Back in October 2007, sensing a little too much froth in the stock market, I created something I called the OHFdex, which began as a “watch list of Overripe High Fliers” and quickly evolved into an index designed to track 14 such stocks. When the markets turned down, the group was pummeled, with some spectacular crashes from the likes of CROCS (CROX), Las Vegas Sands (LVS), DryShips (DRYS) and others.

As stocks have continued their rise, I have thought about resurrecting the OHFdex, but I have not found sufficient reason to do so, until recently. The rise of social media stocks and some of the attendant valuations are the reason for my reconsidering the OHFdex. Clearly there will be winners as well as losers in this space, but relatively high valuations for LinkedIn (LNKD), Groupon (GRPN), Zynga (ZNGA), Pandora (P), Yelp (YELP), Angie’s List (ANGI), Jive Software (JIVE) and others have raised my eyebrows and even the launch of a Social Media ETF (SOCL, holdings) is enough to give me pause. The problem is that I have trouble picking the big winner from this group, particularly when adjusted for current market capitalization. The temptation is to short them all, but for now at least, it is time to put these stocks and counterparts such as RENN, YOKU,SOHU, REDF, DMD, FFN, etc. into a social media OHFdex and see how things play out.

I’m not saying this is October 2007 or tech media bubble 2.0, but every coal mine needs at least one canary.

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