Financial topics

[Cool Breeze]

Here's an interesting extract from John Mauldin's weekly letter published today:

Investors trusted their financial advisor who trusted a fund manager who trusted FTX. All these people now have a lot of explaining to do. This kind of trust, once broken, is very hard to regain.

If the FTX drama ends there, then it will have been just drama—terrible for those involved but leaving others unharmed. Will it end there? Right now, it doesn’t look like it will. There appears to be a great deal of contagion brewing.

I think that FTX has the potential to be the biggest financial debacle of our lives. Bigger than Enron, bigger than Madoff.

I recall Vince that you asked this question last week?

It definitely is and it is quite obviously a political laundering scam of epic proportions.

[aeden]

Yes you are correct.

Also, Bjorn Lomborg.
Stewardship facts.
We started locally before the AI mapped the current formation.
White papers matter. The plain truth is what we already know that devleoped.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NIMLW2RundY

Our small cluster group knew since the isa55 solution map they are corupt in the game theory predator role.
Not cryptic many still behind and the abject proverty their plan not ours.
GD initial map is the relationship of the ration and the developements.

They are misleading you.

A few feet of snow. Winter as like 77
Wife look good in that sweater.
For myself sutures out end of the month.
No good deed goes unpunished we are told from the Locusts.

Planning per acre increases on what we have since as you remember we built soil from the chemical farmer cult.
Takes time since most cannot fathom stewardship in His Garden.
Hume was also right about them. Avarice the spur of greed.

Cashless society is the nail in the coffin for liberty and freedom Senator.

Wake up. Grow a set.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ezA49W-YxAc

[aeden]

https://cms.zerohedge.com/s3/files/inli ... k=vXvEvMLC
Like a servitor entity, an egregore is created—whether intentionally or otherwise—by people.

Review from the notes, http://sjoptions.com/portfolios/vega-multipliers/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QJf8GGsDjNU s file face melt - trigger week was noted

thread: vega, OOu07mxfmJk

[Tom Mazanec]

aeden, either talk clearly or don't talk.

[aeden]

Clearly the machines own this market.
Enjoy your stamp collection.
As for the RNC we will stay home.
Disney is back on the consider list as they trash canned the woke tardian CEO.

Americans’ holdings of corporate equities and mutual fund shares fell to $33 trillion at the end of the second quarter,
down from $42 trillion at the start of the year, according to data from the Federal Reserve.

The wealthy are bearing the largest losses, since they own an outsize share of stocks.
The top 10% of Americans have lost over $8 trillion in stock market wealth this year, which marks a 22% decline in their stock wealth,
according to the Federal Reserve.
The top 1% has lost over $5 trillion in stock market wealth. The bottom 50% have lost about $70 billion in stock wealth.

We consider ourselves clear enough avoiding the wasting.

In the big picture and rendered in a philosophical sense, humanity seems to have lost its ability to learn from its own errors. Put in more gritty terms, too many people among ruling-class interests gained financially and in terms of the lust for power during the pandemic to prompt any serious rethinking and reform.

The spillever is not done in our view also. https://www.zerohedge.com/covid-19/they ... down-again

The bottom line the Banks will crush anything and one they can and are.

[Cool Breeze]

I will likely only hold oil stocks and gold (as well as btc miners), if I do, past next month. Should I sell this week or wait a few weeks, regarding the remainder of what I have, in order to further increase my cash position?

[richard5za]

I will likely only hold oil stocks and gold (as well as btc miners), if I do, past next month. Should I sell this week or wait a few weeks, regarding the remainder of what I have, in order to further increase my cash position?

Short term timing advice is very tricky, but medium term in my view there is still some downward action to come on stocks.

[Cool Breeze]

I will likely only hold oil stocks and gold (as well as btc miners), if I do, past next month. Should I sell this week or wait a few weeks, regarding the remainder of what I have, in order to further increase my cash position?

Short term timing advice is very tricky, but medium term in my view there is still some downward action to come on stocks.

Your best guess is what then (tell me your definition of short and medium)?

[Higgenbotham]

As to what causes the above and what it means for the US economy, it's pretty obvious.

Most managements are using far less than 20% of their work force to carry the remaining 80%+ dead wood. We discussed the square root rule here. It's something like the square root of the number of employees in an organization do half of the work.

A corollary of the above is when you have the amount of dead wood you have in the US work force, you have to have large organizations to carry the dead wood. Too big to fail becomes temporary stopgap reality because it's the only option.

What is described in the above post becomes reality when you have an incompetent management that wants to ride the gravy train and carry incompetent employees instead of going to the work of firing them and training competent employees, and has a lifeline to the government teat. That's why the debt is tens or hundreds of trillions, how ever you want to count it, and going higher literally by a trillion with every news cycle.

Enter Elon Musk.

Not a bad summary:

https://twitter.com/GRDecter/status/159 ... f3y6EsAAAA

Some of it:

2/
It’s the worst-kept secret that the Majors are 2-3x over-employed.

Elon is proving you don’t need thousands of employees who play some foosball, meditate, take a 3-hour lunch, send a couple emails then go home.

The party is over.

11/
What’s going on over at Twitter is a microcosm of the overall Tech space.

Say what you will about
@elonmusk, but he is “The Man in the Arena".

None of us keyboard warriors have run Tesla or SpaceX…

12/
…He is a brutally efficient operator making technically difficult products that further human advancement.

Time will tell whether he has overdone it and broken Twitter, but the end result will be less excess in the system.

13/
When you pair a brutal operator with a fluffy social media company you start to see how over-staffed companies are

This is not the fault of the software engineer or marketing or salesperson at Twitter.

It's the result of too much capital directed to mediocre solutions.

[Higgenbotham]

By being short, I am trading against the 8 traders I've talked about who are normally right about market direction. That's not something I want to do very often.

Meanwhile, I'm continuing to build shorts as the market rises.

Would be very interested in any additional views you may have

I have no strongly held views and no new ideas. It's still my guess that 4200 should cap this market and maybe 4000 will do it.

Still not much new here. I started going short November 10 and added a little as the S&P approached and exceeded 4000. Some have opined that today started a new leg up. I am skeptical of everybody's bullish predictions and their associated targets (4150, etc.) and will just continue to slowly build shorts if the market rises.

My equity is holding steady since starting to short again on November 10 and my account has good gains since the market bottom at 3500 (which is good performance for someone biased as bearishly as me). The big spike down in account value late September was a withdrawal.

If the 20 year (double decennial) cycle deserves any weight, December 2, 2002 was a local top before a sizable move down to the March 12, 2003 low. My best recollection and I have a bias that pattern could be approximately repeated (and with bigger swoons).



Link to 2002/2003 chart:
https://bigcharts.marketwatch.com/advch ... se&state=9