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it's good to have you here i know that recently you pointed out that the pandemic is accelerating the adoption of technology that will boost corporate profits help us understand where we stand at this moment in time i got a 10-year yield below 1.3 percent i got wti falling it's almost at 62 bucks a barrel what is that telling the average investor well i think that uh we've hit peak growth in economic activity uh peak growth in in earnings and uh i think we certainly are not going to get uh it's kind of the kind of fiscal stimulus that we've had over the past year and a half nor the monetary stimulus so i think overall the market's handling all this remarkably well doesn't look like much of a taper tantrum today anyways i think it's been widely signaled and i think the perception is that the federal reserve uh is now seriously moving in the direction of tapering because the economy is doing fine but anyway you slice it or dice it it's going to be slower growth slower earnings growth slower economic growth and that's probably keeping the bond yield down and uh giving some weakness to the oil patch and this is emily over the next four to five months left of 2021 what do you think it's going to take to push the markets higher especially as we're heading into that decelerating growth environment you're talking about well decelerating growth is still growth and so i think that earnings are going to continue to grow and this market is has doubled since march 23rd and about half of that is because of the valuation multiple on the other half is because earnings we've actually had an earnings melt up an earnings lead melt up since last may earnings have been very strong analysts have been raising their estimates on a regular basis and profit margins have held up superbly well in the face of all the anecdotal stories about costs going up so i think just the fundamentals will will drive the market higher i don't think the valuation multiple has a lot a lot more upside here because it's already quite high at a forward pe of 22.
well that's where perhaps some of us average investors get a little confused how can we have profit margins continuing to improve when prices are going up at what point does the bill come due well that that gets us back to what the original point you were making about productivity uh i think that the only way you can explain how profit margins could be at a record high in an environment where we've seen labor costs going up commodity costs going up it's got to be productivity and i think the pandemic did in fact accelerate the pace at which technology is being implemented is being used to augment the mental and physical productivity of workers workers are very scarce you gotta hug them and hold them and be really nice to them pay them more and the only way that's gonna make sense is if you can increase your productivity so if we think over a little bit further of a time horizon perhaps the next two to three years do you think it's going to be then these tech companies that are really on the forefront of innovation uh driving down some of these labor costs that are going to ultimately uh see the biggest run-up because of this increase in profit margins i think that's a great point i think technology companies continue to be the leaders in innovation to increase productivity but i kind of view all companies now as technology companies any company that isn't using technology to uh augment its productivity is going to find that the competitors are and they're going to uh be out of luck they're going to they can go out of business so i think there's a tremendous amount of pressure here to use technology innovations to deal with the labor shortages and that means that you really have to think of like railroads and trucks and chemicals as almost as technology companies because they're all going to use they already are and we'll use more technology to increase their efficiencies we got the news yesterday about amazon uh you know looking at brick and mortar uh and yet you look at target and walmart given what you just said about everybody being a technology company having now successfully incorporated e-commerce and technology into their business models have we reached that point where the technology giants are not innovating fast enough and that those who have been at a deficit for the past couple of quarters even years decades perhaps 20 years are now at a point where they could once again exceed well i think even before the pandemic was pretty clear that a lot of companies that compete with amazon got the message that they had to improve their game they had to use more technology to compete with amazon so in many ways amazon did a lot of companies a favor uh by uh kicking them in the behind and getting them to move forward in technological innovation so when the pandemic hit a lot of these uh competing retailers were actually in a very good position to to go online and to carry forward with their their sales so i think uh it's just an example of how competition really forces uh everybody uh to up their game in the technology field and on the topic of rising prices one of the points you've noted recently is that inflation has yet to demonstrate that it's actually transitory and i'm wondering what data or how much more data you're looking for for the market to have been proven that this is in fact a transitory phenomenon well there's a whole range of inflation indicators there's a there's surveys there's the purchasing managers indexes small businesses all of those are still quite elevated uh you're starting to get a little glimmer of it of a top but it's certainly not a spike it's not like straight up and straight down uh and then anecdotally there's still plenty of uh stories about how difficult it is to get labor to get parts and and so on so we're not out of the woods there yet but uh look the the economy is the economic growth is going to slow down is it's natural there's no way you can maintain the kind of growth we've had and much of that was uh just coming out of a very severe recession even though it's short but looking ahead here i think we are going to find that all in all the economy will grow and inflation will moderate but as i said i'm very empirical about it i'm not seeing it yet you've also by by the way in getting back to a point about the economy growing been in the lead calling for five thousand on the s p 500.
um do you think we could see that because we had an analyst on who was telling us we could see that by the end of this year is that realistic or are we if we're at peak growth yeah i mean it's it's uh it's possible uh i i'll tell you i've been a bull since 2009 um and uh the market pretty well kept pace with my forecast or my forecast kept pace with the market i should say uh but since uh this uh bull run since march 23rd every time i put out a bullish forecast for the end of the year or next year it gets run over by the stampeding bulls so um look 5000 is not that ambitious from where we are now i think you know after doubling uh after the s p 500 doubling since march 23rd gains a five to ten percent looking forward at an annual rate i think are very likely
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