Gregmal

Restaurant owners weren't allowed to go beyond 25% occupancy. Offices were either forced shut, had occupancy limits thrust upon them or shamed into staying shut. All while the leaches in government still demanded full or even increased taxes be paid. It was a disgrace that half the country is all too quick to forget and move on from.

Yup. Lockdowns save lives remember? Also recall the vitriol spewed at people who went out? Didn’t want to wear masks because they were pointless?Simply go to the gym? Or run their businesses? But now lockdowns are for dictators and authoritarians. I’ve truly had it with politicians and people who enable them.

Yup. The more variables you need to account for, the higher the likelihood things can go wrong. Generally though, the more bridges and ladders you need to connect a thesis, the higher the payoff should be. Here though, we're staring down indexes at -20-30% and individual names in many cases much more than that, and it just seems like awful risk reward and a case of "hello boat, I missed you". The time to short or play the short growth and buy value game was by and large right after the vaccine announcement for the fad and bubble stuff. All of last year it worked well too. Early this year was a great window too, Q1-Q2 end. The last few months just seem like the late to the party crew trying to claim their "I called it" status but it just seems long in the tooth because of stuff like above were you need to make 15 different judgment calls and have them all go right together. And then what? Maybe you eke out another 10-20% on the index IF EVERYTHING goes right but also have to time the entry and exits perfect while probably leveraging it with options to make the return worthwhile? Ive run off pretty much all my index stuff in October. All thats left is a few VIX calls I bought last week to hedge into year end and with VIX 20 it was pretty much free, Tesla and today with all the China stuff I threw a little more money into the fire pit on Apple puts, but even there...what am I shorting for? $120? My hunch is the last 2 quarters were basically the last leg needed before new leadership emerged in the market. Stuff like LPX for instance....retards traded it down to $50, like 2-3x earrings, while buying back stock. What was their play? 1.5x earnings LOL. Pigs get killed both long and short if they overstay their welcome. FFH indeed looks like its earning a new multiple soon.

restarted some INDT, added more MANU, and bought some AAPL June 150 puts.I never learn on the latter...

If jobs dont equal inflation then everything holding the argument up goes poof. If people normally get 3% and now get 5% raises...that creates the widespread and rampant inflation we saw earlier? That warrants wrecking the economy? Where does the madness end? Going back to the theoretical index/market bottom debate..not that its too heavily important to me as I've always thought idiots buy the indexes, real investors buy individual stocks and assets....but, who dies and who becomes king and determines that this cratering occurs? Earnings "collapse" and what? all of a sudden we need a low teens multiple assigned to whats likely trough earnings for the first time ever? Seems like a lot of story telling that skips over the important parts or assigns high probability bridges where there should be low probability ones, many times over. 2009 SPY multiple it was like 60x and early 2000s like 30x. Or is this where we go back to the 70s again without context and just say, idk, 12?

The 1% pitch trickle down economics until it actually trickles down and then just as it does they get their boys within the establishment to put an end to it. Rigged?

Isn’t it awesomely amusing watching all the people, politicians and especially news outlets who advocated for and cheered on lockdowns here in the US now bashing “authoritarian” China?!? LOLOL Potemkin villagers

Markets are forward looking. I can guarantee if you're waiting for a 2% inflation print(via CPI or whatever other measure one would be privy to) you'll miss the bottom by a mile. Fed may not "cut" anytime soon...I personally dont want them to...4-5% rates are fine. The world existed at that level while previous tech, housing, and overall market booms were born. And 4% unemployment is fine too, although perhaps a slight goalpost move from the 5-6% everyone said we needed a couple months ago? It may be a wildly contrarian opinion, but when everything under the sun is coming down, and most of it, numerically, pretty hard, we dont have inflation just cuz people get annual raises. And its gonna be a really, really hard sell to the politicians and powers that be, if we drive the economy off a cliff, fighting a healthy jobs market with a boastful vengeance, as everyones favorite inflation measure...CPI, falls off a cliff finally too.

And to line that up with the bottoms….late June and early October…basically right before reporting started and all the bears were jacked up on their own rhetoric.

In June we were told how awful Q2 would be and then again how awful Q3 would be. This was said in tandem with “the market is asleep and looking through rose colored glasses”. At the least, now with hindsite confirming it, we can conclude that it was obviously “baked in”. Pretty much any time I’ve ever heard “it’s not baked it” when an index or sector is off 20%+, it’s baked in. Right now we re at 15x 2023 estimates and even if those are off, probably no more than 20x. That neither bores me nor excites me but again seems to validate the absurdity to being greedy on either the bull or bear side. If I had to guess the markets probably go sideways for a good while with individual sectors and stocks being where the money is made.

Remember in school there were the goody two shoe kids, and polo shirt wearing crowd, who all had their cliques, but also had a couple friends where you scratched your head and thought, WTF? Then you got older and wiser and realized those were the ones who got them weed or picked up cigarettes and kegs for the parties. Russia used to be that for us, now someone else will fill the role. We never do our own dirty work. We can be woke and have energy purchased from terrorists and dictators all at the same time.

Or look another way, one that I would say is almost completely ignored…what does the Fed do if CPI comes in negative 6-8 months from now? Keep wallowing about wages and needing more data? Almost certainly not.

Look at June here….why happened to all that “earnings are going to be awful” talk. They were gonna be awful in Q2. Then Q3. Now “next year”. For sure if we say stuff long enough it will eventually happen, but this is how folks get sucked into bear traps and miss years if not decades trying to be smarter than everyone else. There’s still plenty of stocks you could throw darts at that will do very well with inflation 5% or lower. Which is basically covering 90% of your potential outcomes over the next few years.

