Some basic lessons for new investors to live by:
1/ Ignore the crowd. You make money by going against the consensus.
2/ Always pick stocks where you feel you have a research edge.
3/ You rarely go wrong investing in the company with the best product.
4/ Don’t listen to management. They are paid to be bullish.
5/ Study competitors, suppliers, and customer behavior. Be a product junkie.
6/ Have in your mind what you think a stock is worth, which is different from price.
7/ Be able to articulate in one sentence why you own a stock.
8/ Develop specific downside scenarios that would cause you to sell the stock.
9/ The highest quality of growth is unit growth, then pricing, then margin expansion, then cash reinvestment.
10/ Be wary of companies that grow by buying other companies.
11/ Sell discipline is selling a stock once it exceeds your price target, or if your investment thesis changes.
12/ Short stocks that have bad businesses, and not because they trade at high P/Es.
13/ Two big value creators are brand extension and TAM expansion stories.
14/ High P/Es are a function of high future growth rates, and not the industry.
15/ When investing in growth stocks always look for a controversy (“fight”).
16/ Buy stocks that can leverage key secular megatrends, and avoid those that will be hurt by them.
17/ Always consider cannibalization of existing products when sizing up new product opportunities.
18/ Be wary of “hockey stick” sales forecasts absent new products or expansion to new distribution channels.
19/ Stock buybacks are accretive if the E/P ratio exceeds the after tax cost of debt or return on cash.
20/ Price cuts rarely add value since they often create a race to the bottom.
21/ Stocks are cheap if price is less than the present value of future cash flows. A high P/E does not make a stock expensive.
U.S. stocks rebounded Thursday as traders bought the dip after a swift end to U.S. strikes on Iran raised hopes for reopening the Strait of Hormuz. Oil and 10-year treasury yields fell while tech shares rose even as investors pivoted to expectations of interest rates remaining higher for longer to combat inflation. Massive AI-related IPOs have sparked dot-com bubble comparisons, yet strong 2026 S&P earnings growth (+22% YoY to $340 EPS) supports new record highs as Middle East tensions ease. I remain cautious on TSLA due to falling earnings estimates, rising autonomous competition, and a stretched valuation.. For greater detail, please see my pre-market summary for Subscribers only.
$TSLA (-2.8%) behaving about as well as other long-duration NDX tech stocks today ($NVDA -2.4%, $MRVL -2.6%, NDX -1.0%) in this higher-for-longer interest rate environment. I believe many retail investors buying $SPCX this week will lighten up on their TSLA positions to fund their SPCX shares. I continue to believe that lead bankers $GS and $MS will engineer a Day 1 pop for SPCX IPO investors, given huge potential paydays from Anthropic and OpenAI in the months ahead. That said, I continue to view SPCX as richly priced at 300x 2025 EV/EBITDA and 120x expected 2026 EV/EBITDA assuming a $1.8 trillion market cap ($135/share) and 2026 EBITDA of $15 billion, vs 35-40% expected long-term EBITDA growth (3-3.5x PEG), and would wait for the stock to come back to earth post-IPO before buying shares post-IPO.
May Core CPI came in lower than expected (+0.2% MoM vs +0.3%E MoM), which should help market sentiment going into tomorrow’s SPCX IPO pricing. Headlines making a big deal about the 4.2% CPI YoY, (“the fastest pace in more than three years”) but it’s the marginal core data (ex-food and energy) that matters. Energy accounted for half the YoY increase.