re: Is Everything "In A Bubble" Right Now?

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after the RE crash in 2008, for example, they flooded the oil futures market with speculation, which inflated the shite out of those prices

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Well thats not true at all, oil was running up to 100+ before the crash.

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It's my opinion that this crazy run is due to insanely cheap money

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Agreed.

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and the growing wealth gap

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I somewhat disagree. The "too much money and nowhere to put it" problem isn't just an issue for the wealthy (though admittedly they do have more than others) but for everyone and is a result of cheap money. Many people on this board and other forums aren't wealthy, but they are all searching for an acceptable return in a market environment that I've seen described as bad for value investing.

As far as the OP goes, I don't know if anything is or is not in a bubble. However, I like to tell myself that, "if everyone knows something is an opportunity, then it's no longer an opportunity." In fact, that's usually a good time to take profits or put in a trailing stop loss order because when everyone jumps into "obvious" opportunities, there won't be much more money and people to push it further.

Yeah Amazon could have a PE of 25 right now if they really wanted to

Maybe, but it depends a lot on the type of investment strategy involved. There are so many different flavors of active investment strategies, and all professionals should be able to beat their benchmark. Generally speaking, the shorter the time horizon for the strategy, the higher the profit margin for beating any benchmark, but also the lower the scalability. The long horizon types of strategies (like classic Ben Graham value investing) is more scalable, but can make anybody investor look bad for years, through no fault of his own.

I've been thinking about launching an incubator hedge fund lately. (See e.g., LINK, or LINK, or LINK). The idea would be to construct an investment process using some of Hussman's metrics to be flexible in adjusting leverage ratios for passive investments. I think Hussman has the best underlying macro stock market analysis, but that he doesn't implement it very well. Designing an investment architecture that could beat him doesn't seem like the hard part. The hard part is getting the data sourcing component of it right, and improving upon Hussman's execution process in such a way as to include other stuff (when to do futures vs. options vs. int'l allocations vs. commodities/currencies, plus other selected targeted value buys), and how to convince potential investors that it's something more than just a gussied up market timing scheme.... which to be honest, it kinda is.

But screw it. If can throw in $100k or $200k into a startup incubator fund, and throw a few thousand dollars into setting up the paperwork, then at least I have a chance to draw legitimate outside investors in if it succeeds over the next 2-3 years. If you perform like crap, you lose a few thousand dollars in fees, plus you have to live with poor performance on your capital... but at least it's still your own money that you would have invested anyway. If you perform well and get outstanding returns during a 18-24 month bear market, and then hit the breaks at the right time, execute a 180-degree hard reverse, and lever up to beat the benchmark as the market goes bullish again, then that should be something difficult for potential investors to resist looking at, supposing that an auditable track record exists.

And of course, once you get $10-15 million in AUM, you can quit your day job and live off the management fees, while also paying other people to improve your model. So the plan is throwing a cowboy scheme (a "variable leverage quantitative long-short fund"?) at the market today, seeing if your hunch can start hard out the gates, and getting someone else to back-test it and optimize the parameters for you later. My own personal core competency would be in creating a general design for the process, and being able to formally document it as a legitimate investment model, complete with executive summaries, investor presentations, and all that stuff.

I'm just brainstorming here, by the way. All of this is probably months away. In the meantime, I should probably learn how to get better with my data sourcing, and one little project would be learning how to construct Graham screeners in Excel using public financial data. I wonder how many people have actually done these Graham screeners. Here are a couple of examples:

Forbes (5/11/17): " If Benjamin Graham Were Alive, What Value Stocks Would He Find?" by John Navin

2100 stocks --> (1yr-trailing P/E < 15) --> 251 stocks
251 --> (P < B) --> 58
58 --> (most recent E > E-from-5-years-ago) --> 31
31 --> (long-term D < X% of E) --> 8
8 --> (div > 0) --> 2

Cabot Wealth Network (8/31/17): " Benjamin Graham’s Seven Criteria for Picking Value Stocks"

And these are a couple of YouTube videos on how to create one using Yahoo data:

TimevalueVideos (YouTube, 10/30/14): " Automatically Download Stock Price data from Yahoo Finance"
TimevalueVideos (YouTube, 8/10/16): " Automatically Download Stock Metrics data from Yahoo Finance"

I did my own stock screener, starting with Benjamin Graham metrics and then adding some other items.

My criteria are as follows:

Price/Book between 0 and 1
P/E between 0 and 15
Debt/Total Capital between 0 and 0.45
Positive 5 year revenue growth
Positive Return on Equity
Price/Cash Flow between 0 and 50
Share Price over $3
Average Daily Volume over 100k shares
Available on US exchanges

This way, we obtain:

Enough volume to be traded
Positive Cash flow
A Company that makes money
A company not valued at an outrageous price multiple
A company that can afford its debt
A company worth its capitalization on paper

Here are the results:

Atwood Oceanics
Apollo Commercial
Prudential Finacial
Big 5 Sporting Goods
Hibbett Sports
Axis Capital
Maiden Holdings
Vitamin Shoppe
Genesco
Nuveen
American Equity
PennyMac
Korea Electric
SORL Auto Parts
Fidelity National Bank
OFG Bancorp
Net 1UEPS Tech
Argo Group
Wells Fargo
Reaves Utility
Solar Capital

A lot of this is junk of course but two that catch my eye are Wells Fargo and Korea Electric

What happened to the sector, political stuff?

NAFTA has been great for ag. I can't speak for anything else, but ag greatly benefited from Mexican trade. It's not just rice, either. Loads of Texan cotton goes straight to Mexico. A good bit of grain as well.

I don't look for any sort of major ag commodity recovery in the near future, but hopefully I'm wrong. I doubt any help is soon coming from D.C.

What is fake about it?