Good day all. If you have been watching the stock market, which I do, you have been watching it go up and down like a yo yo over the last few months. Wednesday, June 10th, the DJIA, Dow Jones Industrial Average, the DJIA plummeted 953 points.
As I work on this post, June 11th, the market has rebounded and is up around 870 points, almost erasing the loses from the previous day. There are several reasons for both the sell off and the rebound. In the case of the sell off, certain people would have us blame President Trump and his blowing the crap out of the Islamic Republic of Iran.
In the early stages, that was an issue as Iran’s surviving government pretty much lost control of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps or IRGC. I’m not going to bother going into how the internal military structure of Iran works. Basically, the IRGC has been firing missiles and drones at everyone regardless of what they are doing with regards to the current unpleasantness.
They are also firing at tankers, again and are mining the Strait of Hormuz to force ships to move in a specific channel and pay a fee of $2 million dollars to transit. The United States responded by blockading Iran outright and stopping any ships going to or coming from Iran. This has included the United States Navy firing on a few ships and disabling them.
The United States has also said it won’t be escorting any ship that isn’t an American flagged ship. Because of this, a large number of tankers have been unable to get into the Arabian Gulf to fill up with oil from the Gulf states. Because of this, oil prices went up and we started seeing reports by morons that “We are running out of oil!!” We aren’t. There is plenty of oil. What we have is a logistics issue. Now all those tankers are making their way to the Gulf of America to fill up with American, Mexican and Venezuelan oil.
So why is the stock market going nuts, especially since the jobs reports keep improving? The simple answer is Artificial Intelligence, also known as AI. It looks like the AI bubble is beginning to burst. Here are the details from Newsmax:
Another selloff for artificial-intelligence stocks dragged the U.S. market sharply lower. The S&P 500 dropped 1.6% Wednesday after giving up a brief modest gain in the morning. The index had its first back-to-back drop in three weeks. The Dow Jones Industrial Average sank 1.9%, or 953 points, and the Nasdaq composite lost 2%, or 509 points. Wall Street has been shaky since last week, when AI stocks went from roaring to records to suddenly turning lower.
I’m probably dating myself again, but I’ve seen this happen several times before. In the 80’s it was the Savings and Loan collapse. The it was the internet bubble in the late 90’s and early 2000’s. For the last year or so, we have been seeing companies pushing AI as the “Next great thing!” The problem, as in previous bubble bursts, there was nothing actually there.
Among the worries is that their prices have simply shot too high, too fast because of AI mania.
The question now is whether the break lower has cleared out excessive optimism that may have built into their stock prices, or if it’s just the start of a longer downturn.
It’s to soon to say of course, although the market has pretty much recovered from the previous slide.
Oil prices, meanwhile, rose after President Donald Trump threatened more strikes on Iran.
Which he did. Iran has been jerking the administration around and President Trump said enough. He instructed the military to go back to work. However, again as I work on this post, President Trump has canceled further strikes and that Iran appears to be backing down. We can go into if stopping the strikes is a good idea or not another day. The news that Iran is coming back to the table may have also helped the market.
The Newsmax article then goes into a list of winners and losers. Most of the losers are, of course, tech companies and those who are making semiconducters, memory and every thing needed to fill a datacenter with servers. I know that one of the largest makers of memory chips Micron Technology, announced it wold no longer sell RAM to the consumer market, concentrating on providing products to datacenter servers and hardware. Micron took a solid hit, losing something like 4.7% of their stock value.
Personally, I think whoever made that decision to cut out the consumer market needs to be fired. I’ve worked in companies in the past that did similar things, thinking that the good times would continue. When they didn’t, they almost collapsed.
Now I do invest in the markets and understand them. I know they will go down and I know they will go up. I am not in anyway a financial authority and I don’t play one on television. I am not offering any advice. I’m just reporting what I see and what I’ve done myself.
I am what is known as a long term investor. I tend to buy stocks and hold on to them for years. I prefer companies that pay a dividend rather then bet on a stock going up or down. Since I’ve seen this happen before, I’m not worried. Besides, I’ve always assumed that any money I put into the market is going to be lost. Now if you want to see what panic looks like in a fictional sense, I would recommend watching the movies Margin Call and the Big Short. As for me, I’m just sitting back and enjoying the show.
Thatisall
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