This Week on Trends with Friends (January 19, 2025)
Welcome Friends,
Here’s an assortment of posts shared this week on Trends with Friends. Let’s dive in…
LIVE FROM NEW YORK
Howard Lindzon traveled to New York for the LA Wildfire Relief Comedy show presented by Punchup.live and Stocktwits.
He shares,
I thought Punkie Johnson and Rachel Feinstein ruled the stage best, but I was most excited to see Andrew Dice Clay roam the stage and he did not disappoint.
Dice is now 67 (I am 59) so I grew up watching his career explode. Younger people may remember him from his amazing role in ‘A Star Is Born’.
After the show, I got to sit and meet with Dice and he was great. When I was a kid, I did standup in Toronto at a chain of clubs called Yuk Yuk’s. Dice told me a story about how the owner Mark Breslin wanted credit for discovering him early so he told Dice to get a clean 5 minutes and he would get him on the Joan Rivers show which he did.
Here’s a great shot of Howie with his “new” friend, Andrew Dice Clay…
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THIS WEEK IN AI
Michael Parkeh reviews the China + US AI chip relations, US Tech under Trump 2.0, OpenAI x Axios, TikTok and more in this week’s AI Summary.
AI BIOTECH
Fred Vogelstein interviewed Inceptive co-founders Jakob Uszkoreit and Rhiju Das. The three discuss how AI can revolutionize drug development.
Here’s the money quote,
FV: In other words, you’re not just talking about helping drug companies do stuff better, faster, cheaper, but also creating new medicines?
JU: Exactly that. It’s not an overnight thing. That development work will take us many, many years. But the interesting thing about this direction is that these incremental steps stack pretty well. And that then forms a reasonably direct course towards this completely sci fi vision of medicines.
FV: So things like vaccines that cure all cancer or antibiotics that do not have resistance?
JU: Yes. Antibiotic resistance is a very particular problem of highly resistant microbes. But you could very well imagine other ways of combating bacteria that don’t have as much of that risk. So there’s a very interesting whole kind of other avenue around phage therapies where effectively you infect the bacteria with viruses or bacteria, which supercharges them. That then maybe even obviates the need for traditional antibiotics at all. This is a bold statement, but it is not inconceivable.
FV: How did you stumble on this idea in the first place? You’ve played a critical part in developing the foundation for artificial intelligence. But you’re not a biologist.
JU: Three things happened in about three months. The first thing was that my first child was born, my daughter, during the pandemic.
And then a little over a month later the CASP 14 (Critical Assessment of Structure Prediction) results were released. I realized the stuff that I’d been working on for the last five or six years actually was ready for prime time in molecular and structural biology.
The third thing that happened several weeks later. The first phase one and two trials of the MRNA Covid vaccines came out. Both of them had efficacies in excess of 90%.
Finally a very wise person (who I won’t name) asked me how I’d feel if, 10 years from now, my daughter learned how I stayed at Google despite understanding where this technology was going and despite having the clout to go after that opportunity. The MRNA Covid vaccines probably saved in excess of 20 million lives. So at that stage it became a moral obligation. If I don’t do this, I risk somebody telling her that I could have done this, but did not.
A few months later (while I’m at a conference in Palo Alto with Rhiju Das) Vijay Pande, who started and runs the A16Z Bio and Health fund, walks past. And he says “If the two of you do a company, I’m going to write you a check, any check, actually.” And so we were like, “OK, we no longer have an excuse.”
Read the full discussion here.
BULL MARKET BEHAVIOR
Larry Thompson’s wish came TRUE! The market technician sees messy markets moving higher. He writes,
The Market Did It!
Santa finally arrived to deliver my gifts. Friends joined the party, short-term momentum gained steam and as is common in bull markets, bears got caught in some vicious bears traps.
This week, I want to emphasize the importance of having time frame alignment in your investment framework.
The market can be traded across so many timeframes that it’s possible for three people to have entirely different outlooks and all be correct.
The short term feeds into the intermediate term, which then leads into the long-term trend.
Now that the tactical (short-term) timeframe has flipped back to bullish, the next step is for that momentum to translate into the intermediate time frame, eventually realigning with the underlying long-term uptrend. Currently, we’re in a bit of a “no man’s land” above $580 but below the key psychological level of $600 which could result in some choppy action.
With earnings season set to accelerate, a decisive move either above $600 or below $580 would provide much clearer risk/reward scenarios for the intermediate-term trend. As I’ve mentioned, the longer-term trend remains upward, and that should be our default expectation for how this resolves.
But for now, clean risk management for the intermediate term against the $580 area.
In case you missed it – watch Larry on Stocktwits’ CMT Lunch Hour here.
THEMES OF 2024
Charlie Bilello shares charts and themes that tell the story of 2024. He writes,
Low Expectations
A 1.9% gain. That’s what the top Wall Street Strategists were predicting for the S&P 500 in 2024.
The most bearish target came from JPMorgan, the biggest bank in the world with access to some of the smartest minds and more data and information than anyone else.
Black Monday in Japan
On August 5, seemingly out of nowhere, a curveball came in from Japan. The Nikkei 225 Index fell 12.4%, its 2nd largest single day decline ever.
When combined with the losses from the previous session, the Nikkei was down 17.5%, surpassing the October 1987 crash to become the largest 2-day decline in its history. This was a 10-sigma event and a reminder once again that financial markets do not follow a normal distribution (tail events happen with much great frequency).
Fed Easing Again
After aggressively tightening policy in 2022 and 2023, raising the Fed Funds Rate by 525 bps, the Fed reversed course in September 2024 with a 50 bps rate cut. It would cut rates two more times before year end, with a quarter-point reduction at both the November and December FOMC meetings.
The Least Affordable Housing Market in History
The exact same issues plaguing the US housing market at the start of 2024 were there at the end. Which is to say that the combination of high prices and high mortgage rates have frozen the housing market in time, with record lows in affordability constraining both supply and demand.
The average home price in the US continued to hit record highs throughout 2024 and is up over 50% in just the last 5 years. That’s more than double the increase in average US wages.
PODCAST LINKS
Tadas Viskanta curated podcast links on The Economic of Weight Loss. Here’s a sneak peek…
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TRENDS WITH NO FRIENDS
Trends With No Friends sifts through the noise and discovers stocks above $1B market cap with high relative strength and low social following.
The publication shares 52-Week Highs and Lows sorted by followers on Stocktwits.
Why is high relative strength and low social following important?
Stocks that are outperforming tend to continue to outperform. Stocks that have a low social following are, by definition, undiscovered by the crowd. Stocks that have both Relative Strength and Low Social Following can really outperform as more investors discover them.
This week, Trends with No Friends featured…
Life Time ($LTH), Similarweb ($SMWB), Archrock ($AROC), Waters Corporation ($WAT), TD SYNNEX ($SNX) and more.
THIS WEEK’S EPISODE
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And in case you missed it… Howard Lindzon, Michael Parekh and Phil Pearlman are joined by Josh Mohrer to discuss AI innovation, the evolution of venture capital and the power of good marketing on the latest episode of Trend with Friends.
GET IN TOUCH
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Disclaimer: All opinions expressed on this show are solely the opinions of the hosts’ and guests’ and do not reflect the opinions of Stocktwits, Inc. or its affiliates. The hosts are not SEC or FINRA registered advisors or professionals. The content of this show is for educational and entertainment purposes only. Please consult with your financial advisor before making any investment decision.
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