Recent Lessons

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One of my watch lists is called Recent, and within it I house interesting and relatively young stocks (less than two years in the public) markets. I’ve plucked seven of these out of the list and wanted to share a few words about each chart.

The first chart is a good example of how dangerous is can be to buy a stock with an otherwise bullish formation in the context of a bear market. This was shaping up as a perfectly valid right triangle bullish pattern, but take note that (a) the pattern never completed (b) it did a bit of damage to its supporting trendline. I say again, it’s all about context. It’s tough for an otherwise bullish stock to succeed when the atmosphere is poisoned

Fisker is one of umpteen examples of how awful the SPAC madness of 2021 was. It worked out great for the charlatans pushing this crap on people (the most famous of which is a man whose name rhymes with “Mammoth“) but has been a train wreck for regular folks.

Nikola has the same one-two punch as Fisker (that is to say, SPAC scam and electric vehicle Tesla-wanna-be fever), but it’s got a third strike against it, which is that its founder is a convicted felon. It would honestly be as if Theranos went public in 2006 and was still trading. It is literally insane that people are still trading this thing.

And then there’s Playboy, yet another SPAC wreck. I can absolutely hear the investor presentations in my head now……….”it’s an iconic brand” Uh-huh. Well, it seems to me that eight billion free porn videos on the web has sort of wrecked this ancient publisher of masturbatory fodder.

Here’s another example of the whole “context” argument: Peloton. If this were, let’s say, late 1982, this would be one of those patterns that would probably make you a fortune. Here, however, it has totally gone flaccid, and it’s a piece of unwanted junk again.

Oh, and as another pro-tip, if a company is formed by a megalomaniac pot-addicted weirdo and his grotesque Medusa-like wife, and their ethics are somewhere below that of a child pornographer, it probably isn’t a great investment either. Here, we see WeWork continues to bang, bang, bang its way down to bankruptcy.

Finally, the poster child for what I dubbed the ABC stocks (Accidental Beneficiaries of Covid), Zoom. Talk about being in the right place at the right time. Talk about a one-hit wonder. Talk about a company with an incredibly bleak future. It’s all right here.

Times change. Most of the time, companies don’t. And, for those who don’t, the world passes them by, and their stocks are left to evaporate like the puddle from a water fountain in the midday sun.