Over the weekend I stopped to watch the last part of a James Stewart Western called, The Far Country. It was the story of two cattle drivers who took their cattle all the way to the Yukon to get a piece of the late 1890’s Klondike gold rush. Like many of these movies and many gold rushes, it ended with Jimmy shooting the bad guys after the prospecting did not work out well for late arrivals to the Yukon.
We are writing you from Seattle — known as the “Gateway to Alaska,” which is where gold miners got their supplies and found passage on steamships to Alaska. For example, Nordstrom’s shoe store in downtown Seattle realized its first big success selling boots to miners passing through town to Alaska. It is our opinion that we Seattleites are in another rush, but this time it is a technology rush and Amazon is at the heart of it.
According to The Seattle Times article “Amazon’s hiring frenzy slows sharply; what’s going on?”:
On July 17 [2017], a Monday – the day of the week when new hires arrive on Amazon’s South Lake Union campus – Amazon set a new high-water mark. That day, the company welcomed 767 new employees. That’s more than most local employers hire in a year.
Year-over-year in September, Amazon’s corporate employment grew 77% to 541,000.1 Amazon’s footprint in Seattle is more than twice the size of the corporate imprint of any major city in America. Seattle has approximately 700,000 residents and King County has around 2,200,000. King County will have issued close to 280,000 new driver’s licenses in the four years ending in 2017! It’s as if we’re mining Bitcoin here.
In addition, for two consecutive years Seattle has had the largest number of building cranes in operation of any city in the U.S. despite being only the 15th largest city in America. Those cranes are called booms and their huge numbers in Seattle automatically describe us as a “boom” town.
We believe we are close-up witnesses to the heart of this gold-rush-like bubble in technology enthusiasm. A massive victory party in the U.S. stock market has been occurring due to the success of e-commerce and cloud computing services. Amazon is the premier company in both cloud services and the largest e-commerce company in America! It is almost impossible to visualize what could get in the way of the tech rush in Amazon’s fortunes, even though the stock trades at an extremely high P/E ratio. However, the fact that it has created an unsustainable boom and makes Seattle its ground zero, forces us to consider more far-reaching consequences.
Therefore, what can we rely on which would tell us that the bad guys need to be shot and late arrivals are going to end up without finding the tech riches? The answers lay in the history of the investment markets and the importance of psychology at stock market extremes.
History