Good morning.

The S&P is close to hitting an intraday record as tech enthusiasm returned … at least for the day.

One catalyst has been Netflix … as the company reported sharp subscriber growth … and responded by taking capitalism by the horns and raising its price. I don’t know about your viewing habits, but I have become a bit addicted … as Netflix is the first “app” I go to when I turn on my television at night. There are just so many shows … and so many good ones.

So I will pay more without complaint.  And Netflix knows it.

Is the market overbought?  It depends on whom you ask. Jamie Dimon came out with a comment claiming the U.S. market is “kind of inflated” … but that is a far cry from Alan Greenspan’s famous statement in 1996 characterizing the market as suffering from “irrational exuberance.”

Still, there are concerns over stocks being overvalued.

Factset has a chart out showing the U.S. market … using many popular metrics … as being quite lofty … while China, the UK and Emerging Markets give the appearance of being areas into which some diversification might be in order (my observation) … especially with Bloomberg scaring us by showing a “valuation peak” higher than its been in … oh … around 125 years or so!

One of the interesting observations of the morning is from Banc of America Global which looked at the number of companies actually outperforming the S&P 500 in 2024 … and the result (29%) was one of the lowest levels since 1990.

Okay, I don’t know what all this means … I am just throwing out data seen this morning.

My own issue is that sometimes I’ve looked at stocks … sold when they went up … and kicked myself when they continued to rise much further.  Other times, I’ve had stocks go down … held on, expecting a return to greatness … and kicked myself again (with a high degree of sadness) as the price continued to plummet … as I refused to believe I could possibly be wrong.

In other words, I have no clue as to how a stock might perform based on price movement alone.

Alas … I am a typical investor … which is what makes finding and paying attention to good analysts so valuable.  If only I would listen to myself.

That about wraps it up for today.

As usual, I included a couple of articles on health.

My doctor advised me to cut down on eating bread.  Wanting to follow his advice, I immediately switched to pretzels …

… as I have convinced myself that pretzels are knot bread.

Have a great day,

Joseph G. Witthohn, CFA

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