[FredPret]

> don’t follow any rationality anymore

Anymore? When have markets ever been rational? Markets only line up with reality over the long term. You can point to any instant, and even any decade in time, and point major inaccuracies in the public's collective financial thinking.

> Houses can sit empty without tenants for years but they’ll only go up.

Do you have stats for how much of a problem this is? The problem seems to be vacancy rates that are too low, not too high.

> Companies can be unprofitable for literal decades but they’ll keep finding funding and buyers.

This was a ZIRP (zero-interest rate policy) phenomenon and even then, was very limited in scope. Uber raised billions on a dumb business plan, yes, but that investment is tiny compared to the total amount invested in that period.

> In a world of shrinking growth , stalling productivity, and dying demographics,

Opinions should be based on facts, not over-excitement. Growth has been booming in real terms for centuries now. Many countries are in demographic decline, but overall we still have lots of net population growth for a long time. Productivity is not stalling, and is in fact skyrocketing all over the world.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/labor-productivity-per-ho...

> the market behaves like infinite growth is baked in.

Lots of people blindly pump their money into index funds every month. While this raises PE ratios to near-historic highs (not all-time highs mind you) it is by no means "infinite".

I find lots of great businesses with stock that sells for far more reasonable prices, given that they are off of the major indices.

Blind doomsterism doesn't help anyone.

[cycomanic]

> > Houses can sit empty without tenants for years but they’ll only go up.

> Do you have stats for how much of a problem this is? The problem seems to be vacancy rates that are too low, not too high.

No stats on my part, but I have some anecdotal evidence from Australia a couple of years ago. I definitely knew of several apartment complexes which were significantly empty, but advertised rents did not go down. The reasoning behind this was that banks used the previous rent for assessing value (which people used as capital for buying the next property). Because everyone essentially invested based on property price increases not rental income, it made more sense to leave the apartment empty and use the higher capital (based on a previous evaluation) to use for buying the next apartment, than to renting it out and not being able to buy the next property. L

[abigail95]

Australian east coast capital cities are the poster children for low vacancy rates and high prices.

The indicators you need to look for are politicians making it illegal to bid for a rental to obscure prices from market participants.

The percentage of capital gain vs rental income breakdown has been decreasing in Australia since interest rates started dropping 10 years ago.

Now it's going in the other direction, rents will outstrip capital gains because of higher interest - you'll have people saying that landlords are buying up houses and refusing to sell because rents are going up and they are just hoarding cash. You can't win against this argument.

[cudgy]

DR Horton (largest US home builder) is doing something similar right now. Instead of lowering the prices on their homes, they are including incentives by buying down the interest rates on the mortgages of their home buyers. This helps keep the prices of housing higher, which likely allows them to keep borrowing against their inventory, avoid credit calls, and await the Fed to lower rates and return to the good old days.

[spaceman_2020]

Cities have had to literally charge a tax to penalize investors who let their houses stay vacant. You think this would be happening if vacant investor homes was not a problem? [0]

> Many countries are in demographic decline, but overall we still have lots of net population growth for a long time.

Incredible strawman. Population has been growing in Africa and a handful of developing countries. That should have no bearing on valuations in western markets - these population growth centers are neither producers nor consumers of western capital goods/services.

> Productivity is not stalling, and is in fact skyrocketing all over the world.

In your own chart, labor productivty has been growing at a much slower pace since 2010 compared to the previous decades. This can be corroborated by other studies as well that show much more sluggish productivity growth in the last 20 years compared to the years before it.

This is a frustrating comment, filled with hand wavy platitudes about growth for centuries and booming population growth. It completely ignores the temporal component of market valuations.

0: https://vancouver.ca/home-property-development/empty-homes-t...

[wintogreen74]

>> You can point to any instant, and even any decade in time, and point major inaccuracies in the public's collective financial thinking.

Examples: today Halliburton and GE Health both posted numbers that be the market and saw big drops in value, while Spotify missed big time and swung to a loss, yet saw their stock price go up. Everybody points to potential but totally dismisses today's reality.

[FredPret]

The key thing to remember is “market” is simply a collective noun for “investor”.

It doesn’t have to follow any logical law. People can buy or sell at any time, for any reason, and the market price will move along with it.

[red-iron-pine]

At this point the average individual (aka retail investor) is functionally irrelevant for big moves like the one the parent poster made.

Large firms, often leveraging complex, autonomous systems, are the ones pushing around $20MM worth of stocks and moving the markets (or keeping them from moving). Jim the SE III dropping $30k in RSUs isn't doing to do anything except alter Jim's opinion on the capital gains tax.