Stocks Have Become 'Commodified'

This column was originally published on RealMoney on June 13 at 9:26 a.m. EDT. It's being republished as a bonus for TheStreet.com readers.

Nobody wants to bid on anything. That's the real takeaway from the Lehman Brothers(LEH) earnings conference call. When people speak of "no liquidity," that's just code for "I don't want anything, go sell it to someone else."

What's most compelling to me is that we always thought that one day, stocks would trade just like commodities, regardless of the underlying worth of the companies they represent. We always figured that a day would come where equities were just copper or aluminum and they would rise and fall together. That day is here.

I see no differentiation between the way gold or palladium has fallen and the way that Apple(AAPL) or Boeing(BA) has fallen. There might be the most positive pieces of news out for these two companies, but the fact is that they are stocks and the stocks aren't trading right now on the fundamentals of the companies; they are trading as parts of baskets that no one wants.

In particular, I am seeing whole countries trade in lockstep, regardless of the fundamentals of individual companies.

Could all of these markets simply have gotten too high? Yes.

Are all of their stocks too low now? No.

But some of them will have a value outside of the baskets. Maverick Tube(MVK) did today, with the Tenaris(TS) bid. Houston Exploration(THX) did Monday with the Jana Partners bid.

Are these needles in haystacks? I don't know. The declines have come so fast and furious that I have to believe that, while these few examples of value may be needles in a haystack, if we keep this pace up we're going to have an awful lot of needles in the haystack. A bear just might get pricked if he's not careful.

But no need to be careful yet, not when every stock in every market is getting hit as if it was part of a wheat or corn basket.

All wheat and all corn may be very alike, but not all companies are.

We just don't know that yet in this free fall.

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