https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aARTSSD_-OY Michael Brey is very well known for making stock market predictions some of which are so impressive that they've bridged the gap between nerdy financial analysis and popular culture but how often is he actually right or maybe a better question is does he make a ton of incorrect predictions that we've just forgotten about well I've been following And archiving every single prediction that Michael Buy has made on Twitter over the past couple of years to answer that exact question including a prediction that has so far come completely true and will likely reach a conclusion sometime in 2024 on the 13th of June 2022 buy wrote in a tweet the theater took more than a decade to over stuff not likely everyone gets out in less than a year buy of course here is referring to the classic analogy of someone shouting fire in a crowded theater when Panic spreads in financial markets it can sometimes result in very rapid declines in this case however buy is predicting a long drawn out crash that will unwind over multiple years at the time of this prediction inflation in the US was about 9% and the Federal Reserve had just begun raising the federal funds interest rate from. 1% to 1.2% and the stock market had fallen by about 15% in just 6 months so his tweet could be interpreted to mean that investors should expect that recent decline to continue for some time well that hasn't happened since that tweet in June 2022 the market did keep falling another 8% but since then it has rallied 29% putting the stock market about 18% higher than it was at the time of his prediction now of course you could definitely argue that 18 months isn't enough time to know if this prediction will come true or not and I will cover that specific uh case and argument a little bit later in this video but for now it did seem like bre was expecting things to continue worsening in 2022 because of another tweet that he made the exact same day getting one thing right is hard 1999 Tech bubble 01 to 05 value Revival 2005 housing bubble 2009 Armond Farms 2020 Co bottom 2020 lockdown Horrors 2021 meme stocks 2021 crypto leverage 2021 inflation 2022 not done yet late 2022 question mark these are all events that Bor is claiming to have predicted or at least was able to invest successfully through because of his portfolio strategy a really good example of this is the 1999 Tech bubble and the subsequent Revival of value stocks after the crash in a year 2000 investor letter buy indicates that he didn't predict the exact popping of the speculative Tech bubble but that his approach to picking stocks protected him from it the main accomplishment of the fund in my opinion was not grossing 8.24% in 2 months but rather avoiding such a debilitating devaluations as affected the indices and many widely held stocks during the month I can with some confidence assert that my strategy is entirely designed to avoid and otherwise minimize the price risk in individual Securities his fund only started with 2 months remaining in 2000 but he delivered an 8.25% return compared to the NASDAQ which was - 22.9 he also began buying up small cap value stocks in 2001 predicting that while the internet bubble had burst that the broader Market of larger companies would also suffer in some sort of Aftershock which it did falling over 40% in a 2-year bare Market that only ended in 2002 and bu's list of predictions are almost unanimously large Financial events so the last few words pretty clearly indicate that he's expecting something big to happen by the end of 2022 which again at least for the broader Market did didn't happen of course there was something big financially that happened in late 2022 FTX collapsed and Sam bankman freed was arrested and later found guilty of one of the biggest Financial frauds in history but again with the context of all the other tweets he made in June 2022 it would be kind of silly to give Buy credit for predicting that one specifically just before we get to the next prediction which in my opinion is the most interesting because there's an ongoing element that is relevant to us today I want to quickly talk about the sponsor of today's video Seeking Alpha Seeking Alpha is a massive online community of stock Pickers and the Premium plan has a ton of awesome features for investors expert analysis and news for thousands of different stocks to help you learn the ins and outs of what's going on with companies and the economy you can import and track your own portfolio including adding buy or sell price alerts there are consensus buy hold and sell ratings from Members Wall Street analysts and seeking Alpha's own algorithm you can screen for stocks using a variety of fundamental and technical analysis metrics access up to 10 years of financial data and Company filings also there's a ton of educational content to improve your skills including webinars podcasts and articles and best of all if you click the first link in the description below you can try out a Seeking Alpha premium account completely for free so head over to Hamish hotter.com seekingalpha and try Seeking Alpha premium today a few days after posting those first tweets he wrote this adjusted for inflation 2022 first half S&P 500 down 25 to 26% and NASDAQ down 34 to 35% Bitcoin down 64 to 65% that was multiple compression next up earnings compression so maybe halfway there one way that we can think about how a stock or even an entire Market gets its price or its value is as a factor of two things the earnings of of the companies in the market or the individual stock if you're looking at an individual company and then some kind of earnings multiple that's attached to that earnings for example 12 months before this tweet in June 2021 the S&P 500 had earnings of about $159 per share and it also had an earnings multiple known as a price to earnings ratio of $27 so $159 multiplied by 27 gives you $4,200 193 points or the value or price of the S&P index in June 2021 it's really important to understand both of these factors because it essentially means that even if corporate earnings on average stay flat over a 12-month period or even go up the