Gregmal
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Posts posted by Gregmal
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12 minutes ago, John Hjorth said:
Greg [ @Gregmal ],
Are you above here [as quoted above] referring to the military industrial complex?, or what else?
The amount of money and power available to the incestuous complex during times of “war” is too attractive to them. The complex includes military industrial but they’re just a piece of it. The powers that be love war. Look at how much freedom some were willing to give away to the government because of a bad flu strain a few years ago! Telling people they are in danger and in need of protection is the easiest snake oil to sell.
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We need “wars” to excuse 2013s oil prices and inflation being a little higher than normal going into elections. Always have to have something to point a finger at…remember, Joe Biden told us the buck stops with him. Guess the dementia has taken its toll.
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6 hours ago, Sweet said:
Who do you mean?
In America or Europe?Or in Israel?
Think its very clearly in the interests of a lot of the establishment to keep this and Ukraine going.
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Show of hands…who voted for this?
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This really isn’t an issue for most companies. It’s only really related to investment managers and such, and those certainly don’t trade at a market multiple.
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Conversely, Ill give you another...I earlier also wanted to hedge and the IWM has been money there the past few years. I wanted duration and there is plenty on the chain. But OTM and duration are tough. So I bought $220 Dec 2025 puts. Figured if we rip its ITM enough where I can take another stab while its still got some time to work out...IE 20% move from $205 Would still mean I can save the trade or size it up with a decent probability of it coming back in. So I could double down. Versus if I went for say $150 puts...its a hero trade kinda and a move to $250 more or less crushes the realistic odds I can ever salvage that strike.
So in this case I like things where I can have the market be flat and not lose much, go down and make money, or go against me and trade it again.
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Why go a week out?
It’s funny you mentioned this because I got bored and saw a trade setup a couple weeks ago and just closed out pretty much this trade.
TSLA at 175 looked good for a hedge. I didn’t want near dated stuff because I’d have to time it perfectly. I didn’t want to go too deep in the money because it’s a volatile stock and can quickly go against you…so less capital exposed was my goal. I settled on Sept $150 puts for $10.50 figuring the time value would buy me a few months to be right. But a quick move to about $150 would bet me 50-70%. Closed em out this morning for $16.5-17.
So…what is your wager?
Tesla gonna tank, fast. A timing call?
Hedge you don’t care about not working out?
Fundamental short…IE you need time for it to play out and just roll options?
Most crucial thing with this stuff is how you structure it.
Also keep in mind, VIX 20 vs VIX 14 matters too.
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It really just depends on what you’re trying to do.
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13 minutes ago, Dinar said:
No Clipper for you?
I just can’t stomach investing with management teams that exhibit zero shame or accountability for such putrid performance. At least not anymore
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Nah. Remember how long Fauci kept lingering around and doing his stupid pressers even though everybody but NY and CA moved on from COVID? Jerry’s doing the same thing.
Im actually semi hoping for a Trump victory just to see this guy get fired. He’s a clown.
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Add to Fairfax
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This is what’s so bizarre about this whole inflation saga. The culprits have been super obvious. First go around it was clear as day that stimulus checks and shut down related supply chain disruption was the majority of the “9%” inflation. Now it’s obvious housing and secondarily energy is most of the inflation. Yet people wanna talk about services lmfao….it’s like talking about the attractiveness of a 500 lb chick and being like “yea she’s got a really nice bracelet!”…Who TF cares?
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3 minutes ago, james22 said:
Duh lol.
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The problem with small cap stuff is that even with good ones, G&A can be a huge chunk of the overall earnings. So right out of the gate, you are at odds with their management because its almost a survival thing for them to ensure they can pay themselves.
In the mid-larger cap space, its really just the product of most management personnel being career whores. Ladder climbers. So even when you get good ones, they have little loyalty and will bounce for a bigger check or better job title elsewhere. While theyre employed they are motivated by maximizing their compensation.
So me, I just kind of hunker down in stuff that is the exception to a lot of this, and Ive only really found that exception to occasionally exist with either founder led, or owner operator type C-suites. Folks underestimate how disruptive it is when the C-suite is constantly turning over. Culture at a company is built over many years, and cant evolve in a positive way when every 5 years a new guy comes in asking for stock options.
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8 minutes ago, changegonnacome said:
Listen housing was inaccessible and unaffordable when rates were at zero.....there is fundamentally a housing shortage post GFC....what seems to be the bottle neck in housing is really fetishization of bachlor degress versus doing stuff with your hands...meaning the US is short like a bazillion plumbers...and the avg age of skilled trades construction just keeps rising....suspect AI is gonna lay waste to that shortage...and the moms and dads of America might wake up and realize that the road to a happy life for their kids doesn't have to involve $200k in student debt and swivelling on an office chair all day hoping that you get Bob from accountings job one day if do 60hr weeks for a decade.......
