Let's See ... The Roaring 20's -- What Could Possibly Go Wrong? -- December 27, 2019

All three major indices hit all-time highs yesterday.

FOMO. Headline over at the LA Times today -- "Stocks soared this year. Half of millennials missed out."

Futures, 5:43 a.m. CT:

• Dow: up 88 points
• S&P 500: up 8 points (by the way, that's right at the historical ratio, Dow/S&P 500 --- 10 / 1 -- which is incredibly bullish)
• NASDAQ composite closed at 9,022.39 yesterday.
• NASDAQ 100 contract closed at 8,804.25 yesterday, right now, real-time, up 33.37 points; link here;
• On top of everything else that folks have been writing about at the "macro" level or long-term outlook, thinking ahead to January / February:
• high likelihood of folks looking to take profits; they won't pay taxes for fifteen months (except for quarterly estimates)
• but, if the bull market emotion is still alive, after taking profits, folks will want to get back in quickly
• a pullback would give some folks a chance to get into the market
• "they" say there is still a lot of money on the sidelines (note to newbies: "they" are always saying that; I've heard that line in every bull market for the past forty years)
• a lot of folks are eager to front-load their retirement accounts in January / February
• Christmas bills come due in January/February
• but think about this: starting next year I estimate as much as $1 trillion will have to come out of non-spousal inherited beneficiary IRAs under the new tax rules -- the $1 trillion is a huge wag; I'm waiting for Forbes to give us the number
• let's see: the government says new money raised on the new taxes coming out of these accounts is about $2 billion / year
• let's assume, a 20% tax rate. $2 billion is 20% of what? 
• $2 billion = ? *0.2
• $100 billion
• that sounds about right; certainly more realistic than $1 trillion
• so we will go with that: an additional $100 billion will be coming out of these accounts under the new law; this, of course, does not include the amount that would normally be coming out of all retirement accounts this year
• a lot of that money will go back into investments (tailwind for the market)
• a lot of that money will be spent; new money circulating through the economy
• wow, how did I get this far off track?
• Let's look at some individual stocks:
• Dow futures, now up 94 points (6:00 a.m. ET)
• TSLA: nope, I won't go there
• AAPL: at $291.49, up 0.54%; up another $1.58
• AMZN: jumped almost $80 yesterday; up $11 in futures today; can you spell Robinhood?
• MSFT: up 0.51%
• BA: after falling about a percent yesterday, up 0.4% in pre-market trading
• T: up slightly

The roaring 20s: what could possible go wrong?

The 20 best-performing stocks of the decade: zerohedge.