I am still on house arrest healing from surgery but I think I am starting to feel better because I am getting angry a lot more.

I have done well caged up not to watch any cable news, but any type of news reading has my blood boiling.

Despited all the stupidity around us, the Nasdaq continues to chug higher, now over 8,700 and less than 20 percent from Nasdaq 10,000.

I have been calling for Nasdaq 10,000 the last few years (here are all the posts I have written on the subject) and we seem to be on a push that could get us there in 2020.

We would hit Nasdaq 10,000 tomorrow if someone would finally release a scratch and sniff internet, but I am told that is never going to happen.

As we hit all-time highs on the Nasdaq yesterday, only Apple and Google from FAANG have stayed with the leaders. Amazon, Facebook and Netflix are lagging.

The all-time high list has many names from Healthcare, Biotech, Software, Financials, semiconductors that few have heard of. Yesterday it was Advanced Micro Devices, not Intel, hitting another all-time high.

I liked this tweet from venture capitalist Hunter Walk that captures the magic of technology and our inability to measure the true productivity and even unintended circumstances:

Hunter is optimistic like all us Venture Capitalists.

Leading the pack of optimists is Marc Andreesen who just dropped this 44 minute video interview titled ‘Why We Should Be Optimistic About The Future‘. I think you will enjoy it.

Have a great Friday.

Have a look at the stock chart of Domino’s since 2008:

I think it is the top, if not top 5, performing stocks over this period.

For a moment starting in 2018, it looked like Domino’s would have some strong competition for the ‘Netflix, Disney +, Hulu, ESPN, Cord Cut and Chill Generation, from the other fast food giants as GrubHub, Postmates, Uber Eats, Doordash etc…subsidized customer menu selection with free food delivery.

Why get Domino’s every time when you could get a Big Mac, a burrito or some KFC with the same click of a button?

Times may be changing.

GrubHub’s stock is in perpetual free fall, Postmates may never get public or profitable and Domino’s keeps improving their mobile experience, marketing and product (I don’t know because it has been years since I ordered one).

Like Apple in hardware/software, Domino’s controls every aspect of the pizza making and delivery experience and now the stock is back staring at all-time highs.

I’m kicking myself for not considering it/owing it when it fell 30 percent over the summer.

Domino’s is definitely an 8-80 brand.

Everyone loves a hit IPO. A stock they can but day one and never look back. Microsoft, Chipotles, Cisco….

This year had a few big winners, but we also had a good share of dogs (Tilray and anything weed) and shooting stars (Beyond Meat).

Netflix was not a hot IPO when it came public. Facebook was a disaster for months. Etsy fell over 60 percent and Match.com (Tinder) was not an instant hookup with shareholders. Both climbed over 1,000% from their IPO lows.

I was reminded of the idea of checking in on the year’s IPO’s by Compass Capital.

The team at Koyfin built this great interactive IPO page that lists the IPO’s and allows you to sort by all kinds of market performance and financial metrics.

I check it monthly to see what is in and out of favor amongst the glamor money.

This month it is biotech IPO’s and the big winner from the sector is a company called Karuna Therapeutics.

Other than checking the all-time high list (which I do every evening), this IPO list that Koyfin created is a fantastic resource for spending a few minutes each week or month to get a feel for the strength of the market and which sectors may be the ones to watch.

I am not used to being off my feet and at 10 percent capacity. Jello and Netflix just is not doing it for me. Don’t get me wrong, it is 1,000 times better than being in a hospital.

Right now, Ellen is fighting with the insurance company to get me my post op tests I need to get some tubes removed so that I can mend faster.

The system is working against us.

Obviously, sick Americans deal with this nonsense everyday.

On the plus side, t has been interesting to have home health nurses come to do specific tasks each day at our home. As a patient, it feels very efficient and the nurses I have met seem to love it.

I have the wound machine attached to my belly wound and every other day a nurse comes to change the dressing and reseal it.

I have leaned to give myself the antibiotics through an IV line.

Today I am going to start reading ‘The Price We Pay – What Broke American Healthcare And How To Fix It‘. It is written by Marty Makary MD and is a New York Times Bestseller.

