Take a look at these seven charts:
Appharvest Inc (NASDAQ:APPH):
Clover Health Investments Corp (NASDAQ:CLOV):
Robinhood Markets Inc (NASDAQ:HOOD):
Oatly Group (NASDAQ:OTLY):
Lordstown Motors Corp (NASDAQ:RIDE):
Root Inc (NASDAQ:ROOT):
SmileDirectClub Inc (NASDAQ:SDC):
OK, a bunch of very poorly-performing stocks. So what?
Well, it goes to a point I’d like to make. A couple of miles from where I live is Stanford University, which has an acceptance rate of about 4%. Because it is such a difficult institution to get into, the students who wind up going there almost certainly graduate. Having already been so aggressively filtered, the “surviving” students are almost assured to thrive and succeed there.
It used to be that way with the public markets. Going public was a really big deal. It was really difficult to get listed on the NYSE or even the NASDAQ. Passing muster during the course of a road show was no small task. So if and when a given company actually had a ticker symbol, they probably had a pretty good chance at a successful future.
Not any more, though. The mollycoddling so prevalent in society has certainly found its way into the public markets, particularly by way of the SPAC mechanism. It’s sort of like corporations have managed to find their own “safe space,” which is why companies like Virgin Galactic (NYSE:SPCE) and Robinhood (NASDAQ:HOOD) exist today as tradeable financial instruments.
My point is that none of the charts above would exist in a normal market, since they wouldn’t even be chartable in the first place.