Bleeding

The Nasdaq is down almost 15% from its labor day highs.

Apple is down almost 25% in the last two months.

Facebook is down about 40% since July.

Bitcoin is down about 80% from its highs last December.

Ethereum is down about 90% from its highs in January.

All of those are examples of bleeding, if you happen to own any of them.

So what do you do?

Close out your position?

Buy the dip?

Sit on your hands?

It all depends on your fundamental views on these various investments.

Here are mine.

Apple is the easiest one for me. They aren’t going anywhere, although growth is slowing as they are close to saturating the high end of the mobile phone market. It will be a value stock at $120/share. If it gets there, load up on it.

Facebook is harder. They own some incredible assets like Instagram but the outlook there is cloudier given likely regulation and it won’t be a value stock for another $100 of losses. 

The Nasdaq is even harder. Are we in a bear market now? Or just a painful correction? A bull market that is almost ten years old feels long in the tooth and I can see the arguments for a bear market more clearly than a correction.

Bitcoin will form a bottom at some point and is a buy when it does. But where is that bottom? Probably not $4500.

Ethereum feels like the easiest one to make a bull case for right now. It is hated. Everyone has lost their shirt on it by now. Nobody other than developers want to know about it. It feels like time to start nibbling on it but not loading up on it.

But the thing to understand more broadly about what is going on right now is that big sophisticated investors are reducing their risk exposure across all asset classes and have been doing that for some time. The pace of the “risk off” trade is accelerating. Which means a flight to safety is going on. And when that is happening, you really need conviction to be buying.