The next 100 years will see a revolution in healthcare and education. It is inevitable.

I hope to be back making my weekly Momentum Monday with Ivanhoff next week. I have had to miss the last three weeks as I recover.

Yesterday, Ivanhoff took time off from his weekend Bulgarian Birthday Bash to do the show himself.

He does a great job touring the markets and pointing out the areas of strength.

You can watch/listen right here.

A sector that has not gotten much attention hat looks to be ready to join the all-time highs is the US financial index.

The most popular ETF of the sector is $XLF. I don’t follow it closely because Berkshire Hathaway is actually the largest component of the index and they own so much Wells Fargo that it has perennially underperformed.

My friend JC charted it for us here:

The cousins of the $XLF have already surpassed their 2007 highs:

I have been pretty stubborn avoiding banks and insurance stocks and sticking to payment stocks, but the broadening of financial stock leadership is underway.

As for sexy software stocks?….

The momentum continues to come out of them. It might last 3 months more or it could go on for 12 months, but right now rotation is into biotech, healthcare, financials and large cap tech.

Have a great week.

As a reminder, Marketsmith (by Investor’s Business Daily) is now a sponsor of the weekly show. All the charts you have been seeing in the videos and will continue to see are from Marketsmith. They are offering my readers a three week trial for $19.95. Click this link if you would like to try it out.

First off…I want to thank everyone in this community for the thousands of well wishes the last few weeks. It made a big difference getting notes of encouragement and support.

I think it will take another month of rest at home to regain my stamina and mobility but I now see a light at the end of the tunnel. I definitely did not see that just last week.

I wanted to share some great reads I have come across the last few days.

Fist off is a latest Paul Graham essay (YCombinator founder) titled ‘The Lesson To Unlearn‘

This GQ article titled ‘The Great Chinese Art Heist‘ is pretty wild.

The ‘Jungle Prince of Delhi‘ is a fantastic NY Times piece.

This Justin Jackson piece titled ‘Moving On‘ is a bit of a different take on what it takes to be successful…

In our culture, stopping is often seen as failure. We’re taught to persevere; to keep going. But we need to emphasize the opposite: people should feel free to quit.

Most of the successful people I know are good at quitting! When things aren’t working, they move on:

Last but not least, my sweet ‘fashology’ trend is in the news a lot recently but mostly about the damage that ‘fast fashion’ and the fashology products of $LULU are causing the environment. Have a read of ‘Microfibers Are The New Microbeads. Grab Your Pitchforks.’

I don’t think this story will be going away anytime soon and the industry will have to make major improvements to processes.

Have a great Sunday.

Each time a doctor would come to ask me questions about my surgery the last few weeks at the hospital, I would turn the table and ask a bunch of questions about the equipment, tools and brands that stood out in their industry.

Early this year I added the $IHI (Medical Device ETF) to my 8 to 80 portfolio. Here is a 10 year chart:

(quick tip – using Koyfin.com which is free you can dig into the components of every ETF)

There are massive demographic tailwinds behind the global medical device and healthcare industry.

Here are what these tailwinds have looked like for other healthcare sectors – the $XLV, Amgen and $PPH (Big Pharma ETF):

Of course trends can end and bear markets will come along to make these pretty charts look like hell, but that does not change the fact that over the next 30-50 years a huge component of the S&P and the GDP of the USA will continue to come from the healthcare economy.

If you want to geek out and stay ahead of big trends in the healthcare industry, follow along the a16z content as they have excellent podcast on everythng from nursing to biology.

Have a great weekend.

PS – This article in the Atlanic titled ‘The Great American Eye-Exam Scam‘ was great.

Right now it hurts to do pretty much everything including laughing. My gut is one big scar. Naturally, this video surfaced yesterday that I could not stop watching despite each laugh ripping at my wound. Hope you enjoy and make sure to have the sound up.

Onwards…

Yesterday Ellen broke me out of prison (the hospital) and we carried a bunch of wires and tubes home so that I could continue my recovery from the comfort of my own home.

