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Salesforce is now down roughly 30% in the last 14 trading days. 10.5x forward earnings. 14 straight red days. Lowest levels in $CRM since January 2023.
Let that sink in. One of the most dominant enterprise software companies on the planet, profitable, generating massive free cash flow, trading at a multiple you'd normally see on a declining business and it's been red for 14 sessions straight.
This has gone past frustrating into genuinely absurd. Software collapses every single day while semis keep ripping into euphoria that has now exceeded the dotcom bubble. That's not hyperbole. The magnitude of the semiconductor run has surpassed what we saw in 1999-2000. Meanwhile most software names are down 25-35% in three weeks for no identifiable reason. And here's the part that makes it indefensible: there has been more bullish than bearish news flow for SaaS over the past month, and the sector still got torched.
What is actually happening is a liquidity rotation of historic proportions. Capital is being pulled out of entire sectors and funneled into memory and semis. Value plays some genuinely bad, some genuinely strong are being annihilated identically regardless of fundamentals. The market has stopped distinguishing between quality and garbage in the software space. Everything gets sold the same way.
It's like the market treats semis dropping for more than two days as illegal. Nonstop up for about a year. Every dip bought instantly. Every rotation feeds the same handful of names. And the breadth underneath it is some of the worst in market history. A tiny cluster of tech, semis, and AI names dragging the indices to record highs while the other 80% of the market quietly bleeds out.
Meta and Microsoft are both down nearly 20% in about three weeks. On what news? There is no fundamental catalyst that justifies two of the largest, most profitable companies on earth collapsing like that. These aren't speculative names. These are the literal pillars of the index, and they're being treated like falling knives.
Here's the honest part I'm struggling with. Every bear thesis on software has basically been allowed to run unchecked, and the stocks have priced in catastrophe. The AI disruption fear, the seat-based-to-agentic pricing shift, the renewal risk. Those are real debates. But the stocks are now pricing in something close to terminal decline for businesses that are still growing organically at double digits with net revenue retention above 110%. That's not a bear case anymore. That's the market pricing in a death that the fundamentals don't support.
And I'll be blunt about the emotional side too, because I think a lot of people here are feeling it. I'm jealous. Watching low-quality semi and AI names pump hundreds of percent like outright scams while people get filthy rich, while I sit on strong-fundamental companies that have been nuked for a year, is genuinely demoralizing. I own AI names too I'm not anti-tech. But I don't own the garbage that's tripling, and watching the garbage win while quality gets destroyed is its own special kind of pain.
So the real question I'm wrestling with: how does the software and value narrative ever turn around from here? Every bearish possibility has essentially been "proven right" by price action even when the fundamentals say otherwise. It feels impossible to reverse at this point. We might not be in one giant bubble. We might be in dozens of individual bubbles in specific semi and AI names, with moves that will never be repeated by any company in such a compressed timeframe, while everything else sits in a stealth bear market.
It feels like fundamentals simply don't matter anymore in these sectors. It's a massive dump every single day and that is not an exaggeration. Yes, some companies deserve to die and will. But strong businesses are being dragged down in the same sectors for completely unjustifiable reasons, purely because of what bucket they sit in.
And selling here feels brain-dead. Dumping what feels like the bottom to chase overvalued names that have already run hundreds of percent is the textbook way to lock in the worst of both sides. But holding while it bleeds another 5% a day every day tests your conviction in a way nothing else does.
So I'm genuinely asking the people here: what are you actually doing right now? Is anyone buying the beaten-down quality names? Is anyone sitting on their hands? I've already deployed my cash. Hundreds of dips across dozens of companies over a year makes it impossible to keep dry powder available, which is its own lesson about averaging down too early in a specific sector falling market.
This feels like the most illogical, irrational, fundamentally-detached market I've ever participated in. For those of you with real experience through 2000, 2008, 2020. Have you actually seen anything this ridiculous? Because from where I'm sitting, it's only tech, semis, and AI carrying the entire index while everything else gets quietly executed, and the breadth is the worst I've ever seen.
What's genuinely the play here?