These 2 Stocks Could Go to Zero
Famed value investor Benjamin Graham introduced Mr. Market in his 1949 book The Intelligent Investor. Mr. Market, an allegory used to describe the irrational, erratic, and emotional behavior that can drive stock prices up and down, is a good lens through which to view the pandemic-era ups and downs of certain stocks.
Carvana (NYSE: CVNA) and Coinbase (NASDAQ: COIN) have never made much sense as businesses, at least to me. Carvana operates car vending machines and an online used car buying and selling platform, using billions in debt to fund expansion while losing money on every single car it sells. Coinbase charges high transaction fees on trades through its cryptocurrency exchange, a model that only works during times of extreme euphoria in the cryptocurrency markets.
The pandemic convinced Mr. Market that both of these companies were worth tens of billions of dollars. Carvana benefited from soaring demand and prices for used cars, a situation that Mr. Market seemingly believed would last forever. And Coinbase temporarily earned billions in profit as retail traders frantically traded digital tokens as cryptocurrency prices exploded, leading Mr. Market to turn a blind eye to that fact that cryptocurrency has little utility and no intrinsic value whatsoever.
Source Fool.com
