"I wonder if the analysts who see growth in grocery sales talk to the analysts who see growth in restaurant chains. And I wonder if either of those analysts talk to the analysts who see growth in appetite-suppressing drugs."
I suppose it's possible for prices to change enough and in such a way so that all three grow at the same time. But I'm pretty sure we're not at some turning point for American obesity rates and calorie consumption; I'd sooner bet on "Peace in the Mideast."
We already have a large portfolio of effective anorectic drugs that, if people would use them at the prescribed doses and in the cyclical manner meant to attenuate the build up of tolerance, they would be 'safe' too. And a lot o people would use them that way, per their doctor's orders, and lose a lot weight and keep it off.
But the trouble is that a large number of people wouldn't, because all these drugs that really work also make them feel really good, such that the "potential for recreational abuse" is too high for them.
Which is why all the best anorectics are banned or under controls extreme enough to make mass weight loss unlikely.
My impression is that this is because most powerful anorectics stimulate chubby people into states and neurotransmitter balances that are physiologically normal for naturally skinny and energetic people, and naturally skinny and energetic people act in a kind of manic way like they are high on life. And to chubby people, when they feel that way, "high on life" is just "high", addictively so. And of course, with higher doses, they can push that high much, much higher. And naturally, a lot of them are going to do just that.
Any new drug that doesn't make chubby people feel like skinny people isn't going to work in the long term to make them stay skinny. The effect will be minor, it will wear off, or there will be side effects like nausea or digestive issues severe enough to make people quit.
More concisely, "If it really works, it will be abused. And if it won't be abused, it won't really work."
Disney: lacks an unclear biz plan of which investors can value; so for the present investors have to go through a variety of scenarios that management might implement. However, one can look at its current cash flow and say what they are willing to pay for it until more clarity comes out regarding a biz plan. For now, I would suggest DIS is probably a reasonable investment .
NVDA might be overpriced, but if so the question is by how much if at all? Does the market price reflect an over pay of say 2 years future cash flows or far more than that? Stock prices are determined by the interaction of supply and demand which will have emotional aspects to it. The price of NVDA has come down and were it to come down to say 400 or a bit less it would represent a good buying opportunity.
Pricing the growth curve for companies that have not reached stabilized growth is always a challenge and there will be some using this or that metric to suggest the market price may be too high and others who obviously see lots of growth ahead; but that is what markets are all about anyone can or should be able to price a stabilized growing bond like company's stock.
Lastly, values will change as interest rates move up or down, but in many cases emotions of investors may take the price of a stock up too much or down too much; but more importantly with regard to the reasonableness of repricing is the extent to which interest rate changes affect drivers of growth such as revenues and operating margins.
I suspect Disney's bear scenario is even worse than you say, being roughly something like "fails to turn a profit for many years and sells off big parts of the company, due to forgetting how to make movies people like." The amount of money they spend, and then lose, on recent movies is staggering, especially since they aren't dropping a third of a million dollars in cash to produce things, but borrowing, so their actual costs are higher still over time.
I don't know that I would want to hold Netflix stock, or Disney, unless the price started to look a lot like their liquidation value.
All I know is that there are mountains of corporate debt that was issued in the period from 2009-2020/21. A portion of that debt has to be refinanced every single quarter. I would look at the average duration of the debt of various companies before investing in their stock.
Great line that may apply to much more than entertainment companies: "the trope of people going to Hollywood hoping to become stars and ending up waiting on tables. I wonder if a lot of entertainment companies hoping to become stars will end up waiting on tables."
Grant is quite wrong before being right: "It’s true that nobody could have predicted the scale and persistence of the work-from-home phenomenon. But it’s also true that borrowers and lenders alike structured these loans to be vulnerable to any risk, even a mild recession."
Many did predict w-f-h, but had also often been predicting it for years, and it hadn't happened. Crying wolf is an issue. Like those predicting climate or debt disaster "soon" enough to require measures now, and the disaster not happening without the measures being taken.
Loans structured to be vulnerable to any risk are cheaper for borrowers, and more profitable for lenders ... as long as there is no recession nor big interest rate increase. This increase in fragility is similar to how race cars break down far more often than normal cars - the highest performance requires everything to be right all the time, and small perturbances cause bigger problems.
This is also why high-performance pitchers last less long in MLB. Like so many top athletes attempting to maintain 100% sustainable performance but often adding some 5 or 10% short term unsustainable performance boost - unsustainable because of the increased risk of a small change causing disaster.
or of many free climbers or of folk jumping of skyscrapers with parachutes or ... extreme sports.
