Displaying items by tag: faamg

(New York)

Wondering where the market is headed? (so is everyone!) Well, Goldman Sachs put out a pretty unequivocal opinion about it today. Despite the market being at all-time highs when the country is in a recession and unemployment massive, the bank says that the S&P 500 will rise another 7% to close out the year. The only damper in the bank’s forecast is the election. Goldman says it is assuming a Democratic victory, and that could cause higher taxes that could dent the market a bit. GS also says Treasury yields will fall to 1.1% by the end of the year.

FINSUM: So we have two big competing feelings here. On the one hand, with the Fed so strongly in support of markets (and another fiscal stimulus likely), it seems like it could be smooth sailing. On the other hand, 51% of the entire market’s gain since the bottom in March has come from five stocks. On the whole, we think gains are more likely than losses.

(Seattle)

For the last week, Microsoft has been in a delicate dance to try to acquire the hugely popular social media app TikTok. President Trump has been adamant that it needs to be bought by US interests or he may ban the app. Last week, Microsoft said it was trying to acquire the company, but then swiftly abandoned the efforts because Trump said he would block the deal. Now, Microsoft says that Satya Nadella and Trump have spoken and gotten on the same page and that the deal is back on. Wedbush thinks the deal could be transformational for Microsoft as it would put them in direct competition with Facebook, Alphabet etc, and give them a huge social media prize while those competitors remain mired in major regulatory scrutiny.

FINSUM: TikTok already has 100 million users in the US. We think if this goes through it could end up being a major boost to Microsoft. Perhaps not unlike Facebook’s acquisition of Instagram.

(San Francisco)

No matter how good you may feel about stock indexes being back near all-time highs, one fact cannot be ignored: the market seems to be heavily overweight on the five largest tech stocks— Microsoft, Facebook, Google, Apple, and Amazon (the new acronym, named by Goldman is FAAMG). These stocks have been powering the market, but the whole situation feels like past peaks where their outperformance could not go on forever. Concentration in the S&P 500 is now at its highest in decades, with those five names accounting for 22% of the total capitalization, up from just 16% a year ago. According to Barron’s “Simple arithmetic limits the continued outperformance of the biggest names, the Goldman team observes, because many portfolio managers have 5% limits on holdings of any given stock. The strategists’ analysis shows that the average large-cap mutual fund already has a 5% position in Microsoft and about 4% positions in the other big four names.”.

FINSUM: It seems these stocks are reaching their institutional allocation limits, which mans retail needs to power them higher. The whole situation feels ripe for a correction.