You can “blame” easy money for the strong run in stocks this year. You can talk about stocks being the “only game in town.” You can figure out that companies are stronger than ever because business is just so darned strong and the Fed is keeping rates low.
Me? I think that these “excuses” for a strong market led so many people astray that they serve as reminders that “good is good,” not bad as so many of the so-called sages that we have to listen to all day would tell you.
We live in a Cinderella world where so many people expect midnight to change everything from hopeful to disastrous. The litany of what was supposed to blow up in our faces made owning stocks seem like a mugs game, when it turned out that shorting was the mugs game — the intellectual equivalent of who can best map out a flat world.
Will 2022 be any different? The Fed won’t be as easy. The bankers and SPAC kings will keep pumping out junk pricing it low to entice, but the enticement is the real bear trap of this market. Most of the companies that have gone public are conceptual, when I have said perhaps too many times that 2022 will be the year of the tangible, practical and profitable.
There will be an occasional, shockingly good offering — like Endeavor Group Holdings (full disclosure, my agent) or Dutch Bros. Coffee — but most of the offerings were simply using the stock market as a branding opportunity that many fell for. These are companies that were counting for an opportunity to sell you something that makes them money, not you. They aren’t called out more because so many people think it isn’t their job to do so.
Why do I call them out? Because I don’t play for dinner.
