Why is the stock market up 30%+ from pre-Covid levels?

The strange thing is its across the board. Stocks, all sectors, commodities, bitcoin, home prices, obviously treasuries. There's nowhere to put your money that's safe.

Even if you pull out completely, if we have inflation and a subsequent market crash, this will eat away your capital. Taking your chips off the table isn't an option.

Gold isn't really behaving normally as a large chunk of it is controlled by central banks around the world. If there were a flight to gold, regulators could also restrict access to gold as they did during the Great Depression through executive order [0]

TIPs (treasury inflation protected securities) is an option but that doesn't work if you think inflation numbers are not accurately reflecting cost of living. Not to be a conspiracy theorist, but you have to consider that trillions of dollars are at stake in terms of social security alone, so there's an incentive to under-report inflation.

I'm just trying to understand what can be done.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_6102

It’s (the start of hyper)inflation, plain and simple. Almost a fifth of all circulating dollars were created in 2020. And they keep printing money.. The dollar lost a lot of value and we see it first in asset prices, soon the real economy will follow. So don’t see it as stocks rising 30 % but the dollar losing 30 % of its value.

A lot of people had started investing because they don't know what to do with the money. When you stop spending money on restaurants or vacation or other stuff which is no longer available, you end up surplus. So why not invest it in the stock market?

Covid pulled back the curtain on the mechanics of society. Everyone’s realized it’s all a facade and we’re playing with funny money, so may as well keep dancing until the music stops. It also helps that the US Fed printed a bunch of money and gave it to unsophisticated investors to speculate with.

I've wondered about this myself. The best I have come up with is that the global wealth inequality is increasing. There is more demand for investments, across the board, and the demand is growing at a linear or greater rate. Therefore, the price for everything is going up.

Pretty much every GenX, GenY and GenZ has been told to put their savings in the stock market, "it's a sure bet", "it will be up by the time you retire", "just put it and forget it". I am not saying this advice is wrong. But considering that everyone literally does the same thing, it is not surprising that we see such behavior.

Everything you "think," is wrong. Go research data and make an informed decision when you see a causation not related to correlation. It's fairly simple. The market is trending up right now.

I could think of it this way. Covid hit, and it did a lot of damage to economic activity. The various authorities responded by pouring a bunch of money into the system, trying to avert catastrophe. They overshot a bit, and that money wound up in places like the stock market. (Note that it's better that they overshoot by a bit and create a bit of a market bubble, rather than undershoot a bit and let the real economy suffer some damage.)

Note well: I am not sure that this is the correct explanation.

In general, Hacker News has an atrocious understanding of finance. You see some absolutely swivel-eyed nonsense being given the time of day here by people who should really know better.

I'd recommend looking for a few "What's the economic outlook?" articles somewhere like the Financial Times for a more reasonable and better qualified view. I think the FT Alphaville blog is still free to read once you register. That's generally good.

Nevertheless I will go ahead and answer the question with no sense of shame or irony.

> Does anyone have any explanation as to why asset prices are up so much across the board apart from fed easy money policy?

You mentioned a huge part of it already. Another big part is the spillover effect of the monetary policy of every other major central bank in the world. It means governments can borrow extremely cheaply to prop up businesses and provide extra social protection to their citizens, without the spectre of brutal austerity budgets in the next couple of years.

The flipside of this protection is that bond yields are on the floor (and yes, the recent uptick from "on the floor" is still basically "on the floor"), so a lot of the money that needs a home ends up in the stock market, pushing up prices. This is kind of by design, for better or for worse. A lot of money ends up in property too, which is arguably why housing crises are getting more and more common around the world.

In the USA there's also anticipation of Joe Biden's stimulus plan, which is really very big indeed. It's argued (gently, by only some economists) that it will boost consumer demand in many areas that don't need any extra boosting. Some of this anticipation is manifesting itself in stock prices.

> Is there any way this could end well?

Depends what you mean by "end well", but basically yes, I think so. It's not likely to be a rerun of 1929 or 2008, for Keynesian contra-cyclical spending reasons that I'm not qualified to get into. There could well be a correction/mean-reversion/crash, but that's true of any time period. There might be a kind of Japanese-style slow/no growth eventually. There might be a major war or a natural disaster that upends everything again. It's hard to know.

