Transcript:
Katie Nealis:
Are we in another tech bubble? Just like the previous tech bubble?
Tom Vaughan:
Yeah, Vanessa quite a few times, especially last year when things are really happen. I said no last year, and actually I was right. Because if we were in a tech bubble last year, you know, it basically burst, middle of February, and the whole market would have fallen apart like it did in 2000. It didn’t. It just kind of rotated out into a broader segment, which, which was great. So yeah, and I was here in 2000. I would say that the thing that reminds me the most of a tech bubble is cryptocurrency. And I always like to tell the story about one of my clients that called me from his car, asking me about a stock and this is in 99, I believe. And he wanted to buy a know about bingo.com. Okay, so I looked up, bingo, calm, it’s registered in Florida, it had just become IPO like nine months ago and went from $1 to $9. That’s a huge run. And that’s why it caught his attention, obviously. But when I look behind the scenes, the company did not have approval on a regulatory basis to do bingo online. So they didn’t have a product, there was nothing there. And the only hope you had if you’re going to buy bingo.com was that somebody else would buy it for $10. If you bought it for nine or $11, or something.
Crypto currencies, exactly the same. There’s nothing behind it. There’s no use case for it right now. You know, they talk about being able to use it as a digital currency, it’s been out bitcoins been out for 12 years, it’s still not really being used as much as it should, if it was really going to be effective. Compare that to say Venmo, which has been out less than 12 years, and now it’s really working in terms of transactions, you know, on an electronic basis. And so that’s the area that I would say is the most like that. And that has started to kind of crater here. And we’ve been talking about cryptocurrency, just about every show, something comes up in that area. I just read an article saying there’s 1400 you know, cryptocurrencies right now, again, that’s a lot like the.com bubble, because you could make up a company bingo.com and make this up and register it. And I’m going to go out and go IPO and somebody made money on it. I guess it wasn’t it wasn’t my client, because I didn’t let him buy it. And luckily, because it went in went Bye, bye.
And so yeah, I actually the overall stock market that we’re in right now is extremely reasonably priced in comparison to what we were looking at in 2000. At the top, you know, the PE ratio was really, really high compared to now. And so No, I don’t think so I think in certain areas, I definitely felt like we were in a bubble in that clean energy, innovative technology genomics area, the ark funds, all of those things, which peaked out in February, but it didn’t bring down the whole market. You know, and hopefully cryptocurrency doesn’t either. But that’s a it’s a good question. But I don’t think so. At this point in time, we could get there. I’ll let you know, because I was there. I remember this is not like that. It’s not except for some areas like crypto.
Easan Arulanantham:
Do you believe that over time, the fragmentation will like and consolidate and like all the companies will consolidate into a couple coins, essentially. And that’s when it’s a good time to start investing. Yeah, like?
Tom Vaughan:
Yeah, it’s a good point. Because think about it. I remember during the.com bubble, there was so many companies right coming out, and you know, whether their product or no product or what have you, and now we have Amazon. What a great, you know, fine that was and that came out of the.com bubble. So somebody’s got to survive in the cryptocurrency area. I remember reading articles about Detroit in the very early 1900s when the cars were coming up. There were over 2000 car manufacturers in Detroit at that time, and now there’s three, you know, with Ford and General Motors and whatnot. So really, I think that’s probably very true. And I actually think cryptocurrency sticks around, at least in a few areas. There’s some potential money to be made there. And you know, like Amazon, and I don’t know which coin there’ll be, there’s 1,400 of them.
That’s an incredible number. And you know, which one actually works and sticks around. We’ll see. I will say one of the things that did happen this week that it didn’t mention in my weekly summary was that Chairman Powell the Federal Reserve mentioned that the dollar the US is working on a digital currency, I call it the digital dollar. That’s a big threat to cryptocurrency and he said that we wouldn’t need cryptocurrency once they get their digital currency out, which I thought was kind of interesting. So he’s already doing a marketing push for this. So but people buy cryptocurrencies for other reasons. And you know how US backing actually isn’t an advantage for some people. And so that it’ll be interesting to see how that plays out. But there’s about to be a lot of competitors coming in and I do think it’ll winnow it down to, you know, less less than 8400 are going to survive.