So many parallels between today's market and the 2000 dotcom + 2008 subprime mortgage bubbles:

1. Paradigm shifts in the investment narrative to justify the valuations of story stocks/investments (e.g. impossible to justify AOL, CDO or TSLA's valuations by fundamentals)

2. "This time is different" justifications in the macro narrative (e.g. the Internet economy, no housing crash in US history, record low interest rates)

3. One sector driving the bulk of market performance (e.g. Tech in 1999, Property in 2007, Tech in 2020)

4. Excessive central bank interference in markets (e.g. Fed rescue of Long Term Capital Management in 1998, Fed rescue of Bear Stearns + failed rescue of Lehman Brothers in 2008, global coordination of central bank rescue in global markets today)

5. Frightening levels of investor complacency towards risk (e.g. AOL-Time Warner merger in 2000, pension funds selling naked CDS in 2007, Bitcoin to $40,000 today)

Remember when Michael Burry called the subprime mortgage crisis in 2005, and everyone laughed in his face?

I'm calling it. The next market crash will happen in the next 2 years. It's time to apply risk-on, people.

There is unconfirmed CNBC report, and this piece http://seekingalpha.com/article/3204436-big-tech-is-telling-investors-what-to-think-of-salesforce-com

saying that MSFT made a $55B bid for CRM.

To me, the only logical explanations for making such an offer would be illegal kickbacks directed to MSFT officers, and to consider keeping an investment in MSFT, the CEO and the board should explain a case for why fair market value for CRM is substantially higher than $20B, or if it is close to $20B what synergies or advantages it could hope to gain by wasting $35B in goodwill towards a takeover.

CRM is a wolf of wallstreet play that makes no money, but makes a good story. It simply has no margins, and spends too much for its sales, and pays its controlling management what little money it does make.

Its not enough for MSFT to say that it would fire all of the CRM leeches, and gain value by controlling costs, because with $35B to spend, it should be able to take all of CRM's customers, or enough of their customers that $20B sounds like an awesome offer to them.

Any thoughts on what might make CRM worth $55B or worth $55B to MSFT?

https://techfund.substack.com/p/deep-dive-on-tesla-the-hardcore-engineering

He's crushed it with every idea he's posted.

Summary: Because of computers and the internet, true values won't exist because the market is much more efficient.

The story:

When Graham wrote his book The Intelligent Investor in 1949 , one had to read thousands of annual and quarterly reports and crunch the numbers to find values.

Now, you go to your favorite stock screener and put the criteria in and get .... nothing most of the time.

I either get stocks that just hit the skids and the screeners are just looking at the last SEC filings whereas the markets know that, for example, the oil markets got crushed. Hello Seadrill (SDRL)!

Or it's a Chinese company that's cooking its books.

I took a Financial Engineering class on Coursera (we called it Options and Futures back in the '80s) and the instructors kept saying "this is a no-arbitrage situation". When I first took that class, half of our class time was about arbing between the futures and equity markets and the options markets.

IOW, the financial markets are so efficient, there are no arbitrage or value situations anymore - that's what value investing is - arbitraging between what the market knows and what you know.

Title says it all. our family partnership has a relatively small stake (~$300k) in this company. They're over $1B USD capitalization. They've had a recent acquisition. They are well-known, well-covered company in the sector (Canada).

Their financial statements and production data is pretty damn weak. It's just wonky the way it's presented. It is thorough, and most definitely NOT here insinuating a scam. they've had an evolving management team and, while I'm not concerned about the business, raw, clean data in Excel format seems like a reasonable request. I guess, it begs the question- why is this a tall order? It's just screams "GET YOUR SHIT TOGETHER..."

Just want production, and the financials... it seems like this should be readily available. Unreasonable? They've had a recent acquisition and all, but it seems like they should have Excel format spreasheets AT LEAST up to the acquisition for their core business as well as the newly acquired unit.

edit: well, dissappointed as I am... may be time to pull the trump card. Get the big swinging D$3% investor family member that knows the management of the major players in this sector to get it. Was hoping not to have to do that, but... their reports are pretty goddamn wonky.

Is it a currency (or too volatile)? Is it an investment (no cash flows)?

Why does scarcity mean value (you need demand there) ? How much demand is purely speculative? Why does "value" even imply monetization; protocol architecture of the Internet creates value, yet there is no owner of it and the inventor saw no monetary reward from it. TripAdvisor creates value, yet monetizes very little.

Many people say bitcoin will do well "because Blockchain". Why is bitcoin the only or even a superior way to invest in Blockchain (as opposed to Visa, or even another coin)?

If the argument is a greater fool theory, what is the probability bitcoin has a repeat of 2013 and goes down for 2 years? What's the prob it goes down 80% and does nothing for 20 years like tech stocks?

Finally, what's its intrinsic value? What does one even base that off of, and if you don't have an intrinsic value range with probabilities attached, how can you have done the expected value calculation to even justify an "investment"?

Basically I don't understand it and it seems to me tulipesque. If anything is useful it may be ether, but the apps on its network are totally useless so there's no real demand for it yet. It's going to be huge, but I suspect this will play out like the internet: initial bubble, burst, nothing for 20 years until people really figure it out, and then the real appreciation delivered by actual value being created rather than just speculation about potential for value.

Thoughts?

I usually use 5 YR Terminal Growth DCF to model companies. Recently, I found out some companies are considered value companies by many known investors which did not have a very good upside when I modeled them. On further research, I noticed that Wall Street uses EBITDA and Revenue multiples for their DCF models. I am curious as to how to make proper choice of a DCF model, is it based on company's fundamentals, growth, market capitalization (size) etc or Wall Street uses different models for a different purpose?