Monday, August 1, 2022

If You Thought Market Leadership Was Concentrated In 1999....

That market was powered by the Nasdaq 100 and when those stocks cracked the entire equity universe collapsed. The subsequent decline:

On Friday March 10, 2000 the Nasdaq closed at 5048.62, it's all-time high.
On the following Monday the Naz was down 141 points. Tuesday, 200.
The index had begun a 30-month decline to it's September 24, 2002 intra-day low of 1,169.04,
down 77%.

If interested see December 2021's "Lest we forget, over five trading days in April 2000 the Nasdaq dropped 25%" for more detail.

This year, at least in terms of earnings, we are down to three stocks.

And it is not just those corporations but divisions within those corporations that are powering the entire edifice.

From TechCrunch, July 28:

The biggest story from Big Tech earnings is the sheer growth power of public cloud

When the Big 3 cloud infrastructure vendors – Amazon, Microsoft and Google – reported their earnings this week, it was clear that the cloud is helping keep their overall numbers up. But perhaps what was most surprising was that after years of sitting at 33% market share, AWS was up a tick to 34% in the second quarter, according to numbers from Synergy Research....

....MUCH MORE

In engineering it is known as a Single point of failure. And as the all-knowing one (Wikipedia) puts it:

A single point of failure (SPOF) is a part of a system that, if it fails, will stop the entire system from working.[1] SPOFs are undesirable in any system with a goal of high availability or reliability, be it a business practice, software application, or other industrial system....

If the cloud stumbles, the big 3 companies stumble, meaning the Nasdaq 100 goes, meaning the broader Nasdaq fails, meaning the S&P 500 is kaput meaning...

So let's hope the cloud keeps working. Because if it doesn't we'll be singing my favorite song: "Happy Anniversary Mr. Market: Ten Years Ago Today..."