ASP being $430k isn’t inaccessible because of plumbers. It’s because Fed went mental on a rate crusade and with 20% down you’re now looking at like $4000 a month for a shit box. Even if prices went back to pre COVID levels, because of mortgage rates being where they are, it’s still massively exclusive for the average person. Also embedded in this is that most Americans haven’t actually had any sort of material wage growth since GFC. And now they start to demand it, and have some leverage to get it, and these academic assholes do what? Ooh wage growth bad lol. Like you can’t even make this shit up. It’s so incompetent at the highest levels that one might think it’s not incompetence and that the game is just rigged.
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It’s like these Fed guys are so arrogant that they refuse to acknowledge that they can not control inflation if it is caused by certain elements in the economy that they have no control over. So they just ignore it and say “inflation up, raise rates”. It’s hilarious watching this because it just shows an academic deer in the headlights
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28 minutes ago, changegonnacome said:
We talked about this one before - SuperCore or Made in America inflation as I've referred to it for a couple of years now is where the problem is and remains. Its this prints that accelerating. Its this foundational inflation that has us 'stuck' at something that looks like a persistent 3-handle on headline CPI.
To be clear again - this measure which is the problem here......completely & utterly removes the housing distortions from lagged covid rents AND the increased mortgage servicing costs because of higher rates.....this is not just 'going away' ......I know the instinct here is to just throw out the inflation 'hoax'....the reality however is this monetary domestic inflation is sticking around way after supply chains have healed.
Yea but the super core stuff is bullshit as is the outdated and academically inspired “dual mandate”. Once we start carving up niche ways to create an “inflation problem”, gives people way too many avenues to run with data, as we ve seen.
If the true concern is widespread/broad reaching “inflation”…by far and away the two biggest problems are housing and energy. If the objective is to hit the area most significantly impacting the lives of Americans, especially the average ones, it’s housing. And housing has been made widely inaccessible and unacceptably unaffordable for most, because of the Fed and their rate hike crusade.
These imbeciles are so dumb that it seems they blindly look at some “inflation gauge” and then just go “too high” and simultaneously shout “raise rates”, almost completely oblivious to the cause and effects of such. This is why we narrow down and strip out this or that…it’s nonsense. Fix housing and energy and the “real” inflation is pretty much zero, if not negative. Just because we go “oh services” and act like this is more impactful in a negative way than people’s shelter situation doesn’t make that the truth.
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And then we re back to people calling for rate hikes over things like oil prices(zero to do with rates) and housing(the reason housing is bloated is because of rate hikes)…
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5 hours ago, changegonnacome said:
Contribution? A coherent society is one based on shared values....shared values can only come from a shared view of the world which involves some consensus around what is true or not....a shared set of 'facts'......we've always had differences of opinion on how to move forward as country...liberal/conservative.....but we at least agreed up until relatively recently where we were on fundamental foundational facts (like who won the last election)...on top of those facts there was competition of ideas about how to move forward adjudicated by voters at elections.
Trump's great contribution, seems to me, is a chipping away at the foundations of what makes a coherent society......his contribution was to take a kernel of truth (that the media, reporters, editors, even federal agencies had biases or were outright dishonest at times) and exaggerated and contorted it beyond all proportions such that nobody believes in some common subset of facts anymore in fact he's convinced a whole cohort that everything is rigged top to bottom......... he didn't open up peoples minds as you seem to think....he closed their minds and sent them into an echo chamber that wasn't just biased (like old media) but rather media or his own pronouncements that propagated and promoted a version of reality that simply didn't and doesn't exist.
His great contribution is that he gaslit the whole country......sending liberals into the arms of leftist crackpot theories around wokism & the various news outlets that cater to it......and conservatives into the arms of Newsmax, Quanon, deep state and replacement theory....he took a cultural disagreement/debate and turned it into a culture war for his own political ambition......Trump's great contribution is destroying the centre ground in American political life while populating the extremists at both ends of the political divide...it is not a good legacy turning people into tribal lunatics.......Joe Biden has serious serious flaws in his thinking and approach to many things....been wrong more than he's been right on a tonne of issues over decades.....but blowing up the centre ground where all the progress has been made over decades is not one of his follys.
It’s kinda funny but I actually agree with much of this. The question is, did it matter? Wasn’t it inevitable?
Trump pissed off the media and liberals because he mastered THEIR game. It enraged them that they couldn’t slander him in the news or leak a video and put an end to his campaign. That had been the liberal way until then, in fact, it still kinda is.
