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Tech bubbles are bursting all over the place

economist.com

721–730 of 774 posts

Re: Tech bubbles are bursting all over the place

#721
post #13
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?

Is 20-25 really normal? I thought it was more like 5-15?

Depends on the interest rates and bond yields. 20PE is like 5% profit, which is better than most bonds in the past ~10 years if the business is stable. When yields rise it will become closer to 10-15.

5 is definitely an undervalued company unless the business is risky or expected to decline in profits.

Re: Tech bubbles are bursting all over the place

#722
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s because the market calculates a high probability of an Intel implosion

They’ve got plenty of cash, and they’re still the strong leader in the server space. AMD is eating away at their consumer grade cpus I concede. I would be shocked if we had an intel “implosion” they have a sustainable and successful business model and there’s no world where we need fewer processors.

"Implosion" is probably an exaggeration, but with AMD strong, and competitive ARM offerings (Apple silicon for end user devices, and Amazon with their own ARM processors on server), most people are speculating that they will eat into Intel's profit. The fact that Intel can't produce a competitive GPU in an environment where the GPU is becoming more and more important (for various reasons) is also something against them.

Re: Tech bubbles are bursting all over the place

#723

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, if you're in California and don't own a house, you move. It's not a great option if you were raised here, but a whole bunch of people can take a small pay cut (especially thinking about down equity and inflation) to move back to their hometowns right now. For me, a home (3/2, 1500sqft) in the neighborhood I'd move to in my hometown (US city; 1 mil metro area) is less than my household income, which we'll realis…

Mid-level Bay Area manager in my 40s with a mortgage on the peninsula here. Why would I want to sell my house? We bought it because we have kids that we want to raise in the Bay Area.

There are plenty who would have chosen the Bay Area anyway, but for me who is younger and aware of how similar those suburbs are to any others in the country, I was dreading having to commit to the jobs a Bay Area mortgage require. I’m glad you’re already in your location of choice, but I’m sure you know most people move here for the jobs and would be elsewhere if the jobs moved.

Re: Tech bubbles are bursting all over the place

#724
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With an engineer on the helm, rehiring big names in the field, opening more fabs, and having access to TSMC's newest node over AMD[1].. it seems unlikely. [1] https://www.extremetech.com/computing/334897-amd-might-have-...

If you know something the market doesn't know, and you're confident that you're right, then put all your eggs in that basket: that's how one beats the market. (Don't follow this advice, I'm just a dude on the internet, this is not financial advice and my background is biochem + software, not finance)

Might help if people checked this out first - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelly_criterion

Re: Tech bubbles are bursting all over the place

#725
post #588

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.

Don't know what YC's current deal is but $100k is in the range of what they used to offer.

The attraction of YC is/was the cachet that membership carries and the network you get access to. Not so much the money itself.

Re: Tech bubbles are bursting all over the place

#726
post #657

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thirty years ago in Massachusetts, if you had DMV business, you just walked in, waited half an hour, and conducted your business. And we complained about that. Things have not improved, to say the least.

i think the OP's efficiency reference isn't talking about the user's efficiency in using the service, but the cost-based efficiency; aka, how much budget the DMV has, vs how much "work" they produce.

I was referring to both! Fully considered efficiency.

Re: Tech bubbles are bursting all over the place

#727

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ideological opposition to extensive government is because government is inefficient. See the Laffer Curve. Actual demonstrated inefficiency is the proof, not the justification.

Laffer Curve, really? The inefficiency is neither proof nor justification, it's a side-effect of fairness.

It’s not. For a constant level of fairness, there’s a wide array of efficiency.

Re: Tech bubbles are bursting all over the place

#728

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think the government being inefficient is good. It gives ammo to those who are ideologically opposed to government doing things. We should strive to improve government efficiency, especially those of us who think the government should be taking on more tasks.

Ideological opposition to extensive government is because government is inefficient. See the Laffer Curve. Actual demonstrated inefficiency is the proof, not the justification.

You see the moral hazard of electing people to run government who have a vested interest in being proven right about government being inefficient, don’t you?

I am fine with people who are realistic about government being inefficient, but I insist that they nonetheless try their very best to improve that efficiency (fully considered efficiency, not just making life worse for government workers or people seeking government services). The problem is when you elect people who have an interest in making sure the government is inefficient because then they can use that as justification to enact their ideological goals of cutting government services.

Re: Tech bubbles are bursting all over the place

#729

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Lying” is a bit emotive, suggests you might be a bit too invested here to get the argument the GP was making. Look, Tesla got early success in EVs by being considerably better where everyone else was weak (drivetrain, battery, software, charging network). That doesn’t mean it’s not weak where they are strong (QC, basic manfacturing competencies like panel gaps, dealer network, interaction switchgear refined over gen…

> “Lying” is a bit emotive, suggests you might be a bit too invested here to get the argument the GP was making. Emotion doesn't come into it. You built an argument upon a poor foundation. In strictly logical terms even if your argument structure was correct your argument would be invalid because its premises aren't correct. You said several things that are objectively false. I know them to be false because I have fi…

The principle of charity is to make the strongest possible version you can imagine of the opposing argument, and I also struggle with constructing yours. It appears to be “no electric car buyer with $140k to spend could ever rationally choose anything other than a Tesla”.

If that’s your position, as a Tesla owner who has invested an awful lot of effort across this post in battling Someones Wrong On The Internet, I’m going to say there’s emotion at play, yes.

If it’s merely “a Mercedes isn’t a slam dunk choice, Tesla still has something to offer”, well yes, that is true.

Regardless, and after reflecting on everything you said, I do now think Tesla is quite like Apple here. Just as with the first few years of the iPhone, they created the market and had it essentially to themselves. They offer a limited set of choices and highly opinionated take-it-or-leave design with fixed high prices.

Now the other manufacturers are arriving, just as the array of Androids did, with a variety of models, price points and customisability.

Now will follow years of mutual incomprehensibility and internet arguing over why one set of trade-offs are objectively better than another.

Re: Tech bubbles are bursting all over the place

#730
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 own a growth stock? prepare to pay upwards of 100x multiple on revenue. Depending on the growth rate, a 100x P/E may be cheap.

This sentence made my head explode. Growth is the means, not the end.
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