Gregmal

A nice, family friendly day at the park https://www.yahoo.com/news/york-city-rampage-captured-camera-171203964.html

Yea that is really what I think separates value investing from everything else. There are a lot of ways to make money in the market. They all have their pros and cons. But in terms of the most reasonably applicable and overall skillset required as it translates to actual results; value investing ranks above and beyond everything else because if you do it correctly, its very hard not to do well over the long run. Which leads into Buffetts quote about "no one wants to get rich slowly"....which answers the "if its so easy why doesnt everyone do it" question that will inevitably get asked. Even here, a place for value investors, how much bottom calling and top calling and "I just cant see how we dont go much lower" goes on? Its an irresistible siren song it seems.

So the Fed raising rates is making people “richer”.

I mean what I think gets lost amongst most people as well is that for the majority of the world, you only need to get rich once. So the guy above Frohlik or whatever who did a gazillion percent in 2020….or these younger kids following Sykes strategy…who cares? I listened to the Frohlik podcast and honestly didn’t hear a single thing the guy was doing as far as strategy that is anything more than individual gut feeling trading. Absolutely nothing replicable. Just a high level ability to read market setups which most don’t have. But again…he did it. Only financial world people sit around shitting on strategies because “I don’t think it’s sustainable” and “he takes too much risk” and “oh he did blow up that one time”….and ironically I’ve found most of those people who act as the Siskel and Ebert of other peoples portfolio strategy….mightily underperform themselves. I’ve studied and tried so much different shit because I’ve been fortunate to be in a position where I can over the years…and the truth is that most of anything at the highest levels of execution, works. So just find something that fits YOU, work your ass off at perfecting it, and let the rest happen.

At Costco this morning and they’re basically giving away appliances. Remember when appliances were proof of the sticky inflation? This has all been so predictable. Things that never were hard to produce didn’t become structurally harder to produce. Turns out the “productivity” of the factory workers at LG and Whirlpool wasn’t a big deal either. They just needed the supply chain to get fixed.

Yea I guess theres two ways to looks at it. Statistically like some do, sure. But also in terms of how one lives. Frankly, I know people with way more than me, who are slaves to their jobs and careers and stuff. Not talking business owners or folks who choose to immerse themselves in that stuff, but think EY Partners who make 7 figures annually who travel 5 days a week and cant even attend their kids baseball games. I'd hardly call that rich. Its sad.

What if you wanna live in Monaco or on Fischer Island?

I would just define it as being able to do what you want. You don’t have to be cheap and you don’t have to have this high waste, materialistic lifestyle either. Most of the wealthy people I see complaining about needing to have more spend 80% more than they need to on frivolous stuff.

Yea but at the same time, I don’t know any poor people with $100k let alone a million. You can still buy a $500k home at 50% ltv in a decent market and if you have $750k of that million left over life is pretty easy assuming you aren’t hell bent on living extravagantly I am not shocked that folks think shit is hard though because every finance jerkoff tells you you need millions to retire and all the poor people making less than 6 figures demonstrate it’s close to impossible…but the reality is that if you get a little money in the bank and just live modestly and invest it’s actually easy.

Yea I still laugh at the idea rates solve the housing problem, which is the biggest driver of inflation….it costs folks $5k a month to own a $500k home now lol Thanks Jerry

I keep seeing this said matter of factly but have never seen why this isn’t better defined and the cherry picking explained? All of last year we heard this sort of thing stated as if inflation started in Q1 2022….which I can pretty confidently say, it did not. The post COVID inflation by all accounts started probably summer 2020. During this time period, there are absolutely tons of stocks you would have been fine owning. If you owned bonds you have pretty much nothing to show for that entire period. Even just broadly, the stupid index, SPY was at 3200 in July 2020, 4100 July 2021, 3800 in July 2022, and today sit a bit over 4200. This “stocks are bad inflation hedges” seems like a conclusion a lot of people really badly “want” to be true, but even in the best possible environment for trying to prove this to be the case, the case is pretty poor and actually showing why you want to own stocks for the long haul.

