Episode Transcript
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Mike (00:05):
Welcome to How to Retire
On Time, a show that answers
your retirement questions. We'rehere to move past that
oversimplified advice you'veheard hundreds of times.
Instead, we want to dive intothe nitty gritty because, well,
frankly, there there's no suchthing as a perfect investment
product or strategy. There arecertain things you just need to
know, so we wanna dive intothat. As always, text your
questions to (913) 363-1234.
And remember, this is notfinancial advice. This is just a
(00:27):
show. So do your research.David, what do we got today?
David (00:31):
Hey, Mike. Is the market
overvalued? Great question
because this is popping up
Mike (00:38):
in everyone's feed.
Market's overvalued. Oh, look at
this. Look at that. And it's alot of fear and trepidation now
in the market.
Overvalued is a subjective term.Before everyone gets upset with
me by saying that, let meexplain.
David (00:51):
Okay.
Mike (00:51):
Alright. David, what's the
appropriate price of eggs?
David (00:56):
I could give you an
answer and someone else could
give you a different answer.Right?
Mike (00:59):
What's your answer?
David (01:00):
Making your point. I
don't know. $2. For a dozen
eggs? Yeah.
Is that even possible somewhere?I don't know.
Mike (01:07):
Oh. So you probably won't
be buying eggs for a while if
you expect $2 to be the price ofeggs.
David (01:11):
Am am I living in the
nineteen eighties? Yeah. I think
so.
Mike (01:14):
Yeah. Maybe maybe it's $3.
David (01:16):
Okay.
Mike (01:16):
But what if the price of
eggs all rises to be $4, or $5
for a dozen, or whatever it wasin your local community when
there was the egg shortage?Prices have gone down a little
bit, but still. Yeah. You haveto ask yourself at some point,
it might be overvalued, but whatare you willing to do? Just not
buy eggs?
So is the market overvalued?That is a subjective turn on the
(01:41):
price you're willing to pay fora stock. And you have to ask
yourself how long do you wannahold the stock? Because it's the
price you bought it for versusthe price you want to sell it,
which might be in one year, fiveyears, or ten years. You see how
this kind of all works together?
David (01:56):
Okay. Yeah. So I'm buying
it at whatever, a dollar a
share, and I wanna sell it $5 ashare.
Mike (02:02):
Yeah. Yeah. That That'd be
a great return, by the way.
David (02:05):
Well, yeah, I cherry
picked that one.
Mike (02:07):
So now let's dive a little
bit deeper into this. Think
about it for a second. How doyou measure the price? Because
every day, it's a votingmachine. What do people think
the price is?
And it goes up and it goes down.It's just if more people wanna
buy, then more people wannasell, the price goes up. If more
people wanna sell, then wannabuy, the price goes down. So
(02:27):
over the short term, it's justit's emotions. Over the long
term, things tend to workthemselves out to an appropriate
price on average.
K? So you have to ask yourself,what's the legitimacy of the
company, their fundamentals, andthe price? So let let's break it
down a little bit differently.Okay? Okay.
What is a company? Gosh. That'ssuch a stupid existential
(02:50):
question.
David (02:51):
I guess like a company
Mike (02:52):
It's a business.
David (02:53):
An organization that is
providing a service or a
product. Right?
Mike (02:56):
And they wanna create
money. They want a profit.
David (02:58):
They wanna be a profit
maximizer.
Mike (03:00):
So when you are a company
and you have a profit, good.
Maybe they reinvest the profitor they pay out a dividend, but
there is a legitimate claim thatthis business is working. Now if
you have a business that neverturns a profit, forget about the
tech IPOs and all that for justa second. Think of a normal
business. Right.
Right. Normal businesssituation. They're turning a
(03:22):
profit. If they don't turn aprofit, at some point, they're
going to go bankrupt or close toit. Toys R Us, Bed Bath and
Beyond, what are the other onesthat have really struggled?
Oh. Bath and Beyond's notbankrupt, but it's really
struggled. It's struggled toturn a profit. Cracker Barrel's
been under a lot of scrutinylately. Their their shares
haven't done so well.
