#697

Post by [deleted] »

scarface74 wrote: post #231
samtheprogram wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're going to be paid in equity and not asking those questions, unless it's a publicly traded company (where you have these answers ahead of time) or you are getting compensated well above average in cash equivalents, it would be just plain irresponsible to not ask those questions. Even if you are getting paid an extremely good salary, who wants to start working for a company that's potentially months or a year…

It’s statistically irresponsible to think your equity is going to be worth anything in a private company and give up cash compensation.

[deleted]

Re: Tech bubbles are bursting all over the place

#698

Post by nobody9999 »

halffaday wrote: post #661
nobody9999 wrote: post #597

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Also, imagining that corporate offices are models of efficiency is an error. Absolutely! I used to work for a Fortune 50 company (that shall remain nameless here) and was moving various groups (mostly marketing and research) away from mainframe batch processing (this was the mid 1990s) toward distributed (Unix) systems. The inefficiency and waste were just unbelievable. The corporation had tried to move their custom…

Not that long ago, California paid $2B in fraudulent benefits. https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-12-07/bank-of-... That’s a single program. Forget it, Jack. It’s China Town.

Do you specialize in non-sequiturs?

Re: Tech bubbles are bursting all over the place

#699

Post by cteiosanu »

Robotbeat wrote: post #124
gonzo41 wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is also a central banking fail in so far that there's that much liquidity in the market that can't find a productive outlet. There's a lot of money, but also not enough concentrated in one spot to do really useful ventures like large infrastructure projects. So instead the money is distorting everything. Imagine if lending was less cheap for home owners but it was still cheap for governments or really large comp…

The money can find a productive outlet, it’s just that for the last 5 years or so, speculative investments (that weren’t productive) had a much higher rate of return. Which is too bad as the productive investments like building a solar power plant really benefitted from the low interest rates that drove the non-productive speculative bubble. non-productive Speculative investments tend to get punished at the end of th…

Why can't we have preferential interest rates for certain class of projects (infrastructure, renewables) and those types of projects to be backed/insured by government. Like in some countries the first home loan is is backed by the government.

Re: Tech bubbles are bursting all over the place

#700

Post by dredmorbius »

screye wrote: post #164
freeqaz wrote: post #6

A lot of these companies have very reasonable P/E ratios now. Microsoft is sitting at around 27, Apple 25, and Facebook 15. None of those strike me as "inflated". Those are normal values for the stock market (20-25). Are investors just panicking?

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…

Ad spend and retail tend to be strongly pro-cyclical.
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