The bubble in technology stocks seems to be bursting. There were a couple of interesting articles published in Shares Magazine and in the Financial Times this week. The first was headlined “Tech Stock Mania”. It suggested investors had been piling into technology stocks in volumes not seen since the dotcom bubble of 1993/2000 which I well remember. That was an age when the market valuations of such companies became totally detached from reality and the fundamentals on which you value companies. The mantra was that growth was everything to capture market share in the brave new computer software and internet world. Is it different now?
Technology stocks have been attractive of late because revenue growth is still there and the avoidance of personal contact has driven the need for more digitization and for new software products. Shopping has moved decisively to the internet and video tools and social media have become more widely used. Zoom’s share price has risen by 260% since the start of 2020 and electric car maker Tesla almost as much making the company the most valuable car producer in the world, even though they produce relatively few cars. There was a general rise in all the big technology shares this year until a sell-off in mid-July. It appeared that the increase in valuations was being driven by momentum as investors bought in response to share price rises, which is a great merry-go-round if you can jump on and off at the right point. Just looking at the vertiginous charts of some of these companies can spook you. It’s not that I am a great follower of charts, but when I see a rise in the share price faster than any growth in sales or profits, then this tells me that the market is getting over-excited.
I am of course a great believer in the merit of technology companies where growth can be achieved but past technology giants did not always grow for ever – IBM, Hewlett-Packard and Oracle are good examples. Management errors in not keeping up with technology and market changes are usually the cause, i.e. they collapse like empires from their own internal weaknesses.
I have to admit to recently selling a few shares in the large investment trusts that invest in technology companies – you can guess which they are. The private investors and institutions who buy the shares in such trusts may have even less real view of what is happening in the real world and hence their share price discounts have shrunk to zero or are even negative.
The mega-cap technology stocks such as Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet and Facebook now represent more than a fifth of the US stock market according to an article in the FT. That is surely a dangerous level of concentration. Investors seem to think that such companies are not just defensive because of their near-monopoly control of certain markets, but that they still have growth opportunities. They may be right but there is a limit to how much you should pay for any business when the valuation is founded on future growth. Sometimes the growth disappears as markets become saturated and the valuation then crashes as valuations are a discounted calculation of future earnings.
The big winners from the technology boom have been stock-pickers. But Chris Dillow wrote an article for Investors Chronicle a week ago that was headlined “The Impossibility of Long-Term Stockpicking”. It argued that because few listed stocks survive for many years on the market, you are wasting your time stock-picking. Also only 1.3% of shares accounted for all the rise in global markets between 1990 and 2018 according to academic research. The three companies that accounted for 6% of it were Apple, Microsoft and Amazon which were never sure bets if you look at their history.
Mr Dillow therefore argues that as you have no hope of picking the winners you might as well buy an index tracking fund, and you would have done better to hold cash than invest in small cap stocks on AIM.
The article is well worth reading but I am not convinced. My investment portfolio has done better than the FTSE-Allshare over the last 20 years. It might apply to unsophisticated investors that an index tracker may give a good return with minimal effort but you do have to take into account the management charges. You also need to consider what index to follow – global index tracker of large companies perhaps? If so you will have significant exposure to currency risk and the fact that large companies generally underperform. You still have to make some investment decisions and they won’t be any easier than studying individual companies.
Roger Lawson (Twitter: https://twitter.com/RogerWLawson )
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