 It is kind of a good time to talk about finance, meme stocks, remember meme stocks, financial markets stocks, bonds, Fed and inflation because after all it is about a year since meme stocks just went berserk and crazy and since the what was it the fanboys over at Reddit thought they would take down a bunch of Wall Street institutions and bring down hedge funds and make a fortune and it didn't matter the companies made money or didn't make money as long as they I don't know as long as the meme guys bought them everything was good so it's a good time to evaluate what has happened was I right or were they right I eat with the people promoting GameStop and AMC and Affirm Holdings and a bunch of others in Virginia Galactic a bunch of others of these that made up the meme stock index I guess did they land up being right or not so we can look a little bit all this out of Wall Street bets coming out of Reddit so about a year ago this started I did a few shows on it I predicted that this would end badly and it's a good time to evaluate whether that actually has happened and it's amazing the extent to which there was hype also remember it wasn't just about making money it was about a revolution it was about taking down the man it was about destroying Wall Street I remember tweeting with some anti-establishment libertarians who thought yes this is going to bring down the system this is going to bring down big finance going to bring down Wall Street and this was exciting and you know they were enthralled with the nihilism of it all. Of the of the shattering and the destruction of everything of everything around us so yeah were they right did they win the big tech self-destruct was Wall Street eviscerated by the memesters or did they survive meme stocks stocks that were you know promoted as memes that were promoted on Reddit they were promoted on Wall Street bets they came to be known as Street but stocks there's actually an index of meme stocks that you can find and right it's just a it's just a question of how they were promoted how they were hyped these are stocks that late 2020 and early 2021 were hyped and small investors poured into them if you remember they used Robin Hood the broker Robin Hood then became one of the meme stocks when it went public and everybody just just rushed into it drove the price into the stratosphere and while some of us were saying get out sell sell now. Many of the people held on because they were believers and they they were they were in it to bring down the man. Well we can see how those stocks have done since then so meme stocks are hyped stocks stocks of companies that are being hyped and this was a big phenomena a big event at the exactly a year ago in January of last year. So I looked in investors this daily looked at the 25 largest meme stocks and looks how they've done from January 1 2021 so beginning of last year through basically today right through basically today how they done. Well the 25 meme stocks 25 meme stocks have over the last almost 13 months they've gone down 27% since the start of last year. Now it could be that if you go into 2020 before the first spike in meme stocks they're still up but from the beginning of January 1 2021 meme stocks are down 27%. Now if you had bought if you had bought just the S&P 500 like a diversified set of stocks right then that portfolio would be up more than 20%. The difference between down 27% and up 20% is huge huge a dollar invested in a in in a portfolio that's down 27% would be worth 73 cents a dollar invested in the S&P 500 would be worth more than $1.2 because there's also being dividends invested. So it would be worth $1.2 $1 and if you multiply that by 1000 that's a lot of money starts being significant money the difference starts being super significant. We can talk about proper investing. We can talk about sound investing rules and how to invest your money. Following and running and chasing meme stocks or any stocks is not the way to do it not the way to do it. Meme stocks being down right now is just one of many. We're seeing generally a dramatic increase in volatility in the stock market. We're seeing a lot of stock prices go down the NASDAQ which is kind of one of the exchanges the exchanges that primarily has or where most of the tech companies are listed. The NASDAQ is down this year over 13% it's down over 17% from its high the S&P 500 which is the broadest index is down 8.7% since the beginning of the year Tesla by the way just if you're curious Tesla is down 24% from its high so it's lost a quarter of its value from its high. And bitcoin bitcoin crypto crypto is down 27% this month in January and crypto is down more than 50% from its high so as I suggested over and over again over the last year a lot of these stocks were let's say expensive. Maybe bubbly but certainly expensive by the way the index of cryptos CMC 200 lots of indexes is just one of them is down 28.5% for the for the month year and I think well over 60% from its high so if you'd invested in bitcoin at the wrong time you'd have lost 50% of your money. Of course if you'd invested a long long time ago you've made a fortune in crypto thousands of percent in investing particularly in speculating contrast with investing. Timing is everything in investing it's not in speculating timing is everything you could be lucky and buy bitcoin at the right time