Gregmal

If you have a true lockdown, eventually it is impossible for cases not to eventually go to 0. However, in America, this is simply not possible. Even in places where it is accepted, after 2-3 weeks people will just stop listening. Or the liberals will say protesting doesnt count.

Food for thought: Unfortunately, not once has CNN, MSNBC, or FOXNews published a single article containing the term "cycle threshold". The media is lying to the public about COVID-19 by making it seem as though the PCR "swab" testing used today has the ability to determine... yes you have COVID-19 or no you don't. The #1 question that the mainstream media should be asking today is... "Who determined that a cycle threshold of 40 should be used to determine whether or not you have COVID-19?" A cycle threshold of 40 means that a person tests positive for COVID-19 if there is a match for one of the genetic sequences associated with SARS-CoV-2 in less than 40 cycles of amplification. After 39 cycles of amplification, there are 550 BILLION copies of the DNA being tested. If the PCR test doesn't find a match until 39 cycles, it means that the test is only finding trace amounts of one of the genetic sequences associated with SARS-Cov-2 and the person being tested has a 0% chance of getting sick or infecting another person, but based on today's CDC standards that person will count as a new positive case of COVID-19! The truth is... it was already proven last month that a patient with a cycle threshold value of 35 or higher has a 0% chance of being contagious. Patients with a cycle threshold value of 33 or 34 also have an extremely low chance of being contagious. Most foreign countries appear to be using cycle threshold values of between 25 and 35 to determine if a person is positive for COVID-19, which explains why they have lower amounts of COVID-19 cases.

Isn't the underline a function how things are perceive in a given snapshot in the timeline. The bet that BX made on industrial warehouse seems to be right on the money now, but if we go back to the genesis of that bet, which was probably a decade ago in a much smaller magnitude would have had folks scratching their heads. The obvious bet 15 years ago was to be long office building & malls. Meaning that the malls that BAM is making a bet today, could be perceived differently another 10-15 years from now. After all they are in business of re-purposing them and as long as BAM has enough imagination to see the real estate can be far more than just a mall or can be completely different, than I think we can call that a contrarian bet in the making, which you can participate by using a 10-feet pole, through BAM itself as oppose to BYP. I dont disagree necessarily. I think one of the most misunderstood aspects of the mall hate is that well placed dirt is well placed dirt. Todays mall doesnt have to be tomorrows. Worst case scenario it costs maybe $15M to demolish a mall and start from scratch. Then you can be whatever you want to be, even a warehouse. Malls in tier 1 cities, especially right off major highways will do just fine IMO. The future will obviously look different, but look at what the inside of a major casino looks like. Shopping, entertainment, rooms/housing, and often office space. Simon and BAM are already doing this.

Yea they should have ate their vegetables or whatever....

US at 33k with TX, CA and a few others still unreported for many counties. Good chance at 50k+ today. Perhaps 100k+ days coming soon given what you know will be rowdiness for 4th of July as well. Oh yea, and OK still hasn't reported the 6000 Trump attendees who undoubtedly have it. Should make for some trading opportunities. I added big time to my general market short into the close. There is almost no way the market opens green Monday, if past patterns are any indication and news flow is as expected.

Blackstone seems to go to where the puck will eventually be. They've also seemed to do a pretty good job managing their reputation. In the PE world, IMO, BX is in a league of its own. Visa and MasterCard style. Brookfield is no doubt impressive in its own right, but much like Discover, again IMO, it has its limitations, does a poor job managing its reputation(or doesnt care) and probably extends itself at times, in terms of taking on unnecessary risks.

Blackstone is like Visa, "everywhere you want to be". BAM is like Discover, pretty darn useful in certain areas, but sometimes sleezy and not exactly in the right places all the time.

Does this count? https://nypost.com/2020/06/25/sex-addict-claims-hot-female-gamers-caused-him-to-injure-penis/ Estavillo alleges in the transcript he even once ejaculated on his PC monitor, which caused his gaming system to short-circuit and resulted in a fire that temporarily caused his apartment to black out.

So I dont follow that closely, but WTF is going on in Los Angeles. Haven't they been on lockdown forever? Weren't they the ones who said theyre staying locked down til like late July? Why are they still reporting the type of numbers they are?

