The stock market fails a breathalyser

Beyond Meat, with pea protein, is worth more than the global market for peas.

A Joby Aviation aircraft outside the New York Stock Exchange during the company’s initial public offering in New York last month. Picture: Bloomberg

Joby Aviation, which plans to begin an electric air taxi service in 2024, is worth more than Lufthansa, EasyJet or JetBlue.

Does that seem right? In this market, why not?

Heck, earlier this year, Tesla was worth more than the next nine car manufacturers combined, though now only the next six.

Beyond Meat, made with pea protein, is worth more than the entire market for peas eaten globally – like the bumper sticker says: Imagine whirled peas.

Do fundamentals even matter?

Used-car sales platform Carvana is worth more than Volvo, Honda, Ford or Hyundai. Airbnb is worth more than Marriott and Hilton combined. Crypto-exchange Coinbase is worth more than the Nasdaq.

We live at the intersection of innovation and disruption, but when companies are worth
more than any possible reality, watch out.

How about those meme stocks still getting hyped on Reddit’s WallStreetBets? Those who bid GameStop shares into the stratosphere waved at Virgin Galactic as they soared by. A year ago, the stock was $US6 and it is now $US190 – some dupes paid $US483, game over.

Short-sellers Melvin Capital, Point 72 and D1 Capital focused on fundamentals and got their assets handed to them. Shorts lost more than $US9bn between January and June.

New chair Ryan Cohen, who is driving change at GameStop, may be a retail genius for turning around Chewy, but Redditors may want to put in a call to hedge fund manager Eddie Lampert, who bought Kmart and merged it with Sears in 2005, as a highly touted “integrated retail” play, combining stores and online sales, eerily similar to the argument for investing in GameStop today. The stock peaked at $US135 in 2007. It is now at US30c as the company languishes in bankruptcy.

AMC Entertainment’s stock was scraping $US2 at the end of 2020. It is now $US50 thanks in part to Robinhood speculators, and the company has smartly raised cash. But what about fundamentals? Theatres are still sparse, and Disney and others are willingly putting blockbusters directly onto their streaming services – ask Scarlett Johansson about Black Widow’s ticket sales. Theatres are the new roller rinks.

Venture capital is cuckoo. After investing $US120bn in the 2000 dotcom frenzy, and just $US16bn in 2002, US venture capital invested $US130bn in 2020 and then $US140bn in the first half of 2021.

Start-ups these days raise money as “the Uber of gardening” or “Space as a Service.” Oh wait, the latter was WeWork’s pitch, whose founder Adam Neumann declared in 2017, “our valuation and size today are much more based on our energy and spirituality than it is on a multiple of revenue.” Is “spirituality” the S in SPAC?

And check this out: in June, an Italian artist auctioned an invisible statue for $US18,000 – in reality it was an empty box the artist claimed was a “space full of energy.” WeWork energy? Yeah, maybe fundamentals are a quaint relic of a bygone era.

The Federal Reserve deserves most of the blame. Near zero interest rates means the market has no true north to help compare stock valuations with reality. We are navigating turbulent seas with a spinning compass.

Former Fed chair William McChesney Martin once explained that the Fed’s job was “to take away the punch bowl just as the party gets going”. From the looks of it, the entire market would blow about a 0.35 (as in Dow 35,000) on a breathalyser test.

So no, fundamentals don’t matter – well, until they do.

In 1989 Tokyo real estate sold for as much as $US139,000 per square foot – 350 times the value in Manhattan. At that price, Tokyo’s Imperial Palace was worth more than all the real estate in California. Not anymore, after Japan’s triptych of lost decades.

Yahoo was once worth $US125bn and AOL $US200bn during the dotcom bubble. Both are worth 99 per cent less today.

Tesla chief executive Elon Musk recently tweeted, “I thought 1999 was peak insanity, but 2021 is 1000 per cent more insane!”

Remember, when the selling starts, fear of missing out turns into fear of losing everything as speculators jump like rats off a sinking ship.

Today’s negative real yields don’t reflect reality. The Fed has warned it plans on tapering bond and mortgage purchases later this year. Someone is at least reaching for the punch bowl.

The compass may stop spinning soon. Until then and always, stick with fundamentals.

The Wall Street Journal