Comment by AnthonyMouse | Hacker News Reader

Comment by AnthonyMouse | Hacker News Reader

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> What if it takes 12 months of hard thinking to draw the right conclusion from the information? Are there many investors who go to such lengths?

It's not required to be all of them. Suppose that it indeed isn't, but the ones who do that work for investment funds who control significant pools of money.

Now the investors in two or three of those places do the research and conclude that some company is about to start doing well and their share price is currently $50 but is about to be $150. So they start buying it, and keep buying it until it gets up near $150. Which happens pretty quickly because they control enough money to use up all of the short-term liquidity at the lower prices and the majority of the shares are held by people who aren't even paying attention and therefore don't try to sell when the price starts going up. Once the price gets to that point they don't buy any more because it's no longer selling at a discount.

Then the company actually starts doing well to the point that everyone can see it but the price hardly moves because it was already priced in.

But do we see that happen?

That would mean that the p/e-ratio of a company would rise sharply long before the profits set in. And that rise would be called "mysterious" by the general public. And then only when the profits set in, the p/e would come down.

I can't see that in Nvidia for example:

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/NVDA/nvidia/pe-rat...

The price roughly rose along the earnings. Even though the foundations for generative AI became clear in 2015.

The landmark paper, "Attention is all you need", that triggered the breakthrough that led to current transformer architecture LLMs, only came out in 2017. Without that breakthrough, they wouldn't exist. And even then, the early models produced gibberish. Better gibberish than older Markov chain text generators, but asking GPT-2 "What is three plus five?" would give some nonsense, non-sequitur answer, that might start with a (incorrect) number if you were lucky. At the time, everyone was wondering if scaling up the model size would improve intelligence or hit a wall. ChatGPT didn't release until 2022.

And you'd need to know back in 2015 that Nvidia specifically would be the big winner from AI. They don't even manufacture their own chips. Intel also designs chips and GPUs, but if you bet on them in 2015, you'd have lost money between then and 2025.

> That would mean that the p/e-ratio of a company would rise sharply long before the profits set in. And that rise would be called "mysterious" by the general public. And then only when the profits set in, the p/e would come down.

You have to look at the volumes involved: if there are tens of millions of shares of a particular stock moved everyday, a single event that involves 100,000 shares is going to be lost in the noise.

There are always people who think they know better (if they didn't think so they wouldn't be trading), and they may make crazy-appearing trades. Lots of the people in The Big Short were viewed as 'lunatics' ("You're betting against the housing market?") that turned out to be right. But also remember that there are people who think the world is flat.

> The price roughly rose along the earnings. Even though the foundations for generative AI became clear in 2015.

It's also why you hear the talking heads on television say things like "…this has already been priced in.".

You're not likely to see that in huge companies because everybody is already paying attention to them and it's harder to know something someone else doesn't about the thing everybody already knows everything about. Also, then it's more likely to happen on a scale of 10 days than 10 years.

Where that really happens is with startups and younger companies. Some company is currently making negative dollars but a few people have figured out that they're likely to be big so their share price is up before their earnings are.

And suppose you somehow actually knew what every major company's earnings would look like in every year from 2015 to now. Do you invest in Nvidia in 2015? Or do you invest in Netflix in 2015 and Tesla in 2019 and so on and not bother with Nvidia until just before the hockey stick?

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