I would also say that your "indefinitely" timeframe of 3 to 5 years is way too short. Especially for investing as opposed to day-trading, you need to be able to take the rough with the smooth over many years. If the stock market risk seems too high at the moment, just put your money in cash and eat the negligible or mildly negative real returns.

I can't speak for the whole market, but in the sectors I casually follow (electric vehicles, tech, airlines), there were legitimate reasons for the rally:

ELECTRIC VEHICLES: A LOT of new electric cars have finally entered their production runs this year. It just so happened that 2020 was the year in which many manufacturers planned to drop their answers to the Model S/Model 3. Remember: big auto usually plans in 2-3 year increments, so all of the options you're seeing now were potentially drafted up back in 2017-2018 when the Model 3 entered production.

(The Model 3 was really what lit a fire under everyone's ass. Big auto saw that Tesla could produce a car that is mainstream-affordable without compromising on mileage, battery tech, or safety. That + Tesla making most of the car's core features built into software (which kills the whola idea of options and packages, a HUGE moneymaker) and their world-class driver assistance tech meant that automakers had to do _something_. People love to hate on Tesla, but the Model 3 is really what started Tesla's share price rocketing to the moon.)

There have also been significant advancements in the fast-charging networks available for these cars. Electrify America has grown a lot in 2020, likely due to COVID and businesses preparing for re-opening in 2021. Tesla has significantly expanded their network as well. The theory is that businesses that add fast-charging stations to their parking lots (and actually _enforce_ them) instantly gain access to a small, but growing, set of affluent consumers with time to kill. No better time to build these chargers than when everything is closed, assuming that you had the spare cash to do it. (Tesla pays for everything if they select your site as a supercharging location; it's an awesome incentive to bolster the network.)

AIRLINES: A rally was pretty much inevitable. COVID absolutely killed demand for travel, but "everyone" agreed that flying was going to happen again once we got the virus under control and a vaccine was made available. Additionally, COVID fast-tracked several aircraft retirements that were going to happen years down the line. American retired the B767 last year, Delta the MD80/MD90, Emirates the A380. COVID also forced airlines to rethink their digital strategies (to respond to fast-changing CDC standards) and think outside the box for other revenue streams (American's wine subscription comes to mind). All of these things made airlines more efficient, which is usually rewarded through their EPS.

Additionally, Boeing was finally able to get the 737MAX recertified by the FAA after. The 737MAX brings great fuel efficiencies and longer range over the 737NG models. Pretty much every airline is going to add several of these to their fleet. There's also the 777 replacement that's on the way that promises similar fuel efficiency gains and potentially longer range. (I'm hoping that it can do DFW-DEL, but I'm not holding my breath on that one.)

TECH: First of all, holy shit, like, A BILLION companies IPOed in 2020. It was like COVID didn't happen. Also, think of how many companies saw absolutely maniacal growth due to the world instantly going remote: food/grocery delivery (Instacart and DoorDash especially, doubly so in regions were delivery wasn't normally popular), any company that did videoconferencing (remember last March when basically EVERY cloud provider was short on hardware because of the sudden demand for VC?), EdTech, etc. The only tech companies that were directly affected by COVID were ones that were in the industries that were directly affected by COVID (travel, hospitality); to everyone else, it was basically turbulence.

In fact, I remember companies were going on hiring sprees during the first and second wave. Anecdotally, my inbox was ON FIRE during this period. This made me feel bad: in a world in which millions were losing their jobs, I had more choice than ever before...

GENERAL NOTES: The other thing to consider is that special-purpose acquisition companies (SPACs) and direct listing became really popular in 2020. This made it possible for companies to get access to capital much more quickly. So many companies are going public through SPACs: WeWork, SoFi, Lucid, hell, even fucking TOPPS (yes, the baseball card company) is in this game now. It's great for retail investors (they can get in at pre-IPO prices without having to be accredited investors or a having private bank account with lower risk than going through secondary markets), great for businesses (since they can go public more quickly), and great for the SPACs (since they take shares off the top and make insane money once the merger completes)