Membres
3 #51 09/12/2020 14h36
- SirConstance
- Membre (2012)
Top 50 Portefeuille
Top 50 Actions/Bourse - Réputation : 354
C’est effectivement intéressant à quel point nous pouvons oublier les leçons du passé - j’avoue ne pas comprendre la psychologie liée à ce phénomène: certains sont complètement immunisés contre ça, d’autres pas du tout.
Chris Mayer, de Woodlock House Family Capital, a publié hier un billet tout à fait dans le thème hier sur son blog. J’ai essayé de choisir les meilleurs morceaux, mais en fait TOUT est incroyablement juste et je recommande la lecture complète de l’article:
A Tale of Bubbles Past
Chris Mayer a écrit :
(…)
In the course of cleaning out a section of my office -- something I have to do every once in a while or risk burial by books and paper -- I came across a stack of old magazines that make my point.
This magazine was called Technology Investor and it debuted -- I am not making this up -- in March of 2000. As you may know, that was the peak of the great tech bubble. The magazine had an eyecatching cover, as you can see.
(…)
For example, there is a story about satellite radio with a sort of “gee whiz” quality to it -- a technology everybody takes for granted today. “The best thing since cable TV. Can’t get country music in New York City? Satellite radio will let you choose modern, classic, or hit country, 24 hours a day without commercials.” Golly! Back then, there were two companies going at it: XM Satellite Radio and Sirius Radio. They were still separate companies.
(…)
The magazine also ran some model stock portfolios. Oh, these are great. The debut “Core Portfolio” consisted of “leaders with excellent management” “great products” and “vision.” They included the likes of Applied Materials (up 183% the prior 12 months), Nortel (up 291%), Oracle (up 254%), Sun Microsystems (up 246%) and Qualcomm (up 1,788% -- in the prior 12 months!).
Of the dozen names here, I think maybe 3-4 worked out. (…) Most of them didn’t do well at all. A couple were zeros or near zeros. Nortel, for example, went bankrupt. And does anybody remember Lucent? Several of these have yet to get above their 2000 peaks (i.e. Intel) even 20 years later. And this was the core portfolio. The more aggressive portfolios included names I had long forgotten -- Marimba? Orckit? Zoran? Ariba? -- but at the time they were thought to be potential world-beaters.
The returns on these things for the prior 12 months of that premier issue are eye-popping. Returns of 600%, 700%, even 1,000% were not uncommon.
(…)
The last issue is dated January 2001. The tone of the last issue is quite different from the first. Newton, in his column, is circumspect about the whole thing: “Sanity returns to technology.”
He offers some lessons, which are not bad. The best may be this one: “The internet created immense opportunities. But only a handful are turning out billionaires. Once there were 3,300 carmakers in the US. All bubbles burst.”
That is, I think, the chief lesson in all of this. Sanity returns. When you’re in a bubble, it’s hard to see. All those tech companies that seemed so wonderful in 2000 had great entrepreneurs, great vision and lots of models and data supporting a path to riches.
Today, technology (broadly considered) again is the best party in town. People have made huge gains in stocks such as Nio -- up more than 10x since May of this year. I worry a bit when I see people tweet their portfolios to show how much they’re up this year and they’re loaded with speculative “tech” names that have logged huge gains. And some of these portfolios have massive exposures to one name, like 20%, 30%. How many of these will be tomorrow’s Marimbas and Aribas and Orckits and Zorans?
I don’t know. Prophecy is a perilous business. Not all of today’s tech darlings will be dogs, of course, just as in 2000 they weren’t. There are some wonderful tech businesses today. Who wouldn’t want to own, say, Atlassian? What a business. But will it prove a good investment at today’s price? Maybe. It just seems like an awful lot has to go right for a long, long time. (A friend of mine seemed to sum it up. Musing on the valuation, he said: “Nosebleed.”)
Investing is not easy. When investing seems easy, it may be time to worry. At least, keep a sense of humility and try to maintain perspective. In that spirit, that I offer the above thoughts. And, as Martin Sosnoff, a long-time money manager and author, once advised: “Don’t worry too much… it’s still a long way to dog food for all of us in the Western world.”
Hors ligne
Hall of Fame 