(03:43):
If you look at instead of theprice and the excitement of the
price and you look at the actualcompany, then you can start to
understand two things. One isprice earnings. It's a fancy way
of saying, what is the price ofthe stock versus the earnings of
the company? Is the companyprofitable or not? And then you
compare the two, and you canlook at the twelve months
behind, the twelve months ahead,the projections, whatever might
(04:05):
be, and make an assessment.
Is the earnings, theprofitability worth the price?
And you might think, like, a 16x price earnings ratio would be
an appropriate level, because ifyou buy into it, the profits
rationalize that price, and youkinda get your money back in
some way over a certain periodof time. If the price earnings
(04:27):
is, let's say, 600 x, that meansthe company has to grow, like,
double, double, double, double,double, double, double Right.
And over and over again withoutthe price changing.
David (04:37):
Yeah. Can you break that
down? What does that mean? Like,
16 x, 600 x?
Mike (04:41):
Let's say we're doing this
on the fly. Let's use chickens
as our analogy. We talked abouteggs. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. Alright. Let's say youbought a chicken Yeah. And
you're gonna get three eggsevery single week. What's the
price value of the chicken?
Well, you're gonna price thechicken based on the eggs and
how long you think the chickenwill live.
David (04:59):
Okay.
Mike (05:00):
That's kind of when you
would sell the chicken, I guess,
or whatever this analogy isgonna end up being. But what if
you buy a chicken, it's layingthree eggs, but you think it's
gonna do five eggs in the nearfuture? You might pay a little
bit more for the chicken becauseyou believe the chicken will
start laying five eggs. I don'tknow much about chickens. Maybe
the chicken can start doing liketwo eggs a day or whatever.
Again, I'm I've never owned achicken. I go to the store for
(05:23):
my eggs. But do you see how thiskind of plays out? You're
looking at the yield, the priceto buy the chicken versus the
yield or the eggs it's gonnaoffer you. Okay.
So when you look at a stock, theprice of the share of that
company versus the earnings ofthe company, the legitimacy of
the company, those correlate.And when the price earnings gets
(05:46):
high, the company is going tohave to kind of catch up with
these futuristic expectations.
David (05:53):
Okay.
Mike (05:54):
We're buying based on the
value we think it will have in
the future, not today.
David (05:59):
I get that. Yeah.
Mike (06:00):
That is what most people
would refer to as the overpriced
kind of calculation. Now youcould look at price booked or
the net assets of a company, howmuch debt there's other things
you could look at to kind ofcreate an opinion, but it is an
opinion because what isoverpriced? If you ask Benjamin
Graham, so Warren Buffett'smentor, it's maybe anything
above 20 PE. He would probablyview as overpriced. Warren
(06:24):
Buffett might be a little bitdifferent.
You got any hedge fund manager.They're all gonna have their own
opinion of what is overpricedand do their own assessment of
the stock and its future value.
David (06:33):
And so if the whole
market is overvalued, does that
mean all like, take the S and P500. Are all 500 companies
overvalued, or just some of themovervalued and it's skewing the
opinion? Or
Mike (06:43):
Yeah. So when you have
more bull market people, that's
a fancy way of saying peoplethat wanna buy into the market,
then people wanna sell theirshares. The prices run as in
they go up. The market right nowseems to be melting up.
Everyone's trying to buy.
Few people wanna sell, so theprice is just going high, high,
high. Okay? So that's oneproblem, because at some point,
(07:06):
we have to get back to realityof what is the business
profitability actually being.There are a few exceptions to
this. So quick story.
Amazon, about 2015, 2016, had avery high price earnings. This
is right when they got into datacenters, Amazon Web Services,
and so on, and people thoughtthis is incredible. They're
putting a ton of money into it.It's going to significantly
increase their revenue, so theywere willing to pay a high PE
(07:30):
value because they were like,yeah. We need storage.
The cloud is the next big thing.And so they felt that they would
rationalize the price because ofthe future earnings they
expected. So they're willing topay a high price earnings
amount, and it worked out.
David (07:46):
They were right.
Mike (07:47):
They were right.
David (07:48):
Okay.
Mike (07:48):
People that bought Amazon
at a higher price, it still
worked out for them becauseAmazon was able to deliver on
the expected, not their promise,but the expected returns that
analysts had for
David (07:58):
this. Okay.