There was no question Mitt Romney was the most qualified candidate we ve had for president in decades. And the media turned it into a runaway for Obama using race bait, culture war propaganda, and lies/innuendo. Trump found a way to negate that, and that’s why they all went mental. I’ll still never forget the Presidential Debate where when asked our greatest foreign threat, Romney competently explains that it’s Russia…and Obama, offering nothing but a made for tv quip about “the 1980s called and wants their foreign policy back” and instantly became the winner of that debate…yes, on an arrogant, ignorant, and flat out wrong wisecrack! Now the same outlets that celebrate that “own”…want to cry to us about big bad Russia. Fuck them
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25 minutes ago, Sweet said:
Question, what do you mean by ‘mortgage pay down magic’?
Dont think it works in Canada but the 30 year mortgage really starts doing its thing once you get past the first say 5-8 years....especially with a decent down payment. The equity gets larger, the interest payments smaller, you dont even really need appreciation of the home, although that happens quite often as well. Basically you start approaching the mortgage "tipping point" they call it where your principal payments exceed the interest payments..is where you really see your "worth" accelerate and this unlocks a lot of variables for you in terms of accessing the equity. Also around this time, is where you really start to see the benefits of inflation on that fixed rate. There was a point in time, not even really that long ago, where a $3,000 a month housing payment was considered large. Today? Not so much.
So its really just where the good aspects start accelerating up and the negative ones accelerate downward...a tailwind for the owner.
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16 hours ago, John Hjorth said:
I do remember it, too, althougn while didenn't sell anything because of that. I disagree with you about if this was a big deal a not. To me, it was, still is, an continue to be.
That said, thats about what to to get out of @Lucas sensationalism / meain stream news media posting style in this topic, by now.
If this was a big deal for the investment landscape...how is that? Because the only "effects" I saw, especially now in hind site were:
1) short term volatility(so what unless youre selling newsletters or gambling on 0DTE crap)
2) A speculator wet dream to run up energy prices over the next few months which then warped the CPI index everyone is obsessed with...like didnt we have $120 oil for the summer 22 9 prints?
3) gave US government an excuse to steal peoples assets
So the majority of the market participants had no business getting all riled up. This looks to be another one. The media and the subscription sellers seem to just always need to have a new reason for their daily/weekly "this is a really big deal and we're on the precipice of a huge market collapse" snake oil to sell.
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Like this whole PARA shitshow should really highlight that for people. Shari didn’t build that empire. Her incentives in doing a deal aren’t what everyone in the thread are “guessing” based on their own normal people conventional wisdom and game theory. Her father built the empire through investment, cleverly navigating capital markets, and then estate planning.
Risk taking is often confused with being careless but risk taking is necessary for any sort of growth to occur. Growth meaning, building something. If I want to build something, I can and have to take that risk. If I can’t, then the next best option is to try to participate in someone else building something. If I can’t do either…then what value do I bring to the table? Well, I’m probably just a cog then. And will have to be a cog for as long as the system tells me.
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21 minutes ago, TwoCitiesCapital said:
This system is designed such that people trade time/expertise for money and then the government purposely devalues that money so that they're forced to take risk of loss just to run in place for the time/expertise already delivered.
It is theft, it is immoral, and it is absurd to suggest that this is a foundational teaching that should be put forth in schools.
If you want to start calling the USD a "transaction" vehicle, then be my guest. But everyone else currently calls it money, and that word implies something is a means of exchange, a store of value, AND a unit of account. Otherwise, we're all just bartering collectibles and back to the days pre-gold.
Do you not think though that either you are working for money or money is working for you is what separates those with freedom from those who don’t? The system is designed to benefit, dare I say, even serve the haves. The only real way to break the cycle is to try to participate in the mechanisms through which the haves benefit. Which is primarily investment in business, owning the resources, avoiding unnecessary taxation. Nobody is retiring early getting 5-6% pre tax on their money. And that 5-6% has only been recent. Imagine trying to get ahead with 2-3% annually? The compounding magic is real. The mortgage pay down magic is real. You just gotta let it work.
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5 minutes ago, Jaygo said:
A 100 dollar bill is not a store of value. It is a transaction vehicle. If you want wealth you have to take risks and put that money to good use by moving it around the economy.
This is probably one of the first things they SHOULD be teaching in business school. Or any school for that matter. I know a lot of young people, say under 40 years of age and many in the 20-30 camp. 90% are terrified of taking risks(forget the fact that they habitually fail to properly even assess what risks are in the first place), and probably 3/4 of those that invest only do it through company sponsored programs. Probably more than half treat their money like they are 80…savings accounts, CDs, money market accounts…Then everyone complains about inflation and not being ahead….
Iran - Israel - Gaza Conflict
in General Discussion
Posted
Sure there is. Look at all the spending packages being promoted as immediate and urgent. And all the other stuff they’re jamming in. War is always a great excuse to move money around