Overall, the 1st quarter of 2023 has been among the strongest: Stocks rally to cap a winning month, quarter for Wall Street. This is why I rolled over my 2022 forecasts. I knew it would recover. It always does. You would have to go as far back to 2002-2001 to have two consecutive negative years for the S&P 500.
There was another mass shooting ,as predicted. And Trump was indicted, but it was a trifling state charge, not federal, so I would say I was mixed on this.
High inflation does not affect the ability of huge companies like Walmart and McDonald’s to generate record earnings and profits. This is why I stayed invested and did not sell in 2022. Inflation is like a shifting of the y-axis, in that companies respond by raising prices, but otherwise things do not change much.
I also predicted that META stock would do exceptionally well, and is going back to $350 soon. (It has.)
Year to date, in just 3 months, META gained 75% from $120 to $211. Crazy. We’re talking a company which at the end of 2022 was valued at a quarter of a trillion dollars nearly doubling in size in just three months, not a penny stock. This agrees what I said earlier, which is that huge companies are the future of investing and capitalism. That’s how you get rich: by investing in the biggest and most dominant of companies as they lay the digital infrastructure for the 21st century, and then add some leverage. There is no reason to take unnecessary risk with small or medium-sized companies when huge companies offer bigger, more consistent returns.
Tesla has also recovered considerably, and will make new highs soon too:
Also a huge fan of Walmart stock (WMT), which benefits from the trend of consolidation of retail, and does well in all economic conditions. Also a huge fan of McDonald’s stock (MCD) as I have mentioned before on the blog, which benefits from the trend of more obesity and the unwillingness or inability of anyone to do anything about it, and a general indifference by the public about the health consequences of obesity. This is related to what I call the ‘rational consumer‘ explanation for obesity: the idea is, the public is well-aware of the health consequences of being overweight or obese, but do not care or do not deem it serious enough to modify their behavior.
Similar to in 2019-2021 with Tesla, with META I picked the best performing stock out of thousands. Luck or skill? To do it twice, would have to be some skill.
The Turkish stock market (TUR) down 11% for the year even despite the S&P 500 and Nasdaq up a lot, as I also predicted:
And related: ‘Big Short’ Michael Burry admits he was ‘wrong to say sell’ after the Nasdaq 100 entered a bull market
The big short? More like the big chump. Just another mediocre guy who got lucky once and lived off the coattails of that single accomplishment. Yes, one can argue that he was right about GameStop, but what he had done was accumulate a lot of GameStop and then used his platform/brand to have the media hype it, creating a self-fulfilling prophecy, which he profited from. For things that are much bigger, like Tesla stock or predicting market direction, this does not work. This further confirms a theory I have, which is that the size of one’s platform/brand or media recognition is inversely correlated with quality of the investment advice that is being espoused. Big brand/platform = worse advice. This holds true on Twitter too (such as Elon Musk in 2021 hyping DogeCoin (down 75%), or Chamath hyping SPACs which have also cratered and will never recover, or the dreadful 2021-2022 performance of Cathie Wood’s ARK fund).
The media likes to promote incompetent but alarmist or charismatic people, who are good for ratings even if almost always wrong, like Peter Schiff or Jim Cramer. The media never promotes people who honest, ethical, or good at their jobs…not just investing, but also foreign policy such as hyping the Iraq War or shilling for Zelensky.
So what about Bitcoin? It looks like I was wrong, being that it’s at $28,000 instead of $10,000. But nine months remain for 2023. Second, the prediction has a second part, which is that Bitcoin will lag 3x funds, TECL and TQQQ . So I can be wrong about the first and right about the second.
Over the past 3 years, BTC and TECL are neck-and-neck:
Over the next two years TECL + TQQQ are going to break way ahead.
Bitcoin is already lagging massively the Nasdaq over the past few weeks and looks like it is getting ready to dump below $20k again. (As for my BTC method , that to has gone really well over the past 2 weeks, having seven winning days and a single losing day, to be discussed in more detail later).