Lots of people have been asking recently why the stock market appears unconnected with the economy.
There are several factors that contribute to that impression.
First, stock market indexes are imperfect measures of the whole stock market. Well-known indexes such as the S&P500 are higher than pre-pandemic, but the average stock is down something like 10% over the same time period. The difference is due to some well-known stocks such as Apple and Amazon, which have unusually large weights in the S&P500.
See this Colby Davis post for some relevant charts, and for some good arguments against buying large growth stocks today.
Stock markets react to the foreseeable future, whereas the daily news, and most politicians, prefer to focus attention on the recent past. People who focus on the recent past see a US that’s barely able to decide whether to fight COVID-19, whereas the market sees vaccines and/or good treatments enabling business to return to normal within a year.
Stock markets don’t try to reflect the costs associated with death, chronic fatigue, domestic violence, etc. Too many people want the market to be either a perfect indicator of how well we’re doing, or to dismiss it as worthless. Sorry, but imperfect indicators are all we have.
Plenty of influential people have been exaggerating the harm caused by the pandemic, in order to manipulate the average person into taking the pandemic seriously. As far as I can tell, this backfired, and contributed to the anti-mask backlash. It also contributed to stocks being underpriced in the spring, so parts of the stock market rebound have simply been reactions to the growing evidence that most large companies are recovering.
The vaccine news has been persistently good, except for the opposition from big pharma and their friends at the FDA to making vaccines available as soon as possible.
Another modest factor is that many companies dramatically reduced their capital expenditure plans starting around March and April. That will reduce production capacities for the next year or two, thus making shortages of goods a bit more common than usual. This should prop up profit margins. But I haven’t noticed much connection between the most relevant industries and rising stock prices.
Why is there such a large divergence between the S&P500 and the average stock?
Investors have developed a somewhat unusual degree of preference for well-known companies whose long-term growth prospects seem safe.
I guessed last year that this would be a rerun of the Nifty Fifty. I still see important similarities in investor attitudes, but I see enough divergences in patterns of stock prices that I’m guessing we’ll get something in between the broad, gradual peak of the Nifty Fifty and a standard bubble (i.e. with a well-defined peak followed by a clear reversal within months).
Remember that high volatility is somewhat correlated with being in a bubble. We’ve recently seen Zoom Video Communications rise 40% in one day, and Salesforce rise 26%, in response to good earnings reports. That’s a $50 billion one-day gain for Salesforce. It reminds me of the volatility in PetroChina in 2007 (PetroChina has declined 87% since then). There was also that $173 billion rise in Apple after it’s latest earnings report, but that was a mere 10.5% rise.
Some of the divergence is due to small retailers losing business to Amazon, and to small restaurant chains losing business to fast food chains.
The bubble is a bit broader than just tech stocks – Home Depot and Chipotle are well above their pre-pandemic levels, by much larger amounts than can be explained by any near-term changes in their profits.
Incumbent politicians have been trying to buy votes by shoveling money to influential companies and people. There’s been some speculation that that’s biased toward large companies. It seems likely that large companies are better able to take advantage of those deals, because they’re more likely to employ someone with expertise at dealing with the government than is, say, a barbershop.
But I don’t see how that explains more than 1% of the stock market divergence. Stocks like Apple and Tesla have risen much more than can be explained by any change in this year’s profits. Any sane explanation of those soaring stocks has to involve increased optimism about profits that they’ll be making 5 to 10 years from now.
Large companies have better access to banks. Large companies typically have someone who is an expert at dealing with banks, and they have the accounting competence to make it easy for banks to figure out how much they can safely lend to the company. In contrast, a family-owned business will be slower to figure out how to borrow money, and therefore is more likely to go out of business due to unusual problems such as a pandemic. That might explain a fair amount of the divergence between the S&P500 and what you hear by word of mouth, but it explains little of the divergence between the S&P500 and the publicly traded companies that are too small for the S&P500.
I’ve only done a little selling recently, and I’ve been mostly avoiding large companies for many years. I’m guessing that Thursday’s tech stock crash wasn’t the end of the bubble. Bubbles tend to continue expanding until the average investor gets tired of hearing pundits say that we’re in a bubble. That suggests the peak is at least a month away, and I could imagine it being more than a year away.