Tech's Top Seven Companies Added $3.4 Trillion in Value in 2020 (cnbc.com) 60
Tech's biggest companies just wrapped up a huge year. From a report: The seven most valuable U.S. technology companies -- Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet, Facebook, Tesla and Nvidia -- picked up a combined $3.4 trillion in market cap in 2020, powering through a global pandemic and broader economic crisis. Between continued optimism over iPhone sales, Microsoft's growing Teams collaboration product, Amazon's ongoing control of e-commerce and the strength of Google and Facebook's online ad duopoly, Big Tech was neither slowed by Covid-19 nor the rising number of investigations into its dominance. Tesla's wild rally served as the biggest surprise. The stock climbed almost ninefold this year, lifting the electric car maker's market cap from $76 billion at the beginning of the year to $669 billion at Thursday's close. Despite initial factory closures due to the pandemic, Tesla bounced back to deliver a record number of vehicles in the third quarter.
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Decided to get into stock trading just before the pandemic and Trump ruined America. Made alot of mistakes, but also some good decisions, especially getting into Tesla..
Anyway all I can say is that the stock market is fucking insane... but it seems to be a pretty good way of making money.
Wouldn't be bad to double my investment every year.. doesn't take long to get to millions of dollars at a 100% yearly return.
Buy more tulips ! They can't ever go down.
Next year Tesla will be up 10x again to ~6 Trillion...
* Not a gaurantee.
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Tesla's valuation is mostly down to the claims that they are close to having "full self driving" working and will launch a robotaxi service. Those claims are false, they are many years away, and may never get there.
Market cap is a delusion already (Score:2)
The entire idea of creating "value" based on imaginary stock prices. Hilarious. Exactly where did all those trillions come from?
Easy come, easy go. Right now the mindless computers "think" Tesla shares must have a high price.
Underlying reality is that certain governments are flooding the stock market with borrowed money because one of their favorite delusions is that keeping the share prices high means the economy is okay. But mostly because they and their campaign donors own lots of shares. How long can th
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Exactly where did all those trillions come from?
The fed. They have been stuffing Wall Street like a goose for over 15 months, roughly a trillion every month.
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Public masturbation of 1673220 (Score:2)
Z^-1
you are offending and degrading Slashdot (Score:1)
Shame on you!
Public masturbation of 1673220 (Score:2)
Z^-2
Too much inequality is bad (Score:3, Insightful)
This slightly tautological claim should be a warning to everyone, and last year brought us a shitload of more inequality.
Of course one cannot object to that because that would mean you're a communist and only communists can oppose the true freedom of oligarchy.
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Some people have had a very good pandemic. For most of us it has sucked though.
It's a shame Biden can't be relied on to do much about it.
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I would simply ask: what do the statistics say. What does the GINI coefficient say. Biden will only make it worse but it will also get worse all by itself.
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I France things were improving so much they had to elect a banker to lead the country.
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That is your indoctrination speaking. Do you think you are contradicting something? How unequal do things have to get before you start questioning whether the rich and the poor are simply getting what they deserve? You're fine with claiming oligarchy is freedom and the alternative is communism?
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The value of a company is basically how much people want ownership of it. Unless the owners sell shares, they aren't able to live large with that money. Do you think Zuckerberg wants to sell his shares? Also, if the biggest shareholders did try to sell a large amount of their shares it would probably cause a panic and the stock price will drop like a rock.
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Mod parent up.
401k (Score:2)
If you've got retirement investments, they are probably dependent on these stocks.
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Even if you can, there is no guarantee you will be able buy same amount of milk, bread and eggs when you sell 1 share in your retirement that you can buy today.
Value? (Score:2)
No, really, "value"?
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People often confuse real value and market cap.
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People often confuse real value and market cap.
Goes well with a rather inexplicable stock market financially backing that confusion.
Tends to happen when Greed is never introduced to Regulation at the finance party.
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Every once in a while, the confusion clears, the stock market collapses, and a lot of people lose a lot of money. Then the cycle starts anew, fueled by greed, corruption, and naivete.
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Every once in a while, the confusion clears, the stock market collapses, and a lot of people lose a lot of money. Then the cycle starts anew, fueled by greed, corruption, and naivete.
Every once in a while in the 21st Century, we find yet another mega-corp growing beyond reproach and earning their Too Big To Fail status. There should have been no financial confusion when a global pandemic set in, shuttering entire industries. Instead we find a stock market that in the end, barely noticed a damn thing.
Because of this and other corrupt financial wizardry, I doubt we'll actually ever see another stock market collapse, much less a crash (unless it is done on purpose)
Its Cyberpunk for Real (Score:3)
Re: Its Cyberpunk for Real (Score:2)
Seconded. Any sufficietly advanced fucked-upness is indistinguishable from made-up overexaggerstions.
This is actually a key trick in organized child abuse.
If you ever wondered where those stories about ridiculous cults with nonsenical rituals and silly costumes come from... This is deliberate, so nobody will belive your stories.
("What? An eagle with a face of daddy butbin red jello raped you in a room made of marshmallows? Yeah right, Timmy! Stop saying bad things about daddy!")
And that's a real first-world
Value increased compared to what? (Score:2)
More precisely, the market value of those tech companies increased relative to the value of the dollar. Does that mean the value of those companies went up or does it mean that the value of a dollar went down? How would the analysis change if the value of those companies was measured in ounces of gold or pounds of rice or soybeans instead of dollars? How has the value of those tech companies changed relative to the price of a median US home?
