but picking winners right now is fish in a barrel. I can't make money shorting or buying puts. I more of a stop loss guy, eg ready to be wrong and bail out before the real damage starts. Stop loss saved me in late February. Bought it all back in late April. I recommend stop loss for anyone who is not concerned about a tax hit from selling.
"Buy at the bottom" is impossible because no one can call the bottom. After a retest is generally good. V-shapes seem to be the new mode. March 2020 changed everything. Confirmed that the Fed would rather act early than let the markets fall. They printed a whole lot of money and, for better or worse, they will do it again. New Fed chief in April of 2026 is expected to be dove-ish in the extreme, will juice the markets and the money supply, further eroding the USD. Cash is down 11% YTD vs. QQQ up 22%. We think of cash as safe but further erosion seems guaranteed.
AI is chips, software, data centers and energy. All of which have value outside of AI. This is different from the dynamics of the dot com bubble where pets.com and others had no other revenue or value before or outside of internet sales. The internet, as most people knew it (AOL via dial up), was only 6 years old at that point. People, including experienced and institutional investors, did not understand it very well but they FOMO'd into that bubble. The infamous AOL + Time Warner merger in January 2000 felt four years too late. It echoed the desperation of AOL buying Netscape in November of 1998. I'm not seeing that dynamic now -- not seeing legacy companies buying emerging competitors to stave off doom... Except for Adobe trying to buy Figma (FIG) in 2022.
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