It’s been a couple weeks since I’ve done a wrap up (blame MBA exams and projects) but I need to talk about some huge news stories that have happened over the past week. The month of May has lived up to the old saying of, “Sell in May and get away” because it has been a bloody red couple of weeks for the stock market. The tech sector has experienced the brunt of the massive sell-off. Even after the biggest companies around, like Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and Apple, posted massive record earnings, their stock prices all dipped.
Yesterday and today have started to see a rebound for tech stocks but the markets are down for the week overall, down 1.6% for the S&P 500 and 2.8% for the tech-heavy Nasdaq. The S&P 500 and the Dow started the week by suffering their worst three-day losses in almost seven months. Prices have also been falling over the past couple weeks over increasing fears of inflation, especially in the price of raw materials like metals for microchips, lumber, and crude oil.
As always now days, cryptocurrency has been a main topic in investing news. The biggest news is Elon Musk’s tweet announcing that Tesla has suspended accepting Bitcoin as payment due to “environmental concerns”. I’ve heard rumors that this is actually a deliberate action by Elon Musk to bring the price of Bitcoin down because he’s fighting with a hedge fund that has options on Bitcoin and that same hedge fund was involved in tanking the price of Dogecoin and Tesla stock prices. So the rumor is he deliberately tanked the price of Bitcoin to get revenge on them.
I personally think since the price of Bitcoin has dropped and is still on a declining trend over the past month and week, it makes sense to stop accepting it if it’s quickly losing value. But he took the announcement a step further by saying it was due to the environmental impact of the proof-of-work process used to secure the blockchain network, and that he is, “looking at other cryptocurrencies that use <1% of Bitcoin’s energy/transaction.” Some people are confused because Dogecoin, which he has publicly supported, also uses the proof-of-work process, although they use scrypt-based technology which is slightly different than the SHA-256 based equipment used to mine Bitcoin.
This past week has seen a lot of ups and downs in both the cryptocurrency and stock markets. What’s your thoughts on “sell in May and get away”? Have we reached the bottom level prices where it’s time to buy the dip? What are your thoughts on Elon Musk’s tweet and the future of cryptocurrencies? Leave me a comment!
High Finance Thoughts 