Meta is up 90% over three years and 10% over two.
Read those two numbers again, because almost everybody quotes the first one and almost nobody checks the second.
Both numbers are real, and what separates them is that every dollar of that gain arrived in a single stretch before the stock sat down and did nothing for twenty-four months.
Dead money wearing a good costume, and once you know to look for it, it is everywhere in big tech right now.
Set any chart to three years and then to two. The gap between those two numbers tells you when the stock did its work.
Meta is the cleanest example. 90% over three years, 10% over two, and the last time it made a genuine strategic move was 2023.
Tesla runs about 46% over three years, and all of the positive price action came at the front of that window.
Microsoft is up roughly 52% over three years, and nearly all of it came from one stretch last summer. That was the software apocalypse, when the market decided the whole sector was finished and then a few weeks later decided it was the coolest kid on the block again.
Amazon has gone more or less flat on the year.
Apple is up about 18%, and it is being used as a defensive position because it carries less AI exposure than the rest of them.
Only two names pass cleanly. Google has genuine performance across the full window, and Nvidia is up something like 350% over three years.
Why this matters more than usual
Because the three-year window is about to become the two-year window.
Those big gains from 2023 are rolling off the back of the chart. When they do, the flattering number disappears and what is left is whatever the stock has done recently, which for most of this group is close to nothing.
The story people are telling themselves about big tech is built on a return that is aging out.
What a wide gap means
You are not holding a winner that is resting.
You are holding something that already had its move, and you have been giving it credit for work it did in a completely different market, under rates that no longer exist.
Which raises a question that has nothing to do with whether you are up on the position.
Would you buy it today, at this price, knowing what the last twenty-four months looked like?
Most people cannot answer that, and the reason they cannot is that they have never separated the return from when the return happened.
There is a structural version of that problem too. If you own something without a defined worst case, the only frame you have for judging it is whether you are green, which is exactly the frame that keeps people sitting in dead positions for two years.
On Thursday at noon Eastern I am walking through how I structure positions so that question answers itself before I ever put the trade on.
It’s 100% free to attend. And for one lucky person, they’ll walk away with $2,000 just for showing up.
To your success,
Don Kaufman
P.S. The pushback I get on this is that a gain is a gain, and who cares when it arrived.
It matters because a stock that made its money two years ago and has done nothing since is not resting. It is being held up by people who are up on it and have no reason to sell yet, and when those people find a reason, there is nothing underneath.
