What a year. The crash to the upside continues again today.
As it relates to stocks, Wall Street is mostly dead. Time will tell if that is good or bad (CNN could answer this in a split second), but for me, I could not be more thrilled.
At best, the media considers what I do a hobby. With Stocktwits I am a ‘hobby enabler’.
Louis C.K., not a dumb guy and one hell of a comedian, said this about the stock market:
I just don’t trust any of it. Every time I read something about how there’s been another ridiculous climb of the Dow Jones, there’s a part of me that goes, “This can’t be good.” None of this is real money. You know what I mean? It’s not like there’s actually more of anything. It’s just ideas. When people are getting richer and richer but they’re not actually producing anything, it can’t end well.
If that takes competition away from my hobby…great. Louis C.K. is just dead wrong and full of shit on this one. What does ‘end well’ mean. He sounds like an Wall Street analyst himself issuing advice. I have real money at work. If you are consistently contributing to your 401k, you could liquidate tomorrow for cash and be out at equity highs. Your cash. Go produce something with it.
Yesterday I saw ‘The Wolf of Wall Street’. The 1980’s and 1990’s were creepy…from the clothes, to the drugs, to the telephones. There have always been wolves, sheep and blind squirrels on Wall Street. The clothes, drugs and tools of the trade have just evolved.
Last month I covered the Global Markets Review. Yesterday, I sat with Liz Claman for just a few minutes on Fox Business and talked about 2013 and a little about 2014.
Today, let’s honor some stocks.
Facebook came back from the dead. Tesla and Solar City were a Musky couple of sweet moonshots. 3D printing stocks were the rage. Homebuilders are back at multi-year highs. Google cash and leadership is oozing into every seam of growth possibilities in technology and now transportation ($UBER), logistics, banking and the unbanked (Lending Club). Twitter is the IPO of the year and has made all the skeptics talk to themselves. Airlines (yes I said it) were a good investment (please do not overstay your welcome). In a miracle of common sense, you can now trade stocks from 40,000 feet and gate to gate, because the web is legal on airplanes and $GOGO is the early leader. Icahn is on top of the investing food chain and made $6 billion on his own stock and the financials are ripping higher even as interest rates turn up. Who really knows what Herbalife is – but the stock was the object of affection and hate for Icahn and Ackman. Obviously, with the S&P up 30 percent, one of the stocks of the year was the $SPY itself.
All in all, 101 stocks more than tripled. 333 more than doubled year to date (blind squirrel action).
Stocktwits has chronicled the minute to minute action, the swings, covered the trends and shone lights on the biggest winners if you know how to read the tape and who to follow.
In the business of investing and trading, there will always be wolves and blind squirrels, but it’s silly to let yourself be a sheep with today’s tools of the trade.