Yet the rich investors did learn the lesson of 2008 - the gov't will bail out most of the rich, most of the time, using gov't debt to avoid the rich having to lose their wealth when their bets fail.
Trump has changed the Rep Party so it is not as adverse to using gov't debt for conservative party purposes - the US won't kick the debt habit until the Dems favor less gov't spending, rather than higher taxes on the productive sectors (which do little virtue signaling).
Grant quotes Hoenig. “Wealth is only created through increases in productivity. " That is true in positive sum thinkers about the whole economy, but in normal quarters or years, one can get more wealth by taking from others, which is zero-sum thinking in practice. Like winning at gambling, or having one's gang win more drug selling territory in a gang war.
"For a typical mature company, the P/E ratio might be 15, and the profit margin might be .04, so that the ratio of price to revenues would be less than 1. Of course, people think that NVIDIA is going to enjoy high profit margins, because demand will be high with very little competition. And they think it will grow a lot, so it should enjoy a high P/E ratio. A combination of a P/E ratio of 100 and a profit margin of 40 percent would get you to 40 for a price/revenue ratio. But that seems like a stretch."
I don't pretend to grasp numbers and presumably it is not a stretch for the winning company. But it's all just betting on winners and losers, right? Are people so very good at that?
A very few people are consistently good at betting on winners, and far more think they are - money managers at investment funds. Index funds usually do better than most investment funds, tho there have been Buffett type "good value" investors who were successful in choosing winners and, especially, avoiding big losses. His recent returns have not been so great, but weren't a disaster, either.
There are no Chinese walls in investment banking except in the books. The analysts are auxiliaries to the salesmen and the traders to help them to meet their targets and balance their books accordingly.
>I wonder if the analysts who see growth in advertising revenues at companies like Instacart talk to analysts who see growth in advertising revenues at Meta and Google. I wonder if anyone has calculated where the implied asymptote is for the share of the economy devoted to advertising.
If they did, it might be useful, and they would keep the fruits for internal use. Almost certainly, someone has run these numbers.
"I wonder if the analysts who see growth in grocery sales talk to the analysts who see growth in restaurant chains. And I wonder if either of those analysts talk to the analysts who see growth in appetite-suppressing drugs."
I suppose it's possible for prices to change enough and in such a way so that all three grow at the same time. But I'm pretty sure we're not at some turning point for American obesity rates and calorie consumption; I'd sooner bet on "Peace in the Mideast."
We already have a large portfolio of effective anorectic drugs that, if people would use them at the prescribed doses and in the cyclical manner meant to attenuate the build up of tolerance, they would be 'safe' too. And a lot o people would use them that way, per their doctor's orders, and lose a lot weight and keep it off.
But the trouble is that a large number of people wouldn't, because all these drugs that really work also make them feel really good, such that the "potential for recreational abuse" is too high for them.
Which is why all the best anorectics are banned or under controls extreme enough to make mass weight loss unlikely.
My impression is that this is because most powerful anorectics stimulate chubby people into states and neurotransmitter balances that are physiologically normal for naturally skinny and energetic people, and naturally skinny and energetic people act in a kind of manic way like they are high on life. And to chubby people, when they feel that way, "high on life" is just "high", addictively so. And of course, with higher doses, they can push that high much, much higher. And naturally, a lot of them are going to do just that.
Any new drug that doesn't make chubby people feel like skinny people isn't going to work in the long term to make them stay skinny. The effect will be minor, it will wear off, or there will be side effects like nausea or digestive issues severe enough to make people quit.
More concisely, "If it really works, it will be abused. And if it won't be abused, it won't really work."
Disney: lacks an unclear biz plan of which investors can value; so for the present investors have to go through a variety of scenarios that management might implement. However, one can look at its current cash flow and say what they are willing to pay for it until more clarity comes out regarding a biz plan. For now, I would suggest DIS is probably a reasonable investment .
NVDA might be overpriced, but if so the question is by how much if at all? Does the market price reflect an over pay of say 2 years future cash flows or far more than that? Stock prices are determined by the interaction of supply and demand which will have emotional aspects to it. The price of NVDA has come down and were it to come down to say 400 or a bit less it would represent a good buying opportunity.
Pricing the growth curve for companies that have not reached stabilized growth is always a challenge and there will be some using this or that metric to suggest the market price may be too high and others who obviously see lots of growth ahead; but that is what markets are all about anyone can or should be able to price a stabilized growing bond like company's stock.
