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Novogratz Says Stock Bubble Spurring ‘Dangerous Valuations’

Novogratz Says Stock Bubble Spurring ‘Dangerous Valuations’

Mike Novogratz, the longtime money manager who now runs digital currency investor Galaxy Digital Holdings Ltd., said the stock market is “unhinged from reality” as it rises higher -- and small investors should get out before it crashes.

“We are in irrational exuberance -- this is a bubble,” he said Friday in a Bloomberg Television interview. “The economy is grinding, slowing down, we’re lurching in and out of Covid, yet the tech market makes new highs every day. That’s a classic speculative bubble.”

Wall Street heavyweights including Stan Druckenmiller and David Tepper have been sounding alarms about the stock market for months, yet the S&P 500 index has inched higher, erasing losses spurred by the coronavirus pandemic and notching its best quarter since 1998. The technology-heavy Nasdaq 100 has had an even more dramatic rise.

Novogratz Says Stock Bubble Spurring ‘Dangerous Valuations’

Novogratz said the surge in equities, especially tech stocks, reminds him of the rally in Bitcoin prices in 2017, when the cryptocurrency went from $8,000 to almost $20,000 within a couple months due to retail interest before crashing.

Novogratz said he largely missed out on the tech-stock rally, and has been investing instead in gold and Bitcoin, which are also benefiting from the liquidity propping up the stock market.

“We’re at really dangerous valuations on the growth side, on the tech side,” he said. “If it’s Zoom or Tesla or Beyond Meat, whatever stock has a story, everyone’s rushing in. That gets me worried.”

©2020 Bloomberg L.P.