FANGs on Summer Pay

I never will forget those nights
I wonder if it was a dream
Remember how you made me crazy
Remember how I made you scream
--Don Henley

During the dot.com run up the 'must have' stocks were known as the Four Horsemen. Owning Intel (INTC), Cisco (CSCO), Oracle (ORCL), and Microsoft (MSFT) were tickets to Easy Street.

This time around it's the FANGs. Facebook (FB), Amazon (AMZN), Netflix (NFLX), and Google (GOOG) are supposed to promise riches.

To demonstrate, USA Today suggests that teens and college workers take half their summer job pay and roll it into the FANGs. It estimates that investing half of the average summer pay into these stocks over the past four years (about $6500 total) would have grown to nearly $20K today.

"Think about what you could do," the article beguiles, "with $20,000 in four years. Maybe buy a car or book a trip to Tahiti."

Whether its cab drivers buying dot.coms, bartenders buying houses, or teens buying FANGs, when media outlets capture (and promote) this degree of speculation, you know that we're late in the game.

position in SPX