We’ve hit peak consonant and that has me worried about the stock market.
There’s a difference between being an investor and a speculator. I advise readers to stick to the former in my book and to keep it simple. But I also point out that the awful performance of most ordinary savers has a flip side since the markets are a zero sum game. Aside from fees, which are considerable and keep many fund managers and advisers in fine fettle, a small number of speculators reap the rewards of outwitting a large number of suckers. When you zig they often zag. if you want to be one of those guys or girls who can sniff out opportunity or danger and profit from it then you have to be able to read the writing on the wall. I think I just saw it.
The trend of naming companies and products with few or no vowels seems to have peaked. The shuttered burger store pictured above, which I walked by yesterday on Broadway, is exhibit A. Why on earth would this matter, though? Names are just names, after all, and the likes of Flickr, Scribd, or Unbxd are mostly private companies or, like Tumblr, divisions of public ones with other activities.
Ah, but trendy names have been a recurring sign of danger in markets. Back in the early 1960s there were the “tronics.” Any company associated with space or electronics did marvelously for a while as the government poured cash into the Space Race. Burton Malkiel writes about a company that sold records door-to-door and changed its name to Space Tone. It saw its stock rise sevenfold in a short period. This sort of irrationality signaled not only a bubble for those particular companies but the beginning of the end of the Kennedy Bull Market.
Years later, most of us were in the market already during the granddaddy of them all when hundreds of companies with a dot-com in their names achieved lofty valuations. We all know how that ended.
In fact it seems that, even outside of a bubble, avoiding companies with exciting names is smart. The great investor Peter Lynch wrote in One Up On Wall Street, the first book I ever read about investing, that “a flashy name in a mediocre company attracts investors and gives them a false sense of security,” and he warned against buying stocks that have an x in their name.
I decided to test this out for an article I wrote for the Financial Times back in 2010 and found 109 companies in the Wilshire 5000 that began or ended with an ‘x.’ They were, in fact, more expensive, far more volatile, and less likely to be profitable. In a stock picking game I’ve been playing for several years I’ve blindly shorted such stocks and made decent returns doing so. ‘Q’ is just as bad.
So back to the vowel-less companies. Is it a case of what’s old is new again? The Semitic languages, including modern Hebrew and Arabic, had some of the first alphabets and are written mostly without vowels. When I went to Hebrew school they were written in but are considered training wheels in modern Hebrew, much to my confusion in Israel.
That’s not the case here. There is no convenience factor as with those scripts, just a hipness quotient. My former colleague John Carney once made up a fake company called Grindr that would grind down your enemies, but it turns out someone grabbed the name to start a gay dating app. I considered grabbing the url for Tstr, perhaps to launch a grilled cheese company, but it already was claimed by “Tacoma & Seattle Trailer Repair.” Darn.
Anyway, the moment has passed and you’ve been warned. The stock market as a whole is at the 96th percentile of all observations in 135 years based on the Shiller P/E ratio and companies like Tesla with no earnings or free cash flow are worth multiples of established competitors many times their size. Put “cloud” in front of a product and you can command double the multiple. I can go on and on.
Watch out below – srsly.
Spencer Jakab 