Mike (07:59):
So today, you have to kind
of look at, does the market
rationalize its price, or is itovervalued because too many
people want to buy and notenough people wanted to sell?
When you print a lot of money,guess where it goes? It goes to
people's pockets. What do peopledo with it? They spend it.
At some point in thecirculation, the spending and
(08:20):
makes its way to the market. Andthen when it makes its way to
the market, you've got morepeople buying and selling, so
you melt up. You you'reincreasing the price of all
these different stocks. Sothere's something for anyone
that's really inquisitive, lookup the Schiller PE ratio. I've
heard of that.
Yeah. So doctor Schiller fromYale. I don't know if you won a
Nobel Prize for this or not. Ifhe didn't, he should. It's quite
(08:43):
profound.
But doctor Schiller figured outthat if you look at their price
earnings over a longer termperiod of time, and there's a
bunch of data points that gointo this, and you're accounting
for inflation, you can get amore accurate reading of the
price earnings or theprofitability versus its price
and the expectations. And it'sonly been higher once before to
(09:06):
my recollection based on today'sprice earnings or valuation of
is it overpriced or is it notoverpriced? That was February.
David (09:14):
Oh, okay.
Mike (09:15):
What happened in February?
You know, there's this thing
called the Internet that wasinvented, and everyone loved it.
And if it said .com, you mademoney until you didn't. Right.
So the argument that the marketis overvalued is a fair argument
because a lot of money has goneinto the market based on future
expectations.
The question is, can AI becausea lot of this overvaluation is
(09:39):
based on AI. Can AI deliver anincreased corporate
profitability or not? Or did weprice it wrong? Or do we have
not the right expectations? Oris the momentum not able to
sustain the growth of the marketlong enough for AI to deliver?
Look at .com for a second.Dotcom, great idea. We all use
(10:02):
the Internet today. Yeah. But itdidn't really deliver in 02/2001
or o two.
It kind of took a few more yearsfor us to figure out how to
really use it. What if it takesanother five, seven years for us
to really figure out how toimplement AI into the corporate
world for profitability andgenuine effectiveness. It's nice
to ask ChatGPT or Croc orwhoever. Yeah. Claude.
(10:24):
Yeah. It's nice to ask themquestions. It's nice to treat
them as a fancier Google. Yeah.Right.
But I only know, like, a coupleof people that actually have
taken their standard operationsand now has AI doing it. A lot
of people are struggling tofigure out how to do that. So
there's a lot of questions here.Is the market overvalued? That's
a fair argument.
(10:45):
But does that mean it's going tohave a significant correction?
David (10:49):
No one really knows?
Mike (10:50):
No one could tell you.
It's just impossible to know
because either it's going tosatisfy the expectations or it's
not. But here's just kind of mymy parting words on this.
Alright. At some point, ifeveryone wants to buy and no one
wants to sell, you have notransactions.
If there's no transactions,you're not growing the price
(11:12):
anymore, so it starts to slowdown. And if it starts to slow
down, then people might getscared. And then you might get
more sellers than buyers, andthen the price starts to go
down. That's kind of how amarket top happens is when
everyone's a bull, everyone'sbuying, and there's no one to
buy from, it starts to tip thewrong way, and then people
(11:34):
panic.
David (11:34):
This is where the market
gets emotional. Is that what
we're saying? Yeah. We'rereacting to why is this slowing
down?
Mike (11:39):
Yeah. So over a ten year
period of time, I think the
market is efficient. But from ayear to year basis, I do not
think it's efficient. I thinkit's more emotional. Mind your
stocks.
Mind your bids. Mind yourpurchases. Mind your investment
decisions. Follow systems, notsentiment. Know how you price
(12:00):
something and what your standardis.
Understand what price are youwilling to pay for something,
and what price or price earningsare you willing to sell
something and move on. These arereally important discussions to
have with yourself, with youradviser, with your spouse, with
whoever's involved in yourinvestment making decisions, so
that you can follow the systemand not sentiment or your
(12:23):
emotions. That's all the timewe've got for the show today. If
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(12:43):
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