The market is so possessed by tech that it can’t see the forest through the industrials. If the discourse isn’t about the slowdown in the cloud, it’s about who is pulling out of the now-private Twitter, or how disappointing it is that co-CEO Bret Taylor left Salesforce (CRM). Meta Platforms ‘ (META) Mark Zuckerberg could sneeze and Amazon (AMZN) CEO) Andy Jassy cough and it’s a bigger deal than United Airlines ‘ (UAL) order for 100 Dreamliners from Boeing (BA). We don’t pay much attention to the industrials anymore. There aren’t that many of them. We are used to them being hostage to so many forces of negativity that they just aren’t worth our focus. That’s wrong. The Dow Jones Industrial Average has done so much better than the average semiconductor company, or even the above-average enterprise software company that it’s insane that we even focus on some of the latter. The 600 companies formed in the last two years rent too much of your brain space even in passing. Advertising, which turned out to be the Achilles heel of everything internet and media, just seems to have vanished. There’s not enough of it to feed the mouths of all of the players and nobody seems to be able to reach the 18- to 24-year-olds with whatever they spend. So they are shelling out a fraction of what they used to spend. It’s so bad that we cheer when a semiconductor company like Marvell Technology (MRVL), guides down and it only edges the stock down slightly. That gives the market hope that some of the inventory glut for chips is near its end. In the meantime, the unheralded industrials gap up on any S & P 500 run, where there never seems enough stock ahead to where you find sellers. I will go into the ones that intrigue — but first, let me just say that the biggest problem with so many of these techs is that there is so much supply at every level. Someone is always a seller. There’s always merchandise up a penny. And it is sizable. The orders, if you could hear them would be something like, “sell 50,000 shares every five cents thereabout for the next dollar and then I will reload when I get my report if there is enough time left at the end of the day. I don’t want to hurt the stock too much because I have so much behind it.” There is endless selling in anything related to the cloud and it isn’t just from the price target reductions. It is from insiders who sense that the era is over and they all compete with each other now, even Amazon, Alphabet (GOOGL) and Meta get that. When the biggest issue with Meta is how much time is Zuckerberg really working on his alleged metaverse pipedream, instead of the highly profitable but slow-growing Instagram, you know you are way too deep in the weeds. Now I want you to hit up the stock of Caterpillar (CAT). When you are in the deep stages of a Federal Reserve interest rate tightening I would normally say that this may be the single best short in the book. Shorting a stock means betting it will go down. But not this time. There is…
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