Another boom: Outtakes from Harry Dent
November 26, 2004
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Wall $treet Week with FORTUNE sat down with money manager Harry Dent, who sees big things ahead for the stock market. Portions of Dent's interview will air on our Nov. 26, 2004 program. Here are excerpts that won't be on the broadcast:
On the likelihood of another tech investing bubble:
Most people now say, "Well, the bubble's over."
(But) in the Roaring Twenties we had a boom and bubble into late 1919. General Motors and major tech stocks crashed 75 percent. Everybody thought it was over. The next thing you know, General Motors goes up 22 times. The Dow goes up six times, automotive stocks go up 12 times. We had another boom and bubble because technologies do that: They have a first strong growth boom as they're moving into the economy rapidly. There's a shakeout in the middle when they first over expand. That's what we saw happen in the early 2000s after the great expansion in '99 that nobody saw coming. And then they have another boom that takes them all the way to 90 percent of households before they slow down. So we have another tech boom coming. We have another decade, this decade of baby boom spending, and we're going to see a market just like '95 to '99. That's the last thing people expect today.
We show in the book that automobiles did this from 1914 to 1928, one of the key technologies of the past. They went from 10 percent to 90 percent of households. You had this big shakeout, a tech wreck, and General Motors, an automotive stock right in the middle in the early '20s just like this, and then we turned around and went from 50 percent percent to 90 percent.
Baby boomers are continuing to move in the Internet. We started this correction in 2000 with 44 percent of households in the Internet. We ended it in 2002 with 59 percent. We are marching right up this S curve. And broadband's coming twice as fast, so by the end of this decade, we're going to have 90 percent of the households in this country broadband, wireless, Internet connections, and this revolution then will slow down because there won't be anymore households to sell to. Tech industries will slow down like they did in the '30s, and that's going to be part of this downtrend along with the decline in baby boom spending.
On interest rates and inflation:
Surprisingly, every time there's a recovery, the bond markets and economists think interest rates are going to rise. Well, what happened in the '80s? Inflation and interest rates only fell, '90s, same thing, recovery, inflation, interest rates fell. And we also predicted that in 1992 in The Great Boom Ahead.
We see interest rates and inflation continuing to slide down a bit in the next year or so, because of the productivity from these new technologies, and also we've got an indicator in the book that shows it's the workforce growth. It's the entry of new generations into the workforce at great expense and infrastructures that cause inflation outside of work periods. And when those workers get older and rise in productivity, inflation comes down. So baby boomers are going to be at their peak productivity years, workforce growth is going to be slow. We are not going to create as many jobs in this decade as we did in the '90s, and the '90s created less than the '80s and the '80s created less than the '70s, because the baby boomers mostly entered the workforce in the '70s and early '80s. So that should keep inflation low. The Roaring Twenties, which we compare this period to, same crash to start, same incredible bull market, productivity, new technologies going to 90 percent at the peak of a generation cycle. Inflation was near zero in the Roaring Twenties, despite the strong boom.
On high oil prices and their economic effect:
Yeah, it's one of the tough things for the stock market in 2004, along with the terrorist threats and the slow recovery. Recoveries from a tech wreck like this are slow. The same thing happened in the early '20s. It took years for the economy to turn around. The market came up slowly at first, and it just took off in '25 to '29. That was the greatest run in stocks in history. That was even stronger than '95 to '99. Most people don't realize that. So all of that will turn around. I think oil prices will be falling. It may take another year, but I think between 2005 and 2007 oil prices will probably start to fall. We're really building a bubble in oil prices. I think there are scarcities, but I don't think it's going to sustain at these levels.
The best news is that oil is now two to three percent of the economy, energy, when it was a huge part back in decades way back. So it doesn't have as big an impact on inflation. Labor productivity is far more important. Baby boomers are going to still keep inflation low despite $50, $60, maybe even $70 oil.
On investment allocations in the years to come.
We're saying, and we'll have to refine this more when we get there, but somewhere around late 2009 or early 2010 these trends should start to peak. Baby boomers need to start moving out of equities, particularly growth equities, into high quality fixed income, high quality corporate bonds.
You know, the best investment to ride out the Great Depression from late '29 to '42 would have been General Motors bonds. Their stock went down, but they were the leader in the race for leadership for automobiles in that time, and although their sales and earnings declined, their market share expanded in the downturn. They had positive cash flow and they paid out their bond. So you need to go from equities to fixed income. We've got another cycle we show in the book. We call it the decennial cycle. The first two to three years of most decades are bad, even in bull markets. The '80s started off weak, the '90s, the 2000s. So did the Roaring Twenties. The worst crash in history was the early '30s, and then the early '40s.
On Asian investment:
You know, we back tested this extensively. Asia does outperform the U.S. stock markets on average, like Hong Kong, say for example versus the S&P. But the volatility is much greater. The S&P will only be down 20 to 40 percent and Hong Kong in '97 and '98 was down 67 percent, almost as much as technology stocks in this great crash.
So we like a range of 10 to 20 percent in Asia.
On knowing when it's time to get out of technology:
You know, we have a channel for the Nasdaq just like we do the Dow, and we saw it following that channel and starting to hit the top of that channel, just like the Dow did in some of our indicators in late '99 and early 2000. We'd say, "Okay, it's time to be cautious on tech stocks."
We're also going to continue to monitor, we monitor the S curve, the acceleration of Internet cellular and now broadband. When broadband hits 90 percent, that's going to be a sign, look, this revolution's going to slow down. Tech stocks, we think tech stocks will slow down before the broad market this time, so we're going to be looking for that, and we're going to be looking for overvaluations.
I see the S&P 500, the last time we got to about 30 price/earnings ratio -- somewhere between 30 and 35 price/earnings ratio, you better start watching out. So we have a lot of indicators.
But again, this decennial cycle, it's so funny, we've known about this cycle for years. It came from Ned David, who is a great analyst. And after this correction, we really looked at it, and most of these decades, this decennial cycle alone was the best back testing tool we found for investors to get defensive at times. That cycle alone would say from 2010 into at least mid 2012, you better be cautious. That's when the worst crashes tend to happen.
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