My sense is that the market doesnt fear the virus...it fears the government responses. You can look at charts about death rates and total cases all you want, but I'm waiting for one charting the economic consequences of "shut everything down and lock people in their homes"... It is also evident a lot of people do not fear the virus(for better or for worse) and have only been held back by government shutdowns. To the extent they focus on what should have been done from the get go, worry about older and at risk and tell the rest to be careful, I doubt things turn out as morbid as some are predicting. Which would be fine for stocks....if they were already obscenely expensive.

Incorporating the assumption of a 28% tax rate under Biden I think is important. I also have been looking at trying to find companies that will obviously have large NOLs from Covid that should help them over the next few years. Something like the sports teams or entertainment companies who literally have 0 revenue.

This "engineer" missed basic math apparently. End of lockdown + Memorial Day + Protests + Reopening of the economy + (just for you libtards) Trump campaign rally = Increase in positive cases, especially amongst younger people, especially in Red states who implemented these things first(despite again, the cases being largely in blue neighborhoods).... go figure. Not farfetched either. No joke, I saw a headline today stating "COVID cases go up after Trump rally"... they were expecting 0 I guess.

Yeah, you pretty much nailed it and a lot of folks are of the same opinion. Been hearing the same from Orthopa for weeks. Theres no narrative or agenda though. For instance, its totally coincidental that when Florida cases go from 3800 to 4200, the headlines of "cases soar to another record", but when cases drop to 3400 theres nothing of the same aggressiveness like "Florida cases plummet!". Then theres other folks who during the height of the panic were posting many times a day, and then mysteriously disappeared. Only to come roaring right back at the first sign of "another wave"... No agenda either from any of these fellas. They deserve oh so much credit for predicting that, wait for it, cases are trending up! Orthopa was on the money months ago. For a while the message board DR's thought they knew better, but he turned out to be spot on. Remember, the was NO coronavirus anywhere prior to late February! Its was impossible that it was around before then! Impossible. No way more testing equals more confirmed positives! Then there was the time someone said, I hope you are invested in the market...trying arrogantly to be condescending, and then the entire market proceeded to go up 20%+. Brilliance all around for sure.

Yes, Florida(specifically, Republican stronghold Miami-Dade) will continue to see increasing cases, as will many of the other states. This really shouldn't shock anyone, although it will certainly continue to be reported on as "breaking news" and given greater coverage than it probably deserves because fear sells and certain people wake up every day hoping for "MOAR!". But, we've already seen how this works, as other parts of the country went through the same thing in March/April. Provided it isn't bungled terribly like NYC was, the hospitalizations(depending upon how they are classified) and death rates should be much lower. Certainly nothing to stop the world for. Hopefully everyone learned from that mistake.

This is an excellent idea. While maybe annoying, is there any reason at all it doesnt make sense to mandate an individual with limited investing experience take a brief online tutorial/course prior to being permitted to open a trading account? Doesnt even have to be pass/fail, just a basic intro of "hey this is what you're getting in to".

We're not really going to know whether a second wave materializes until late 2020 - even if things quiet down, the threat will be looming over us with the return of cold weather and flu season. So it's hard to justify a runup in the market on that basis. We've got 6 months to kill until then. But every day that ticks by we are one step closer to effective treatments and/or vaccine discovery. And we've already learned a lot about how to treat people and keep them out of ICU's, all of which is positive. At this point I'm seeing businesses closing every day, jobs being lost that will not come back any time soon, and investors that don't seem to care. I'm pretty certain we're seeing the numbers bear out the start of the second wave as we speak. We hit a low point in daily cases at end of May with ~18k/day. Since then, multiple places have reopened and some semblance of normalization has occurred and we're back to ~25k+/cases per day for the last 4-days in a row (30k today!) - the last time this happened was early May when we were still coming down from the major spike. Also, keep in mind NYC just reopened and is not yet contributing meaningfully to the spike despite being the absolute largest contributor the first time around. Anecdotal evidence from friends who live in Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Texas, and California paired with my own observations here in Missouri suggests that most people still aren't wearing masks and still aren't really taking this seriously. A second wave is all but a foregone conclusion and I think we're seeing that play out in the data today. We're damn near close to doubling the daily case load nationwide, from the lows, without NYC contributing yet and having only been re-open for ~3 weeks. Yup. I did a bit of lightening up this week. Am actually now holding a smidge of cash and have a number of shorts on reducing exposure further. Probably most bearish Ive been since I can remember. Take all of the above, and add in that we have a 4 week void with regards to earnings. As the case load builds up, fewer and fewer companies will maker an effort to commit to any sort of guidance, now, for Q3. This on top of numbers that we already knew would be bad but expected to ramp back up. On top of this, I think there is high probability you see re-interruptions with some of the sports seasons as cases again flare up. You probably will see a number of college football teams cancel their seasons in the name of safety. Then just take what our eyes are seeing; every rally this week was aggressively faded...never a good omen. I even took a speculative gamble at the close on a reasonable sized index short. You tell me, more likely open Monday? +5% or -5%...could of course be up green but I think the skew towards some kind of massive moves definitely favors the downside. That said I do think some spots have promise. I think there will be an effort to make the coastal reopening very positive. This while "episode" has been entirely news driven, so I dont think it would be unreasonable to expect that to continue.

