[vtsnowedin]

I am happy to see that I don't own any of your list as individual stocks.

[Newfie]

Those mainly seem to be technology stocks.

Our Daughter had a car and sold it to Carvana at some rather high price. She is a car saleman and recognized that the Carvana model was a kilter and took y of it to reduce her debt.

Weird financial models out there.

[vtsnowedin]

The luckycountry"

I don't believe 'people' have much to do with the market now, it's all algos

But those analogs are programed by humans and if anything magnify human mistakes much faster then humans can do it by themselves. When a computer decides to sell a million shares of a stock it is because it was programed with a trigger decided on by a human. It might actually be selling that million shares to another computer that has a slightly different set of triggers in it.

[evilgenius]

I regained a bit of previous losses today. No rime or reason to which were up and which were down.I think stupid people are now moving the market with no clue as to the underling fundamentals.

I don't believe 'people' have much to do with the market now, it's all algos. But the biggest force is the private pension funds, little day traders have an insignificant effect.

This story
https://wolfstreet.com/2022/05/13/massi ... odletting/
Is all about leverage but the list of imploded stocks down the bottom is quite ominous. It's looking a lot like the IT collapse of 2000.


Massive Stock Market Leverage Unwinds amid Brutal Bloodletting
by Wolf Richter • May 13, 2022 • 128 Comments
Margin debt started dropping a month before the Nasdaq went south, and it’s still dropping.
By Wolf Richter for WOLF STREET.

The total amount of leverage in the stock market is unknown and takes many forms. The only form that is tracked and reported on a monthly basis is margin debt. The other forms, such as Securities Based Lending (SBL) and hedge funds leveraged at the institutional level are not tracked. Not even banks and brokers that fund this leverage know how much total leverage their client has from all brokers combined, which became clear when the family office Archegos imploded in March 2021 and wiped out billions of dollars in capital at the prime brokers that had provided the leverage.

But margin debt – the tip of the iceberg and indicator of the direction of the overall stock market leverage – dropped by $27 billion in April from March, to $773 billion, according to Finra, which gets this data from its member brokers. Margin debt peaked in October last year at $936 billion and started falling in November. Over those six months, it has dropped by $163 billion, or by 17%. But leverage is still massive, and the unwind has a long way to go:

Not included in the margin debt data today is May. So far in May, the S&P 500, despite today’s rally, has dropped 6.2%, and the Nasdaq 8.3%, and many of the imploded stocks have gotten brutally crushed over those two weeks, including Coinbase, whose huge gigantic rally since Thursday morning didn’t amount to flyspeck compared to the devastating plunge in the prior two weeks and since its IPO and is barely visible on the stairway to heck since the IPO.

These kinds of selloffs trigger big bouts of forced selling amid margined stock jockeys that have concentrated on these stocks.

Hundreds of stocks have plunged by very large amounts, by 70%, and 80%, and even over 90% in a replay of the beginnings of the Dotcom Bust, only bigger and broader, and it’s going stock by stock, and it started in February last year, and seriously got going in November, and some of those I’ve captured in my special column Imploded Stocks.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Here is a sampling of well-known names amid the brutal bloodletting. The percentages are from their highs through the close on May 13:

Carvana: -90%
Vroom: -98%
Rivian: -85%
Snap: -70%
Pinterest: -76%
Netflix: -73%
Wayfair: -84%
Chewy: -78%
Shopify: -77%
And on and on it goes

Don Juan, the Yaqqi Indian sorcerer, would have said that to target prey one must know its routines. The prey is not just to own the companies, but to own them cheaply. All of this stuff you describe gives reasons for the behaviors we are seeing that are giving us these prices.

I'm not into any of the stocks in your list. I do follow Rivian. I don't own any of them yet because I think they are still too high. They make a great 4 wheeling pickup. They should have strong sales with it. They won't outsell the F-150, when it comes out. They will, however, be making delivery vans for Fedex by then. That's kind of what everyone expected from Lordstown. Rivian seems poised to go there instead.

I do own an EV company. I chose to dabble a bit in Canoo. They are way down too. I don't own enough shares in them. Cheaper prices are good. I like Canoo because they are the only car company among all of the car companies that will admit they don't need to put a trunk where the engine used to go. Instead, they make more space for people. They also do this drive by wire thing, so that no matter what sort of input is driving it won't ever be a hard thing to change over. Your input, or an AI's input are both digital.

Chewy at a huge discount also looks promising, as long as Chewy isn't carrying some debt bomb or other. Because anybody can engage in that sort of commerce. What Chewy does is send dogs birthday cards. They provide service. People love that. But I'm not interested in Chewy, though.

As for something like Shopify, even if they are a large part of what goes on every day, you do have to assume there could be a sea change that removes it. The stuff I'm getting into, industrial automation, is mostly about assuming there will be trade, even if we don't know who will do it. We don't need to know who will conduct the trading, in other words, to take advantage of opportunity. We just have to meet a need.

The need for automated belt sorting will be huge in the world of tomorrow. Brick and mortar is already losing. There will be more of a balance toward online, I think. Brick and mortar won't entirely go away, but it could be harsh living in smaller communities. There might not be much choice available. The way the internet infiltrates that space will be interesting. Even with fewer people working, there could be a huge amount of online traffic. It could be much larger than today, for the breadth of it.

When I talk about industrial automation, I am talking about that world, where shipping is supported by robots. Where twenty people might work now, along conveyor belts, one might work tomorrow. They might look at dashboards all day, and play video games. Tens of thousands of facilities like that will be built, if it goes that way. It's best to get in on the action now. Prices for the companies that will be involved in this are going down too.

Because what are the Republicans promising? Isn't it that they will change the way that Biden has eroded people's personal power? They will probably make a comeback in the next election. Then, they will be on the hook for that. Fed action should help them a bit, but they will still have to deal with lame duck Biden after they take power back. What should we expect from unemployment numbers? It looks like they might actually go up over that lame duck period, when the Republicans hold the actual power. Hmmmm, it's a setup?

[vtsnowedin]

I just saw a clever add for chewy. The cat was doing the talking and selecting it's order. The add caught a cats personality exactly in a funny way. My neighbors are customers so Chewy boxes are sitting on the mail boxes regularly and I seem to see them everywhere at other mailboxes and the clearly marked boxes act as their own advertisement.
I might have to look at the reports to see how they are fundamentally.

[Armageddon]

Are you guys enjoying your post peak oil life yet?

[vtsnowedin]

Are you guys enjoying your post peak oil life yet?

I'm waiting for the last of covid restrictions to go away but I am enjoying complete retirement. Don' know as we are past peak oil or not. The current shortages and high prices are artificially produced by Biden' Green policy and have no basis in geology.