Max 3%. Summer 2023 on CPI which is what everyone has used this year to promote the scheme, will possibly even be negative. What comps higher than May-August 2022 as far as the inputs go? Housing? Nope? Energy? Outside shot but probably not. Car prices? Nope. Commodity prices? Which ones? I don’t see any. We ve reach a level where the comps are damn near impossible to retest. Giving people 10% raises probably wouldn’t put a dent in all the stuff they’ll be able to buy now that supply is catching up. I would almost guarantee this will be evident in Black Friday sales, which is a good precursor. All the goods and services people want. At some point they are satisfied with what they have and don’t need anymore. That’s capitalism working. Add in technology advances, which even just in the logistics and planning side are greatly deflationary, lack of gold standard catalyst, and the general reduction in relative significance of unions and it’s clear this ain’t the 70s. 2024? That’ll be interesting. But the inflation story for now you can stick a fork in.

There’s been not an ounce of “wage price spiral”….period. It’s purely academic and there’s even been evidence to the contrary. The egg on the Fed argument at this point is basically, kill jobs. It’s as preposterous as it sounds. There’s also turnover of voting members soon. Another angle where “wait and see” makes more sense than not. It would be all too funny if not more than two years after doing it with COVID, the academics hijacked the country on little more than a theory and fucked everything up again.

Wage increases alone arent going to keep the charade going. You even started seeing the ramifications of this in October, in terms of playing that game. Folks like Powell dont want to end up on Capitol Hill having to explain why theyre targeting the average American worker and actively trying to cause them hardship. It just won't fly. And my belief all along has been that they dont even really intend to, they just have to talk a really tough game to keep things in order until the obviously necessary time passes in order to start the downward spiral with CPI. If you can point to real things, and enough in aggregate, that are inflating in an unhealthy manner, they can keep playing the raise rates game. But so far, go back to this time last year...every single item held onto tightly by the inflation forever group...its imploded, one by one, as the one time stimulus drawdown inflected with supply chains or supply sources catching up. Only thing left to keep the gig going is the academic jobs/wages argument. But see above. And even just step back. That argument is as stupid in reality as it is on paper to anyone not holding a short position. Job and wage strength is a great thing for the economy. Everything else, even on the energy front which surprises me....seems to have been brought back to reality. I dont see a scenario where the kindred spirits take over ALL of those things again, at least not to the extent we start seeing wild inflation numbers again.

I’m definitely a tree freak and always go grab a giant Xmas tree almost as soon as they get delivered to the farms(F the Home Depot trees)….typically a couple days prior to thanksgiving or the week after it. This year?….yea my town has changed over the years from suburb with a rural flair to yuppy…basically the exact mix everyone fleeing cities during COVID was looking for….but shit. Absolutely zero Xmas trees available over 10ft tall within a 20 mile radius. $275-500 a pop? Usually they sit for weeks because there’s only a couple maniacs like me that wanna deal with one that big and don’t mind paying that. Every farm or small shop selling them said the same thing. We ordered the same as always. We priced them 20-30% more expensive, and inside of 24-48 hours they were all gone. No, the cost of growing a tree didn’t increase 20-30% in the last year, these things take 10-15 years to grow….people are still feeling jolly in some ways I guess. Total discretionary good too and definitely not something folks go blow money on if they’re tapped out, or even close to it. Stupid anecdotal observation, but soft landing seems far, far more likely to me than total bust. Pretty much everywhere I look things still seem healthy if not robust. Maybe that’s just specific to where I look and invest(north NJ and Florida lately)….even dreaded housing. My stupid blue state lake property I bought in August 2021? Just had the worst unit in the development, 4 rows back from the water and close to a main road, sell above ask and 18% above what I paid 14 months ago for waterfront with a boat slip. Maybe it’s just me but it’s hard not to get excited about what seems to be the wind coming out of the sails of this farcical inflation story. If the consumer manages to survive this Wall Street led raid on the economy, next year is gonna be a doozy.

Yup. I hate gold and always have. But heading into the year figured if it was ever gonna work, this is the environment all its worshippers have dreamed of. And it only worked briefly when everyone overreacted to the Russia/Ukraine situation...IE perceived crisis. Total flop as far as correlating to inflation, so far at least.

I’m not sure any quality long term observations could be made if they’re predicated off a few quarters of trading behavior. That goes for any asset class. I can’t even count the number of times I’ve seen stuff bid down pointlessly over the last year only to then get taken private at last years levels. However gold IMO is pretty worthless all around.

Happy Thanksgiving all.

Did the Jan 2025 $15. Only got filled on 18 and this was at the open when stock was $17. Very illiquid. Ended up buying a bunch of common.

Hit some MANU calls

Almost exactly the same for me too. Its best value to me is mainlining the bull and bear cases via elevator pitch type deliveries. From there I can filter out whats worth moving further on myself.

Yea the cost cost increase and eating into profits thesis is hugely overblown. First, most are healthily at or around 40% net debt to EV. Second, they’re often staggered. Third, just do the math on say a $5b company with $2b total debt, refi-ing maybe 1 tranche of say $400m with a 3% bump to interest? Say that occurs over 3 years. It’s not that relevant especially if the assets are growing income.

Much of this sort of theory relies on the user making assumptions that they know better than the market, or that they know what the market is thinking in general. Such as "the market is pricing in higher growth rates"...is it? With what certainty can you say that? Thats the danger there and largely why I just ignore the macro prognostications as they apply to securities analysis. Look no further than WM, again. Pretty sure no one is expecting huge growth there. Maybe people are just paying up for quality? IDK really, but I try to avoid the major underpinnings of a thesis relying upon guesswork.