If there’s a market sell off due to inflation, where are those dollars going?
If there’s a market sell off due to inflation, where are those dollars going?
This is why growth stocks like tech have taken more of a beating than value stocks like food, oil, or defense. The former rely heavily on the expectation of future cash flows, often far off in the future, and if there's an incidence of extremely high interest rates between now and then, the value of those cash flows is significantly reduced even if their absolute amount increases because of inflation.
If the Fed does not raise rates or is unable to control inflation, then it behaves as you describe: stocks become much more attractive than cash, and the rational price point for a stock becomes infinite. This is how the stock markets in Venezuela and Zimbabwe have behaved: they increase exponentially, measured in their native currencies, as the currencies depreciate exponentially.
In other words, investors are pricing in rate hikes in response to inflation, and assuming that this will be "controlled" inflation that raises price levels a finite amount and then disappears. If either of these assumptions proves to be false, stocks are significantly undervalued.
I thought that the value of many tech stocks was heavily based on growth. E.g. it's not worth waiting 10 or 20 years for a tech stock to start paying 3% dividends if the price stays the same; start earning 3% or more right now instead. In that sense, selling stock due to the risk of inflation is betting both that the company won't grow as fast inflation-adjusted as it did in the past (essentially the company can't perform as well under inflation) and that inflation will still be high when the stock starts paying dividends.
I am definitely not a financial analyst, just confused.
The cash flow stream from most tech companies usually looks like 5 years of large cash infusions (often from VCs); a decade or two of zero cash spun off as the company reinvests all profits in growth; and then a few years to a decade of massive cash being spun off for investors. For a historical example, see Apple - didn't pay a dividend for about 15 years from Steve Jobs's return until 2012, and now regularly returns tens of billions to investors in buybacks. For a current example, see Salesforce, which makes effectively zero GAAP profit but is growing massively as they reinvest that into product development and sales.
If competing investments - say Treasuries - are yielding zero now, there's no reason why you wouldn't buy Salesforce stock now and lock in those future dividends even though they're 15 years off. But if the 10-year Treasury is going to go up to 15% in 2 years - why wouldn't you sell your Salesforce stock when rates go up, buy a 10-year Treasury, quadruple your money over those 10 years, then buy 4x as much Salesforce stock right before they actually start spinning off cash as a dividend?
The 1970s actually looked like this. There was a big stock run-up in the late 60s, and then a very large stock market crash (~50%) in 1973 when the Fed started raising interest rates to combat inflation. Stocks continued to trade sideways during the high-inflation, high-interest period of the 1970s, and then they really took off in the late 80s once inflation was under control and rates started dropping.
"Largest miss of jobs numbers in history" = "Stocks hit new highs as traders expect long term low interest rates"
"Largest increase in inflation in many years" = "Stocks sink as traders fear Fed tightening"
Things are so bonkers now that bad news about the economy pushes stocks up, rather than down, because it means the money printing will continue.
Once inflation is high enough that we can get away from the zero lower bound, government paper becomes less of a desirable asset and stops being hoarded and displacing and blocking investment in the private markets. It's a return to markets having room to breath instead of being dominated by monetary actions.
As long as it doesn't go too far the other way...
This is called P/E compression. It's why stocks don't perform as well during inflationary periods as physical assets (such as gold, silver, real estate, etc.)
the moves today are in relation to the move in the 10 year yield spike. Tech stocks are inversely correlated to increases in this yield and more specifically the steepening of the yield curve.
The bond market is very large and moves in stocks can be understood with the yield curve: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/y/yieldcurve.asp
Gold went down today for a similar reason, it is strongly correlated to the real yield of a bond. Negative real yields favor gold.
It's only going down relative to previous highs because institutional investors are expecting to be able to get better returns by lending instead of by investing in equity.
The reason they expect to get better returns by lending is because they expect the FED to react to rising CPI by raising interest rates.
> If there’s a market sell off due to inflation, where are those dollars going?
Anything that returns more. Mostly towards lending to humans, businesses, funds, countries what have you.
Maybe also towards commodities which are essential and people will continue to pay for them (oil, copper)
Inflation hedges such as gold and more recently, crypto which is turning out to be an excellent hedge against US Dollar.
All of this still sucks for anyone being payed in cash. We are all just puppets in financial games.