Yeah, this is so true. The world would be a much easier place to live in if everything were black and white, no shades of grey. It totally sucks that existence is so complicated. Its actually not complicated at all. Its defined by the constitution.

LOL, re-introduce the Trump bashing angle....welcome back Dalal. No political motives here though, they swear!

Aren't they planning a large political rally tomorrow? I think protesting police brutality and corruption and racism may be a cause worth taking risks for, but getting on stage to get some narcissistic supply may not rise to that level... Of course! The Hypocrisy of the LEFT speaks once again! Justify the nobility of rioting/protesting/looting in addition to a dozen murders while spreading the disease unchecked! Beautiful! Thank you.! See this is the problem with these people. They are selfish and have zero grasp on principles. Do we allow large gatherings? Or not? Plain and simple, yes or no. Do you allow people to fly pieces of cloth, yes or no. Do we believe every women who makes a sex assault claim? Yes or no? And thats it. But to these people, its yes here, no there...yes to what I feel, no to you....oh I agree with this so yes, I dont like that so no....

I can't find what, if any, penalty Newsom is imposing for not wearing a mask. Florida Keys just did it until June 2021. $500 fine.

He seems to do this a lot. I find the the people who call crashes every 6 months have a perfect record in terms of having "called" all the previous ones. https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052748704905604575027602834843606 I remember that Mr. Grantham once sounded like you: he said that people with cash tend to suffer from terminal paralysis (rigor mortis). https://www.gmo.com/americas/research-library/reinvesting-when-terrified/ The one-page memo (which can be downloaded) holds a special place in my financial portfolio. His fair value assessment for the S&P500 was at 900 then and many felt he was wildly optimistic... That is an excellent article.

If you want "free trading" and market access so you can invest your incremental $100 a week or whatever, this is what you get. Bares bones bs thats riddled with conflict and hidden costs/risks. KYC is great and all, but when you have the option of opening an account without ever even talking to a real human being, I'm not sure what you can expect, especially since, they are able to do it; everyone lets you open up an account and trade within 24 hours no a days. This is the system, and if all of them are doing it, I am sure its one of those special finance areas where its either a) allowed, 1b) not allowed but no one cares or 2b) profitable on a net of the slap on the wrist fine basis. I mean for those arguing otherwise, what else does a ROP have to go off of? Is he/she expected to personally call every applicant and string them through a lie detector test? If you legalize drugs, tragedies will happen. If you make trading available/attractive to everyone, the same things occurs. The solution IMO is educating people, rather than advertising. Financial industry advertising used to be incredibly regulated and super strict about what got through, although periodically thats ebbed and flowed. The most obscene Ive ever seen were not coincidentally during the late 90s, I think from Etrade. If it were up to me, they should treat all of them the way they treat hedge funds.

Yea........I think its for sure pushing new grounds to now hold brokerage firms responsible for people of legal age, speculating on things they may or may not be knowledgable about. The era of the "no fault" individual because of the "greedy" corporation is underway...but if we are already at the point where gamblers arent responsible for their actions...then we are indeed in deep doo doo. This is irrespective of the tragedy involving the 20 year old.

He seems to do this a lot. I find the the people who call crashes every 6 months have a perfect record in terms of having "called" all the previous ones. https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052748704905604575027602834843606

And, despite sad stories like this, and much of the country in shambles financially, we still haven't "mustered up" the courage to demand even basic, entry level financial literacy courses for our high school students....nah, we need all those important schedule blocks for study hall, literature, and photography...