stock market can still go down if the earnings multiple contracts and what influences the contraction or the expansion of an earnings multiple well one of the biggest factors is changes in interest rates which we saw play out exactly in that way from mid 2021 to Mid 2022 the FED started raising rates to combat inflation and those higher rates pushed the earnings multiple down so even though corporate profits Rose from $159 per share to12 a staggering 21% growth rate the price to earnings ratio of the market declined from 27 to 20 so the market ended up declining by 12% this is what buy was referring to in his tweet where he says that was multiple compression he then says next up earnings compression so maybe halfway there so B's prediction in mid 2022 was that earnings of Corporations would contract significantly and he was right S&P earnings fell from $192 per share to $181 per share as per the latest quarter representing a 6% decline so then why is the stock market it up and not down well you know how earnings multiples contracted from 27 to 20 well it's back up to almost 26 If instead that earnings multiple hadn't gone back up it had stayed at 20 then since Buy's prediction the market would actually be down 4.5% instead of being up considerably okay that was a lot of numbers that I just threw at you so let me just summarize it for those who maybe weren't keeping up we all observed the earnings multiple of the S&P 500 contract and buy was predicting that it would be followed by a contraction in corporate earnings and he was right corporate earnings did contract but what he was wrong about was the ultimate direction of the stock market because the earnings multiple expanded again but then on the flip side maybe he wasn't wrong I mean we could just be seeing a temporary expansion of the multiple maybe it will go back down over time and then buy would be completely right and that actually seems to be Buy's ultimate prediction as indicated in a tweet from August 2022 the New York Times front page the day after the Dow bottomed on the 12th of the 6th 1974 doesn't mention stocks which were down 45% since January 1973 Peak mentioned was the FED cutting rates to 7.75% signaling a credit ease stocks ried 53% in 6 months making a lasting top on that killer mistake in this tweet he's referring to the huge mistake made by the Federal Reserve during the' 70s inflation crisis I have a whole video on this so I won't go into too much detail but essentially the Federal Reserve made a mistake of dropping interest rates too early which made the stock market very happy in the short term But ultimately led to a second inflation Spike the need for further rate Rises and a stock market that declined for over a decade and today the market is experiencing an eerily similar situation ation we had a massive inflation surge the Federal Reserve raised interest rates and the stock market then collapsed but now as inflation has eased almost back to normal levels the market is now expecting the FED to cut rates in 2024 we know this because the oneyear government bond rate is lower than the one Monon Government Bond rate the market is expecting interest rates to be lower in 12 months than they are today and this is also partly why the earnings multiple has expanded recently so we could really summarize all of Buy's predictions in 2022 into one large prediction that we are sitting in a temporary Rising stock market that could turn ugly if another inflation surge is on the horizon in some respects buy hasn't been all that wrong but there are major parts of his predictions that we'll have to wait to see if they materialize Buy's most recent prediction Echoes this sentiment in early 2023 he wrote maybe accompanied by a chart of the stock market Market from 2000 to 2003 which shows an initial 31% decline that began in 2000 followed by a 10% rally which lasted about 6 months before the remainder of the crash occurred another 29% decline over 6 months this prediction is pretty self-explanatory at the beginning of 2023 the market had risen somewhat after a big decline through the majority of 2022 so he thought maybe there would be a further decline in 202 3 and he backed this up with a bet against the S&P 500 and NASDAQ index which he placed some time during the second quarter of 2023 unfortunately we don't know the details of this bet but from the context of his tweets it's very likely that he placed a very very small bet on a large decline in the stock market maybe he was right maybe he wasn't we actually don't know if he made money from this trade unless he decides to tell us about it what we do know is is that the stock market did not go down in 2023 it's up 21% so far making it one of the best years for the market in its history especially if you owned a lot of tech he also tweeted inflation peaked but it's not the last peak of this cycle we are likely to see CPI lower possibly negative in the second half of 2023 and the US in recession by any definition fed will cut and the government will stimulate and we will have another inflation Spike it's not hard which we can firmly say that he was also wrong about the CPI the Consumer Price Index has not gone negative in the second half of 2023 and the US is nowhere near recession US GDP actually grew incredibly fast last quarter at 5.2% annualized rate after inflation I have to give some points to buy for his predictions because he has been right about a lot of stuff that he's said publicly whenever he's been wrong which is a few times times it's because he's placed a timeline on a particular economic event occurring and that right there I think is the most important lesson here I love listening to bu's commentary on the economy because he is very well researched and he understands Market mechanics better than almost anyone but timing these economic predictions is extremely difficult even for the brightest Minds which is why many investors don't consider these big macroeconomic shifts in their investing strategy instead pick Investments that allow you to ride the waves of the economy not one that relies on you knowing whether a recession is coming or not or whether there's another surge of inflation