Lastly, values will change as interest rates move up or down, but in many cases emotions of investors may take the price of a stock up too much or down too much; but more importantly with regard to the reasonableness of repricing is the extent to which interest rate changes affect drivers of growth such as revenues and operating margins.
I suspect Disney's bear scenario is even worse than you say, being roughly something like "fails to turn a profit for many years and sells off big parts of the company, due to forgetting how to make movies people like." The amount of money they spend, and then lose, on recent movies is staggering, especially since they aren't dropping a third of a million dollars in cash to produce things, but borrowing, so their actual costs are higher still over time.
I don't know that I would want to hold Netflix stock, or Disney, unless the price started to look a lot like their liquidation value.
All I know is that there are mountains of corporate debt that was issued in the period from 2009-2020/21. A portion of that debt has to be refinanced every single quarter. I would look at the average duration of the debt of various companies before investing in their stock.
Great line that may apply to much more than entertainment companies: "the trope of people going to Hollywood hoping to become stars and ending up waiting on tables. I wonder if a lot of entertainment companies hoping to become stars will end up waiting on tables."
Grant is quite wrong before being right: "It’s true that nobody could have predicted the scale and persistence of the work-from-home phenomenon. But it’s also true that borrowers and lenders alike structured these loans to be vulnerable to any risk, even a mild recession."
Many did predict w-f-h, but had also often been predicting it for years, and it hadn't happened. Crying wolf is an issue. Like those predicting climate or debt disaster "soon" enough to require measures now, and the disaster not happening without the measures being taken.
Loans structured to be vulnerable to any risk are cheaper for borrowers, and more profitable for lenders ... as long as there is no recession nor big interest rate increase. This increase in fragility is similar to how race cars break down far more often than normal cars - the highest performance requires everything to be right all the time, and small perturbances cause bigger problems.
This is also why high-performance pitchers last less long in MLB. Like so many top athletes attempting to maintain 100% sustainable performance but often adding some 5 or 10% short term unsustainable performance boost - unsustainable because of the increased risk of a small change causing disaster.
See the free-diving death of Natalia Molchanova, https://www.newyorker.com/sports/sporting-scene/the-disappearance-of-the-worlds-greatest-free-diver
or of many free climbers or of folk jumping of skyscrapers with parachutes or ... extreme sports.
Yet the rich investors did learn the lesson of 2008 - the gov't will bail out most of the rich, most of the time, using gov't debt to avoid the rich having to lose their wealth when their bets fail.
Trump has changed the Rep Party so it is not as adverse to using gov't debt for conservative party purposes - the US won't kick the debt habit until the Dems favor less gov't spending, rather than higher taxes on the productive sectors (which do little virtue signaling).
Grant quotes Hoenig. “Wealth is only created through increases in productivity. " That is true in positive sum thinkers about the whole economy, but in normal quarters or years, one can get more wealth by taking from others, which is zero-sum thinking in practice. Like winning at gambling, or having one's gang win more drug selling territory in a gang war.
Have a nice day.
"For a typical mature company, the P/E ratio might be 15, and the profit margin might be .04, so that the ratio of price to revenues would be less than 1. Of course, people think that NVIDIA is going to enjoy high profit margins, because demand will be high with very little competition. And they think it will grow a lot, so it should enjoy a high P/E ratio. A combination of a P/E ratio of 100 and a profit margin of 40 percent would get you to 40 for a price/revenue ratio. But that seems like a stretch."
I don't pretend to grasp numbers and presumably it is not a stretch for the winning company. But it's all just betting on winners and losers, right? Are people so very good at that?
A very few people are consistently good at betting on winners, and far more think they are - money managers at investment funds. Index funds usually do better than most investment funds, tho there have been Buffett type "good value" investors who were successful in choosing winners and, especially, avoiding big losses. His recent returns have not been so great, but weren't a disaster, either.
There are no Chinese walls in investment banking except in the books. The analysts are auxiliaries to the salesmen and the traders to help them to meet their targets and balance their books accordingly.
>I wonder if the analysts who see growth in advertising revenues at companies like Instacart talk to analysts who see growth in advertising revenues at Meta and Google. I wonder if anyone has calculated where the implied asymptote is for the share of the economy devoted to advertising.
If they did, it might be useful, and they would keep the fruits for internal use. Almost certainly, someone has run these numbers.