Survey: Raise your hand if you believe that the official US g
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Dividends on the other hand, is your share of the cash your investment produced. We used to value the companies by their dividends.
Then we changed law to tax money earned by labor, blood, sweat and toil, including white collar jobs, the dividends and interest more, a lot more than capital gains. 33% for wages, dividends an
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Yet:
Inflation alone would not cause that. It is also monopolization.
War on retirees and fixed income continues ... (Score:5, Insightful)
The income stream for the retirees, especially to the responsible ones who planned and saved for retirement, has been dwindling.
All the defined benefit plans, pension plans are gone. Instead we have defined contribution plans, like 401Ks and Roths where you need to save it on your own, there is no requirement for the employers to contribute anything to the provident funds.
The companies that actually had funded their pension funds were raided by Wall Street, claimed the pension funds have been over funded using sham accounting based on a year or two of boom times, and the money was taken out from retirees to give out size bonuses to the Criminal Executive Officers and his minions.
The responsible retirees who saved, and were planning to live on interest were attacked first. The interest rate has been kept low, ostensibly to keep the economy going, but it has devastated people on fixed income. People were forced to move to equities. In 1990s the "ideal asset allocation" for retirees was 70% bond, 30% stock. Now that allocation would not produce sufficient income. Now a days it is 70% stock and 30% bond even in retirement.
The dividend distribution is also shrinking. It was routine to get 3% dividend from SP500 companies. Widows and orphans stock of utilities, gas companies, and banks paid out incredible 5% dividends easily. Now the SP500 dividend has fallen to less than 1.5%.
The culprit? These tech giants with outsize valuation are sucking in the capital and savings at enormous rates. The world capital market is sloshing with 4 to 5 trillion dollars with nothing worthwhile to invest.
Selling a certain dollar amount of investments every month to fund retirement is the worst thing that can happen to retirees. Remember the virtues of dollar cost averaging drilled into you as part of savings and building the nest egg? Well, for every purchase you made in $CA there was a counter party who sold. If you do $CA in retirement, selling your portfolio, the buyer is doing $CA.
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Re:War on retirees and fixed income continues ... (Score:4, Insightful)
The reason that you cannot save enough in your defined contribution plan is because you are over taxed on labor income. You paid 20 something percent taxes, or more, on the income you used to buy the stock. Then it wasn't until retirement that you could realize a tax break on your gains and end up at 15% or less in taxes, per your plan. While the Criminal Executive Officer was paid $1 a year plus stock, which he held before selling later to keep the tax rate down. The CEO got to keep a larger percentage of his larger pay package over his entire career, while those of us compensated in cash got screwed. Reaganomics is a trickle-up system if there ever was one. We are all getting raped financially by those at the top. Worse, wages have been flat for the last 50 years. The system is tilted against you. To fix inequality we need a fair tax system. Redistributing wealth requires a fair playing field.
Re:War on retirees and fixed income continues ... (Score:5, Insightful)
While the Criminal Executive Officer, his cohorts, the trust fund babies etc pay 20% tax, if they really want to. Once you have enough, there is this whole industry that shuffles the investment through shell companies in tiny islands and you pay no tax.
Thomas Picketty showed it using the language economists understand, once the return on capital out paces the return on labor, inheritance will dominate the wealth distribution and we will have super rich class and serfs with nothing in between.
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Then Wall Street started using sham math to steal the funds from the retirees. A couple of good boom years, they show the company has "over funded the pensions" and draw out the money and give themselves huge bonuses.
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USA is a country of laws, and contracts, and law enforcement and strong enforcement of contracts. Correction. Make it used to be instead of is. Truth in advertising, truth in labeling, disclosure requirements, prospectus in securities, disclosure of conflicts of interes
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We should avoid insisting what is good for you should be good and must for everyone else. Not all of America is in this situation of having paid highest social security tax band for 40 quarters. Not all of America have the life skill to manage careful trading through retirement years
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So sell the damn shares and use the cash you generate. What's the fucking problem, you won't be able to be buried in a casket made of Apple shares whose passive income won't allow you to keep up your standard of living after you no longer work? Your nest egg should let you maintain that standard for a certain amount of time as you draw it down.
Meanwhile, after the 2008 and 2020 c
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Every trade you made buying on $CA has a counter party who realized lower average revenue from the trade. In retirement if you are forced to sell fixed dollar amount of shares to keep a roof over your head, you will find your nest egg will vanish faster than you planned. Volatili
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Not using the interest payouts to buy more principal is semantically equivalent to slowly selling off deflationary asset - provided that we consider bubble rally on it to continue ad-nausea (which is assumption about as shaky that dividends would), no?
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So that is where all the money the fed printed (Score:2)
Not in my book. (Score:2)
They mostly added in damage!
Oh, you've been listening to the gamblers again?
("Buy this stock from me! It is very valuable! I swearz!")
Totally bogus numbers, all from QE (Score:3, Insightful)
The fed is stuffing Wall Street, causing hyper inflation. Nothing is real up there anymore. Crash is coming soon. We need another crisis after the virus dies down
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It's already happening in the financial markets. That's why we are hearing about these ridiculous trillion dollar "valuations".
These Tech stocks are mostly just overvalued
Yes, exactly, and not just tech, it's all of Wall Street. It is overvalued because it is engorged with all that fed funny money.
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