Spekulatius

Well said. Germany never thrived because of trade with a Russia. The NG dependency from Russia was a self inflicted wound that could have been voided by Merkel. It wasn’t necessary to drive the German industry.

These 3x ETF’s get killed by volatility if the underlying index goes nowhere and the index just seesaws. It’s going to essentially buy high and sell low all the time due to the inherent 3x leverage.

I booked a vacation during Gulf War I. It was very cheap. So, if you are cheap, you could get better airfare prices if this escalates. In any case, the Gaza Strip is not in Europe, so it’s not going to affect European travel directly. Flights to Israel, or travel from Europe to India or Gulf States is a different story.

I love old annual reports. The writing was so much clearer and you could get a grip what the company you owned was doing and where they tried to go. Her is Lockheed 1958 and Getty Oil 1956 annual reports (the oldest I could find). Some of t(r airplanes introduced in lockheeds 1958 annual report are still flying. getty oil 1956.pdf Lockheed 1958ß.pdf

I love this song, but the choreography is out of this world:

After watching “ Boy Swallows Universe” this:

Xi came into power in 2013 but it did only became gradually obvious that Chinese way of checks and balances within the party (via committees and fractions and term limits ) are replaced with one man Neo Maoist rule. The Frog is slowly getting boiled, I guess. I have a few shares of BABA which I intend to hold, but I have a hard time seeing me making a large investment in Chinese equities until something changes for the better.

Gilded age is pretty good. We did a trip Westchester county last weekend and had a tour at Lyndhurst castle (highly recommend ) and they mentioned that part of the show was filmed there. We did recognize some rooms from Lyndhurst in S1 E5. Great show, which had a similar feel than Downton Abbey. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4406178/

Alibaba falling seems to be a case of where economic good news is bad news for the stock market. I have heard another economic forecaster talking about the Chinese economy looking stronger than predicted. Here is the version on Archive: https://archive.ph/IRPMZ

My guess is that Iran really didn’t want to do that much damage. They were just forced to “do something” to save face after Israel bombed their assets and are probably glad if this does not escalate. Not that Iran government are great guys, but I think they want to stay out of the Gaza conflict. They are more rational than many in the west think, but they are also bound by constraints that can force them into a Zugzwang situation.

The problem is that neither Hamas nor Israel or Iran has a winning strategy. It‘s tit for tat and this for that and as it spirals out of control everyone loses more and more. Sad.

As the world reserve currency, the US has to run both fiscal and trade deficits - there simply is no other way to be a reserve currency, because the $ hasn’t end in foreign hands eventually and that via trade deficits. Its the size of the trade fiscal and trade deficits that is an issue ,not the fact that they exist. On infrastructure - keep in mind that while states and federal government are not the most efficient in building them (most of the time), they can finance them at a way lower cost of capital than private entities. So that compensates for inefficiencies. Also, tolls are a tax on trade and mobility which are beneficial to economic growth, so that’s also to consider.

Buying some ABEV here for yet another swingtrade most likely.

He forgot about $UNH

If we get a Liz Truss moment in the US as it pertains to the deficit and capital markets, I think we will be shitting, not peeing in our pants.

Fiscal deficit of 6.3% of GDP means that if the Fed keeps interest rates high it’s not going to do much. It’s like driving full throttle while pulling the hand break.

You need to abuse the McDonalds app to get deals and order the right way and it still works. My son became an expert with this.

The infamous HK dump. This happened a few time with Hk stonks which often have issues that the public later learns about.

You can get lousy index performance when a few stocks start to dominate the index and those stocks start to perform badly. On this case, the average stock in the market may do quite well, but the market cap weighted index would underperform an equal weighted index. A classical example is Canada where Nortel became close to half the index at its peak and then subsequently went to zero. It caused a severe underperformance of the Canadian stock market for quite some time. Another example is the UK stock market with its heavy weighting of financials which imploded during the GFC and did not perform that well years later.

And has badly underperformed since 2016. No guarantees. The period from 1998 to 2112 was an interesting one as different sources boomed and busted at different times. 2000-2002 was foremost a tech crash but utilized got hit badly too (Enron etc). 2008-2009 was a financial crash where pretty much everything crashed, but tech recovered well, while banks never got their multiples back from before and many bank stocks were diluted at the bottom (Citigroup), so they could not recover.

Buying da dip in $LW this morning with small potatoes in my portfolio

Trimmed GOOGL a bit today AH.

This is pure gold (on Moody‘s):

Annual report is out. Earnings ~$77.6/share (about flat ) Book value ~$1370/share, of which ~$700 are treasuries, munis and cash. They did buy back ~215 shares this year. Nothing new really.