Every year I make a few predictions…not about the markets (because nobody knows) and I don’t do ‘price targets‘.
I went back to read my 2020 predictions and considering there was NO mention of COVID or a pandemic, my predictions were damn good.
The ones that made me money were the Nasdaq reaching 10k and Shopify hitting $100 billion.
The Stocktwits team is working on a ‘Year In Review‘ which I will post this weekend with a special podcast, but in the meantime I wrote something a few weeks back that broke down 2020 into two categories:
1. The Pandemic
2. Speculation
The pandemic will eventually subside (hopefully in 2021), but a new era of speculation will only intensify.
So, with the above as a backdrop let’s get started…
1. Increase in speculation and elevated volatility. So, my first prediction for 2021 is the intensity of speculation will increase. A bear market or crash will not stop this trend in 2021. People are armed with free trading, API’s, group chats up the wazoo, mentor networks and free time. The stock market has always been a game, but now tens of millions more people are in on the game.
2. The mega mergers will increase. Empire building will continue as cash and elevated stock prices make everyone feel like a king.
3. More Robinhoods. Seeing I got Robinhood right, I have to believe the copycats (at home and abroad) proliferate . I talk about this all the time on my blog, but the unbundling of the indexes will continue. People want to build their own portfolios and do not want to own 500 stocks. With API’s for stock trading like Alpaca (biased investor) every country will have their own version of Robinhood.
4. More radical changes in education. This stat stood out to me recently about MOOC’s (Massive Open Online Courses)…
Of all the learners that ever registered on a MOOC platform, one third did so in 2020, making 2020 MOOCs’ most consequential year since the “Year of the MOOC”.
This report on MOOC’s is a good read.
I will continue with some 2021 predictions tomorrow.