4 Times Mark Cuban Was Right About the Stock Market
Mark Cuban knows a thing or two about timing the market. He rose to fame and fortune, after all, by selling Broadcast.com to Yahoo for $5.7 billion when the dot-com bubble was at its highest peak in 1999.
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He went on to buy an NBA team and find television stardom as a celebrity investor — and he has never been shy about offering predictions for the future of business, finance, money and investing. Although he has been wrong — the stock market didn’t crash when Donald Trump was elected — Cuban’s track record is far from shabby when it comes to stock market prophecy.
Here’s a look back at some of his best calls.
2021: Cuban Nails the Interest Rate Percentage That Triggered a Downturn
On Jan. 28, 2021, Mark Cuban told CNBC’s “Squawk Box” that “I hedged the heck out of my portfolio.”
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Cuban explained that he was selling stock due to concerns about overvaluation in several asset classes. Cuban told the show’s hosts that the historically low, near-zero interest rates of that time had led to widespread speculation. The result, he believed, was artificially inflated values that were sure to fall back to Earth once interest rates rose back to around 4% or 5%.
A little more than one year later, in March 2022, interest rates hit 4% for the first time in three years. Just three months later, in June, the Wall Street Journal declared an official bear market, just as Cuban had predicted.
2021: Cuban Calls It — the Hedge Funds Hadn’t Heard the Last of Reddit
In the wake of the GameStop short squeeze, the victorious Redditors’ celebrations were cut short when the stock they saved plunged and the government launched investigations into their activities. Despite the pressure, Cuban did not believe the maverick traders would be sent scurrying back to their online holes.
According to CNBC, Cuban said in early February 2021, “I think now that they’ve recognized their power and now that they’ve learned some lessons, we’re going to get more of it, not less of it. It’s not going to be a set of circumstances where all these people lost money, they’re going to go home with their tail(s) between their legs and they’re never going to do this again.”
Less than five months later, at the end of June, Cuban was validated once again when Insider Monkey reported that Reddit’s WallStreetBets forum — the same one that foiled the big dogs with the GameStop short squeeze — was buying hedge-fund-held stocks like Workhorse Group Inc., UWM Holdings Corporation and Corsair Gaming.
2014: Cuban Bets Big on Netflix at the Start of an Epic Run
It would have been nice to get in on Netflix back when it was trading in the single digits in early 2010 or before — but getting in when it was still at $55 in October 2014 like Cuban did would have been pretty sweet, too.
According to CNBC, Cuban bet $17 million on Netflix’s future that month — just when the stock really started to soar.
By November 2015, one year later, Netflix had more than doubled from $60 to $125. By the end of January 2018, it had more than doubled again, to $275. It crossed the $300 mark in March, then $400 in June. A clear pandemic winner, Netflix breached $500 at the end of the summer in 2020 and continued to peak above $682 in November 2021 before collapsing into oblivion.
There’s no word on whether Cuban got out before Netflix cratered to its current price of around $190; but, even if he held through the company’s recent turmoil, he still would have more than tripled his money between then and now.
2010: Cuban Predicts a Bot-Based Crash
On May 9, 2010, Cuban lamented the rise of traders he accused of using technology to behave like the stock market’s equivalent of hackers. A far cry from investing, these high-frequency traders spent all day using their machines to search out and exploit any weaknesses in the platforms they roamed.
Five months later, “60 Minutes” profiled the same “speed traders” that Cuban had publicly loathed. Their supercomputers could make hundreds or thousands of trades in a fraction of a second, steering entire markets, making it impossible for average investors to make informed decisions and injecting heaping doses of market instability and volatility wherever they went.
One year later, in 2011, the market was racked with the most extreme volatility since 2008, with indices like the Dow plunging more than 500 points on individual trading days in the miserable months of August and September. Many analysts placed at least part of the blame on high-speed trading and the market volatility it created, just as Cuban had predicted.
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4 Times Mark Cuban Was Right About the Stock Market
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