Market Top?

This is not normally my thing. I don’t call markets ups and downs. I focus on individual companies.

But this is becoming a pattern. SHOP does a secondary, and now The Trade Desk TTD, does a tertiary, I would guess you call it. This is just a few months after its post IPO secondary:
http://www.investors.com/news/technology/heres-why-hot-ipo-t…

Follow the money. Are there other secondaries being tossed out fro companies who have been successful during the year?

follow the money, because people with money won’t tell you what to do, but they will do with their money what they would tell you to do, should they care to do so.

Just a random tertiary offering to cash out insiders? Or are more people thinking we have reached at least an area, risky enough, that they prefer to be in cash?

My advice…is none. I have not a clue. I am just seeing this happening from companies who are not otherwise short on cash.

This could just be TTD thinking that it, as an individual company, thinks it is now overvalued, and will not continue to have such great earnings results going forward. Or it could just be a rare tertiary. I have never seen a tertiary so close to a secondary, so close to the IPO.

Tinker

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Tinker,

The markets go up and down.

If you buy companies that are growing and building businesses, you make money. If you buy companies that are growing and building businesses in a growing economy you make a lot of money.

It takes three inputs to grow an economy, energy, capital, and governance.

We typically understand governance as a lack of war and/or corruption, the supply of energy as the relative cost of the main transport energy cost. Today that is oil. The cost of capital is generally measured by interest rates, and to a lesser extent by stock prices at IPO.

Today, in most countries and as the world as a whole, governance is very good, i.e. there is no need for private militias to protect goods in transport, and the amount needed for backsheesh is fairly modest.

Energy prices as measured in the price of oil are near historic lows.

The cost of capital as measured in interest rates and in the price of stock issuance is very low, maybe at historic lows.

With these inputs, the economy is going to grow and grow very fast. I don’t know that the world has ever seen a situation this good before.

When you consider that almost a 1/3 of the world population is not only experiencing those critical inputs, it also has a low wealth compared to the richest part of the world and a young population as well. You get a sense that we haven’t seen anything yet.

Cheers
Qazulight

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Overpriced stock is good currency to buy stuff on the cheap with as I recall CISCO doing back in its day.

Denny Schlesinger

money - get it while you can, you might need it later.At these P/E ratios it’s almost free. And unlike debt you won’t have to pay it back

Companies can issue stock when P/E are high and buy it back later when the P/E is lower. A very low risk way for stockholders to profit and management to keep their jobs.

Too much cash is a minor problem, too little cash is a major problem. In a rip roaring bull market investors will ignore the stock dilution.

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Qazulight, under your ‘governance’ category for economies, I require first and foremost a factor which is missing: ‘the free market, always subject to competition and the rule of law.’. Surely that is what creates successful, enduring economies.

Instead, every major global economy has deliberately plunged into levels of debt formerly regarded as unimaginable, untenable and catastrophic. We are pleased to hand this legacy to our children who will find it illuminated by very high, work-inhibiting taxes and very low, or abandoned, forms of welfare. On this new, crumbling foundation stand the economies of the world.

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