I honestly haven’t follow him in years. I’m sure there’s more or other stuff. Any good trader has to evolve. Tim is definitely not an investor, so I’d assume he’s found ways to refine it. Even within the basic strategy there is a ton of detail and stuff on details. Hold period, often quite short. Risk management rules, when shorting never hold overnight. When to hold overnight long. Same as investing, there’s many different angles and points of attack. Some work, some don’t. Some work most of the time. Nothing works all the time. It’s just a unique niche because you do know a couple things for absolute certain when dealing with pump and dumps. The short term goal is to get the stock up. And the mid duration goal is to sell into it. With the end result being, pretty much 100% of the time, that the stock ends up back or below where it started. That’s the unique things with the super junk OTC and mini Nasdaq pumpers. They are always total garbage. So your risk of running into, say a Tesla, is not there. Especially when you can confirm it’s the target of an active manipulation campaign. So overall, all I’m saying is to don’t blindly knock stuff. If you’re a younger guy starting out and just not 100% committed to actual investing yet(some aren’t) with some work I think it’s one of the more replicable strategies for legitimately making money I’ve seen over the years. But if you have real money already it’s probably not worth your time. If you look, of his ~7500 total trades, he s right about 75% of the time and an average profit is like $1500. Plus now with the super tough rules on OTC trading you have to focus more on other stuff, which of course starts introducing you to the quant guys and that’s where you run into risks like that dude who just blew up his fund shorting a Chinese ipo.

Here is one I know he was all over in 2012 and it was liquid enough for me to make a ton of money on. Note the disclaimers and the reduction in shares of BVSN as the next campaign started(SYNC). BVSN started at $5 and went to $60 then back to $7 with massive volatility and SYNC $8 to $15 to $3.

I looked at what Sykes does a long time ago but it’s definitely not something you can even sniff doing if you operate in the capacity of a “financial professional” which I was just starting off as. When one says, why would he disclose it if it’s profitable, well, name me a registered 24/compliance guy who is going to sign off on buying pink sheeters and stuff trading for 37 cents? Not happening. But at its core, it’s just refined momentum trading. He’s front running stock promotions. Stock promotions have distinct phases. They all have the same life cycle. But it’s not fundamentally different than what Kuppy does when he says he’s got no problem buying Ponzi schemes and shitcos. Your trade is basically predicting behavior. When the retail schmuck gets the new email about the next can’t miss get rich quick stock, what do you think he does? When he does what he does, what do you think the promoter does? Or the insiders? Follow the incentives and you find the pot of gold. It’s just the dirtiest form where you have to use speciality brokers who let you short stuff trading at .00065 and you don’t mind swinging long on something that’s overvalued or shorting something that isn’t moving on fundamentals.

Let’s hope this goes on long enough for Cerebras to IPO. Then we can call it a day.

You watch and keep monitoring lists of stocks that move. Typically manipulated ones or promotion campaigns. The volatility is how you make the money. In this case, you WANT to seek out stocks you know there’s funny business going on. They are very predictable depending upon what phase of the promotion they are in. The problem is that it, like all other money making ventures, actually requires a lot of work to do successfully. You have to constantly keep up to date on this because they’re all shitcos. So whereas with MSG, I put in a ton of work and then over time have a fairly high level understanding with almost zero future work put in, this sort of trading strategy you constantly have to be grinding it out. It’s tedious for sure. But for example, the model in a simplified way is to watch volume on thinly traded shitcos. Flag stuff with abnormally high volume…this is generally where a stock promoter or pump and dumper is buying. It’s clear as day when you find it. Then after finding those stocks, monitor internet traffic and message boards. If there’s going to be a promotion, that’s generally where they begin once you find activity. You wanna look for mailing list campaigns and associated entities. Often within these campaigns you can confirm what you saw on the tape with the volume. In small disclaimers with tiny print many will tell you(because they have to) “we own 550,000 shares of xyz and reserve the right to sell at any time” or “we have received $100,000 in exchange for a 6 month investor relations contract”… that type of stuff. Then once you confirm that stuff you just have to be aware of what stage the campaign is in. Early on you wanna be long. Mid phase you play both sides. Once it’s over you short all day.

