We are going to do a variation on Fun Friday today. We are going to discuss the near future of the public stock markets, particularly the NASDAQ, where so many of the tech stocks trade.
Here’s a chart of the NASDAQ over the past six years.
What you see is a big run upwards since the last downturn (and the election of Obama). He’s been great for the stock markets. If you had bought the NASDAQ on his inauguration on Jan 20th, 2009, you’d have tripled your money in six years. A 3x in 6 years is a 20% compound annual return. Whatever you might think of the President, he surely has been great for wall street.
But I am not really interested in the rear view mirror. What I am curious about is when this bull market will end.
I’ve posited on this blog that rising interest rates will eventually suck the wind out of our sails and bring stocks and valuations back to earth. But we could get a break before that happens. Ebola could start spreading in the US, ISIS could take all of Iraq and Syria, Putin could take the Ukraine and then start thinking about the Baltics. Or something else could happen.
We could do this via the comments section, and I am sure we will discuss this there, but I’ve created a poll so that we can easily see where the sentiment of the AVC readership is on this issue. So please vote away and add any color you’d like in the comments.
