You Can Read Everything You Believe on The Internet...What a Time to Be Alive!

Never has there been a more true statement about the state of the internet.

I do not remember who blurted what is now the title of this post as I skimmed through Twitter but I laughed.

I have hit that age where I have to stop by the front desk of my hotel each night because I forget what room I am in. A friend suggested I just take a photo of my room which is genius, until I start forgetting that I took the photo…

I spent the last few days in San Francisco and it was intense. So many smart people and a blur of me pitching and getting pitched.

I am headed back home now and going to lock myself down for the next 10 days to prepare content for Stocktoberfest SIX in New York (our first), on March 30th. It is such an interesting time in the markets and fintech which is where I live. Some of the topics I will be discussing with our wicked smart lineup of speakers include:

The Snapchat IPO is already yesterday’s news. As I mentioned on Bloomberg TV a few weeks ago – $40 billion is the new $400 million. Snapchat by any measure that Wall Street has ever made up is overvalued.

Bitcoin is old news and Ethereum is the shit?

In a world of Snapchat at $40 billion and the planets of Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google …it is hard to build financial models but does that mean we should stop?

Wall Street gave up on research long ago and is all in on machines, ETF’s, derivatives. Bloomberg just reported that fund managers will be cutting another $300 million on external research (nobody needs research when prices just go up).

In an era of the ‘last mile’ and the ‘last minute’ it might be data, not land or money that is the most important asset. At the same time…we are in an AI bubble.

Voice is the new Keyboard.

Three years ago, 27 percent of Morgan Stanley’s assets were fee based. Today it is 40 percent.

Staying private is not a fad. The US tech sector boasted 371 IPO’s in 1999 and in 2016 there were 20. The IPO market will not ever be cool again, but it is not dead. WeWork, Dropbox, Palamtir, Airbnb and UBER could file at any time.

Between incubator/accelerator Techstars, YCombinator and 500 Startups – over 3,000 startups have been funded in the last 10 years.

Banks are hard to kill and stronger than ever despite the billions raised to disrupt them.

Unrelated to everything, but hey this is my blog and I think it’s a great business opportunity and am an investor…there is a Salesforce of pot. Thank god.

Bill Gross just blogged this on the Janus website… ‘Our highly leveraged financial system is like a truckload of nitro glycerin on a bumpy road’. I don’t think he’s bullish. Thank god for him that a Salesforce of pot is here. His grumpiness may also be related to the fact that over the last five years the annualized returns for his beloved bonds is ZILCH.

The Fed has raised interest rates three times and the US Treasury yield closed above 1 % for the first time since November 2008.

Most importantly, as always and in the face of a President that has never read a book, it is easier to be an optimist. I have no idea what’s next for the markets, but my goal is to help people embrace and better understand, enjoy and profit from them.