Facing Down Financial FOMO
Rodney Johnson | April 01, 2019 | Biotech in 1990, internet companies in 1999, vacation homes in 2005, cryptocurrencies in 2017. Now the fast money is chasing ridesharing pioneer Lyft, as well as other unicorns (private, money-losing companies valued at $1 billion or more). The Fear of Missing Out (FOMO) can certainly make us look foolish. My mother warned me about things like this. Something about following friends off a bridge... Luckily, my friends today are too old to consider bridge jumping. Although in our younger years… but that’s a different story. Manias are easy to spot in retrospect: big price moves, big-time hype, big promises of untold riches, and then poof!… it’s all gone. People get righteous when they talk about how they never got caught up, never lost money, never got deceived. That ignores the times when the hype played out. Remember falling interest rates during the 1980s, booming equities in the late 1990s, computers, cell phones, and of course the internet? People who dismissed those trends look pretty foolish in retrospect... The cell phone was already ubiquitous in 2007. Then Apple introduced the iPhone. I thought it would fail… not because of the functionality of the phone, but because it was only available on AT&T, a network that, in all fairness, sucked. Needless to say, the iPhone didn’t fail. I definitely missed that one. Now Lyft is a public company, with shares initially priced in the mid $70s, valuing the money-losing, ride-hailing app firm at a cool $24.4 billion. Is it worth it? READ MORE » Trending Stories... An article caught my eye earlier this week: 102-year old John "Sonny" Franzese, a former Colombo crime family member, incarcerated for 50 years for refusing to rat on his friends, is finally speaking out. This, on the heels of the Francesco "Frank" Cali murder on March 14 – the first killing of a New York... Hidden for 87 years, the American elite’s best kept secret has just been revealed to the public. It was uncovered by famous economist, Harry Dent, and for the first time ever he’s laying out the proven steps America’s 1% have used to build a legacy of wealth. It’s a formula for making a fortune, fast… and it’s so simple anyone can do it... Last weekend wasn't exactly sunny on the Texas coast, but it was the closest we've gotten in two months. Early on Saturday, I started work in the yard. 96 bags of mulch later, I took a much-needed rest and made my way through the day's news. It was all Mueller, which is unfortunate because there are... In the last week, there have been a slew of articles warning that we're on the verge of a recession. The most prominent is talk about the yield curve – the 10-year versus the three-month Treasurys – finally inverting. That has led every recession since 1955, and only gave one false signal in the 1960s.... I live 200 feet from open water, facing Clear Lake, Texas. It's not a lake, it's a bay off of Galveston Bay, and it's definitely not clear. But other than that, the description is perfect. My downstairs area is 9.2 feet above sea level and consists of garage space and a storage area. The first... People don't understand gold. They don't understand the U.S. dollar either. Mostly, it's the same people. Gold bugs thought we were debasing the dollar by printing our way out of the 2008/9 financial crisis. Ha! Actually, the dollar has been rising since the start of that recession. The dollar, not gold, is actually the safe... | 
No comments:
Post a Comment