Talk about stock-market crashes! Plenty sectors and individual stocks are crashing relentlessly right now.
I spent last night going through a lot of charts on my quote screens and was rather amazed to see how many stocks have fallen 70% or more over the last year or two.
For instance, gold mining has crashed over the last five years. Every gold miner I looked at is way down, including Barrick Gold (ABX), GoldCorp (GG) the Market Vectors Gold Miners ETF (GDX) itself:
Dozens of energy stocks have also crashed over the last 2-1/2 years. I thought of three -- Chesapeake Energy (CHK), Magnum Hunter (MHRC) and Peabody Energy (BTU) -- off the top of my head. But there are dozens more with charts just like this:
How about 3-D Printing? Look at 3-D printing stocks 3D Systems (DDD), Stratasys (SSYS) and VoxelJet (VJET) and how far they've crashed over the past two years:
And don't forget GoPro (GPRO) and Fossil (FOSL), two very different kind of wearables that have both tanked over the last year:
Some stocks like troubled Valeant Pharmaceuticals (VRX) and SunEnergy (SUNE) have even crashed in the past 90 days:
In 2010 and 2011, I used to loudly predict that we were likely heading into largest stock-market bubble in history. Commentators have long pointed to Alphabet (GOOG, GOOGL), Amazon (AMZN), Apple (AAPL) and (more recently) Facebook (FB) as evidence that we're in a huge bubble that's about to pop.
But looking at the charts above, it seems like many sectors have already gone through a huge crash over the past few years. So, it sure doesn't look to me like we're in a speculative bubble any more.
True, this five-year chart of 3-D printing stocks shows how high some companies got before they tanked:
But Alphabet, Amazon, Apple and Facebook are all at or near all-time highs.
As an opportunist and contrarian, I'm digging into the hard-fallen former high flyers to seeing if there's anything in the rubble worth picking up. But for now, my biggest positions remain the "Four Horsemen of Tech" -- Alphabet, Apple, Amazon and Facebook.