and even though it's down 50% still be up huge. You could be unlucky and have bought bitcoin at the wrong time and now be out 50% of your money. Remember every time there's a transaction somebody's buying somebody's selling somebody bought bitcoin when it was at its peak somebody bought the Nasdaq at its peak they're down 17% or in the case of bitcoin 50%. But that's speculating investing and certainly if you're investing as part of a saving plan saving strategy. And investing does not depend or should not depend significantly on timing it's something you do regularly it's something you do steadily it's something you do for the long run. And it's not a place where you put all your eggs in one basket or in three baskets but where you diversify heavily. The Nasdaq is as we said the tech heavy index it's down 13% but I remember the Nasdaq being down over 50% 60% in you know after the dot-com bubble in 2000 to 2000 2001 the Nasdaq went down 60%. And it did not recover to its form of valuation you did not make your money back for 10 years basically until after the financial crisis. So people today think people always think oh it goes down you buy in the dip and it immediately come up. Well how do you know the dip is the end. How do you know the dip is the bottom. How do you know you don't buy in the dip when it goes down 10% and it's going to go down another 20%. How do you know when it's going to recover. How much it's going to recover. There are way way way too many amateur investors out there who don't really know what they're doing. Who have no clue what they're doing. Who play the stock market as if it as if it's a casino and as a consequence the house always wins. They suffer the consequences. I mean this meme stock is a good example. Who do you think has done better over the last year. The people who invested in meme stocks or the great big evil financial institution called Citadel that they were out to get and they were committed to destroying. Well Citadel has done amazing. Citadel has done amazing. Meme stock as we've seen lost a lot of money. Indeed a lot of NASDAQ stocks a lot of technology stocks have taken a beating. Moderna our my you know my vaccine of choice. Landon thank you. Appreciate it. My vaccine of choice Moderna is down 42% just since January 1st 42% you've lost 42% of your money. Now it's only $58 from the high from its peak. Somebody bought at the peak. It's down 70%. This is Moderna. Moderna couldn't do any wrong. But as it's clear that COVID is going away. Hopefully and that the vaccine is not very effective against army crown anyway. And that it's not going to be as easy to develop vaccines for all these other treatments they have in mind that the FDA is not going to be as easy on them as they would COVID. They're not going to give them emergency authorization. It's going to be long slug process. It's great. There's a huge amount of upside. But Moderna was priced as if it could do no wrong as if the world was laid out before it that it would print make huge quantities of money and now it's clear that that is not happening and reality is actually setting in and it's down a lot. Moderna has no other product except mRNA and it has no other product that generates revenue except for the COVID vaccine. So any profit that they get from the COVID vaccine is being poured in to creating other vaccines and other products mRNA products. So it's compared to Pfizer which is a big diversified company and has multiple sources of revenue. Moderna has just one and that source of revenue is probably going away. Netflix. Netflix. We all love Netflix. We all use Netflix. Netflix is a great company. But if you bought Netflix at the end of last year you were down 40 percent. And this just proves that there's a big difference between a good company and a good investment. If a good company is a good company but everybody knows it's a good company and everybody's pricing it as if it's the greatest company ever then you're not going to make particularly good returns. So Netflix has done 48 percent for its peak almost 50 percent and 39 percent just from the beginning of this year. Etsy. You know Etsy where you buy and sell outs and crafts down 50 55 percent from its peak 36 percent and you can go on and on. I mean technology in particular is just being crushed by what is going on. AMC one of those meme stocks down 50 percent GameStop just this is just the beginning of the month down 43 percent Rivian member Rivian. They make or they don't make yet. They haven't made anything but they're supposed to make electric trucks. They're down 40 percent. So stock market is down a lot. Now the index is not down that much because a lot of stocks are holding up. But technology particularly not big tech has been crushed really being crushed. It's you know there are a lot of tech investors people who invested huge amounts of money in Netflix and concentrated the investments in Tesla and other companies and maybe invested more recently didn't invest way back when he was cheap. They've lost a lot of money a lot of money over the last few weeks. Thank you for listening or watching the Iran book show. If you'd like to support the show we make it as easy as possible for you to trade with me. You get value from listening. You get value from watching. Show your appreciation. 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