With that said, our company recently switched from slack to teams, and its been a fairly annoying change. Teams is miles behind slack in terms of usability.
Office365 is lightyears ahead for pretty much everything, from a business perspective.
From a nerd persepective, outlook mail is a bit uncomfortable to use and Teams has usability problems (slack is still better in that regard).
However you get Teams basically for free with an office 365 subscription, and you would have to buy the office suite anyway, so...
That's possible, I wouldn't know. I was writing about my experience as an user.
It's all video call related.
I'm still taking these changes with a grain of salt. If devs are still getting the same treatment in say, 5 or 10 years, I'll believe that Microsoft has changed. But to me the whole thing smells of "Use our open-source programs that just so happen to work really well with our paid-for closed-source software! Why not just switch to Windows and grab our Office 365 subscription while you're at it?"
But yeah, considering Microsoft's history it's probably good to stay vigilant.
However, I believe the single biggest factor to the market's continued stability was the announcement by the Federal Reserve to buy corporate bonds. This has NEVER been done before and was a HUGE deal.
The announcement came on March 23rd. 'Oddly' that also happens to be the very bottom of the March sell off panic.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/23/business/economy/coronavi...
Those purchases just started happening. As such, I expect the markets to continue as if there is no Covid Crisis as it is viewed as a short term issue that has been mitigated at a corporate cash flow point by this Federal Reserve buying. https://www.marketplace.org/2020/06/16/the-fed-starts-buying...
Sure there is a chance that we are in a bubble (by the way, we have been saying that since 2010. That's over 10 years) but after Covid, I think that fundamentals have changed.
I think this might be the biggest reason. With B&M falling like flies left and right, people are shifting their investments. I don't think it's limited to "wealthy people" either.
I'm sure the Fed's buying spree/inflation is a factor as well, however. Interesting times.
Most companies in SP500 are down. Stocks hurt because of COVID are losing value, those who are not affected or benefit gain.
High prices in tech sector reduces their expected future ROI. That's completely acceptable because other investments are worse.
so we will so oversized capital misallocation, until it is not considered a misallocation anymore
comparative metrics of the individual companies just because they happen to be publicly traded shares is not relevant or holistic enough
The fundamental problem of capitalism is that it only solves the problems of people with money. Put the money in the hands of people with more problems, and those problems will get solved. (On the 'oh noes, inflation' side, many of these problems can be solved by services, which create their own supply over time as people take the new jobs created by new demand.) As it is, a massive amount of wealth is tied up doing nothing but looking dumb...
....but I'll entertain you, both of your first two sentences are about inflation. We aren't "kinda seeing this on the stock side" this actually is inflation. This is the expected outcome of inflation and what has been happening for 100 years in the US. With an unprecedented acceleration.
I think what you are missing from a "capitalism versus X" discussion is the nuanced discussion of macroeconomics.
Redistribution of wealth into poor people affording food has only a little to do with inflation, so I'm sorry thats the level of discussion you've had with people thus far. It has more to do with market signals as well as competitiveness of that market at all for private investors if they were to be taxed heavily in order to pay for it. They really can go somewhere else, and that is a great privilege which always has to be balanced with what policy makers attempt to do. Right now, there is a massive wealth distribution occurring in order for people to be able to stay fed, with additional payments in unemployment insurance, coming directly from the Federal Reserve creating new money. And there are many market signals missing, exacerbating misallocation of capital.
You have to realize that with the CARES Act, the Federal Reserve's charter has been modified by Congress. Things that were unfathomable and illegal for the Federal Reserve to do are now legal. The entire point of the Federal Reserve were so that Congress stayed out of managing the money supply as it would be a continual political distraction, and Congress always shied away from touching anything about the Federal Reserve's law until now.
So the entire discussion has flipped. Republicans and moderate Democrats will never call it socialism, they'll never call it universal basic income, and right now there is also no political will to tax heavily in order to curb inflation while paying for the same programs. But what is happening is massive inflation, from the state, into a lot of people's pockets, to keep the lights on for everyone. Many of those people are buying stocks, along with the wealthy and corporate recipients.
Also for MSFT specifically, I think the company is in a very good spot right now with its cloud business, gaming and office, developer and productivity software
I also suspect the decision makers don’t really want asset prices to go to shit, so better for them to issue more debt and let the next generation deal with it.
Passive cash flows became more expensive. Money got pushed into Microsoft, not pulled into it.
It’s another form of inflation.
10Y treasury rate dropped by 1 percent point this year: https://ycharts.com/indicators/10_year_treasury_rate
1) assets are denominated in dollars
2) the amount of dollars in circulation has increased about 40% in 2020
3) Therefore, asset prices go up
That's all there is to it.
Covid-19 gave all those people a very visual example of the value proposition.
Dunno if you have tried to find PC parts lately but things like power supplies are extremely difficult to get your hands on right now. I have seen $100+ for a shit-tier random-brand gold power supply, take it or leave it, because right now there is just no supply. 30% of America is suddenly working from home and a significant number of those are building rigs for their new home office.
Monitors are another, the impact on the monitor market is palpable, basic productivity monitors (60 hz 24" 1080p and 27" 1440p) are up 50% or more in some caases from the start of the year.
I consider myself lucky that I am sitting on a great ultrawide gaming monitor and a lot of misc hardware, as things have been heating up this summer I pulled my J5005 NUC off one of the TVs and reformatted it yesterday so now I don't have to run my power-hungry gaming rig just to do citrix.