I’m talking about Sykes. I don’t know much of the 24 year old kid. But what Sykes did was pretty crazy and he had audits done and if you actually look at what he was doing is was very repeatable and intelligent. But often with value investors, there’s a tendency to dismiss or besmirch those who do things a little different. Like look at the assumptions being made even above. Uh no he is not competing against renaissance and quant funds, he s trading against retail idiots and stock promoters who are notoriously sloppy. Pretty sure the quants can’t even trade $50m market cap OTCs lol. Think Canadian miners and US small cap biotech, not Netflix and Google. All I said is I know for a fact that Sykes is 100% legit. Now he basically just runs a media company. Probably because he has made enough money that he grew out of that sort of style of trading. I knew the guy a bit some time ago. Remember seeing him like triple his money in a couple months on LEXG, Lithium Exploration or some shit like that in 2011 on the way up and then the way down. So if you’re asking me to dig in I would 100% assure you I have more knowledge of the guy and how he does it than the armchair comments.

A lot his strategy involves utilizing certain resources to identify manipulated penny stocks and then trading the volatility. It’s 100% repeatable. It takes work. But it’s actually extremely predictable when you find them and low risk if you take certain measures to reduce some of the obvious risks. I don’t know why there’s always an instinct to discredit or poo poo or say it doesn’t count. I mean Monish Pabrai is still given credit for like 3 good years 2 decades ago. This guy has twice turned like $10k into over a million in a few years including as a college student. All using the same framework and process. He also shuttered a hedge fund because at a certain size the strategy isn’t viable and he made investments outside his circle of competency. But man, it’s crazy how there’s always a rush to declare “it doesn’t count”. Dude is a self made multimillionaire 100% from trading and now basically does the Instagram life thing. Not bad.

Pretty sure he had the original Bar Mitzvah $12k into $2M audited. And what he does/did(not sure what he s doing anymore) is totally repeatable, just not scalable. Although the new SEC rules around penny stocks probably make it much more difficult to do.

Yea the only issue with what he does is it’s not really scalable. But it can get you into 7 figures and for most that’s good enough.

Tim Sykes is the real deal. Hard to believe and seems very scammy based on a lot of his content and layouts, but he s a legit genius. Turned $5k or whatever into a million a few times just for shits.

Well the answer was and is pretty simple...just stay the course. But everyone feels better being prepared for "something bad might happen tomorrow".....

If I was looking for a real reason to be bearish...IE not the same gargled bear points that just always seem to exist in perpetuity...why isnt the student loan payments getting turned back on a larger talking point? Its the last real return to normal event (IE 2019 pre covid life) thats left. And considering how many people have them and how big they typically are...that money has to get pulled from somewhere. This was and has been a stealth stimulus check as well which unlike the previous that just stopped, this one forces money to go out the door. I'd probably guess auto purchases will be the most impacted by this. But theres probably a lot of everything that sees pullback directly bc of this.

The answer is obvious. They have skin in the game. FIZZ is one of my favorite examples of this. As to cherry picking, wtf? Isn’t that the entire name of the game lol? There’s very lucrative, well run, family controlled businesses out there. Is this not true because we want to be lazy and just include every single one to exist so we can draw a blanket conclusion? I don’t get it. If you are a good investor you exist to cherry pick. Meanwhile what do Disney, Bud, and Target have in common? People with no skin in the game who certainly aren’t worried about making money. Edit: Actually wow just looked and was surprised to see Bud does still have heavy family related ownership. So chuck that one out. What morons

Any guesses on energy prices year over year for June? Although what’s funny is $125 barrel equates to $5 a gallon at the pump. $68 is still $3.50 my neck of the woods. Especially odd given six months ago with $75 on the barrel it was $3.15. It’s pretty clear with just about everything from energy to housing that the deflation aspect is occurring and some of it is being kept as margin. But we deny the profit gauging argument because last year margins contracted(wasn’t this obvious?). Like the Frito lay debate a quarter or two ago. Margin expansion looks likely imo if you pick your spots at well run outfits. Which could mean upside for stocks.