The last two weeks – selfishly – have been sheer hell. Time was standing still for me. I have never been in a hospital more than three days and this stay was two weeks. I was in this mixed state of pain and fear the whole time as my body was not processing food. I did not eat anything outside a tube for the last two weeks.

I got lucky that my late night emergency room walk in a few weeks back placed me in great hands that diagnosed the problem quickly and stuck me in an ambulance to a sister hospital that took fantastic care of me. I got lucky that the chief of Surgery (Dr. Lipton) at the hospital was a general surgeon. General Surgeons focus on the organs within the abdomen, including the stomach and colon.

So now I am home and have another 6-8 weeks of mostly bedrest.

I have lost a lot of weight and feel pretty beaten up. I don’t have an appetite.

Because of the weak appetite I have no energy so will have to hack some foods and vitamins to build some sort of routine to not fall much further behind with work.

Day by day, but at least I am home with Ellen and my puppy and the Phoenix sun all around.

Yesterday, portfolio company Kustomer.com announced a $60 million series E.

The quick deets (which are impressive):

Kustomer, a CRM startup that’s taking on the likes of Zendesk, Salesforce and many other bigger and older providers, has closed yet another round of funding — no less than its third fundraise of the year — as it continues to double down on its new approach to managing customers in today’s digital world.

The New York-based company has picked up another $60 million, a Series E led by new investor Coatue, with participation from existing investors Tiger Global Management and Battery Ventures. Other investors in the company include Redpoint Ventures, Cisco Investments, Canaan Partners, Boldstart Ventures and Social Leverage.

CEO Brad Birnbaum — who co-founded the company with Jeremy Suriel (the two worked together across a range of other places, including Airtime, Salesforce and AOL) — said the valuation is now “definitely above $500 million” but he declined to be more specific.

The New York-based company has been on a growth tear and has raised more than $161 million in the last 18 months

Back in 2016 I started writing about ‘How The Death Of Retail Is The Birth of Retail’. I updated it earlier this year.

Crypto, Paypal, Shopify, Mastercard, Visa, Facebook, Alibaba and Amazon wont rest because they cant rest..

We continue to hear about brands (consumer and omnichannel) that seem to burst out of nowhere. They do so because of platforms like Kustomer.

In his spare time, Brad likes to call me and ask me if he should keep buying $QQQ with all his spare cash. No matter what I say, he does.

Brad understands the leverage coming into the Nasdaq 100 from ecommerce software like his own.

Of course valuations continue to seem high and hectic…but from the eyes of Coatue and Tiger Global once enterprise companies like Kustomer hit a certain size, their channel checks on public companies they own like Zendesk start turning up customers switching over to Kustomer and that his how rounds like this can end up coming together.

I have now spent the last 12 days in the hospital, but I should be breaking free for home care by Thursday.

I was woefully unprepared for such a long stay and I learned a lot about myself in the process.

On day one in the emergency room, I heard the term ‘bowel blockage’, looked it up and thought…’I got this’.

By day two, I had to have an NG Tube jammed through my nose directly into my stomach (have a watch). It is easy to read google healthcare definitions, but it’s hard to put all the subtleties into context.

This battle I have had the last few weeks is no different than a trade I put on with terrible odds and poor information.

By the time I was diagnosed, I was so far behind the information curve and the strength necessary to get out in front it that the trade (bowel obstruction) was beyond me.

Speaking of Google, Yesterday Sergei And Larry stepped down from executive roles and handed more control to Sundar Pichai. Good for everyone (I believe shareholders too) Sergei and Larry want to have more fun. Booyah to that lovely idea.

It was easy to find the dumbest sound bite/headline of the day on the news …I searched CNBC and Google and got this:

Sundar Pichai will have to step it up to become the wartime CEO Alphabet needs.

Gimme a break with ‘wartimes/peactime CEO monikers.

Maps, YouTube, Search, Travel, Android, Cloud, Cyber Security, Healthcare. I do think financial services including insurance are inevitable

Let’s please not forget how many thousands of great seed stage companies Google must see each year whose sites, tools, products, bubble up amongst google engineers solving google problems. Google is an endless opportunity (oceans, land and space) of margins.

Everyone will have a complicated reaction to the news. I would shred most of them.