Gregmal

Tesla puts

Weird. Almost like it’s following a pattern.

Ambrosia 75 with Empress Gin before the hard stuff

WBD and PARA are one trick ponies. DIS DTC is just one piece of the equation. Market just does what it does sometimes and gets too granular on one dimensional metrics.

It’s just the market. One negative datapoint and a lot of things sell off. A few Qs ago this woulda been +15% on the sub numbers and parks strength.

I think it’s a lot easier than you give credit for. You’ve already seen they delayed vaccine news til after the election for purely partisan reasons. You’ve seen deliberate coordination with social media companies to control the news narratives and either censor or discredit those against them. Intelligence agencies have been exposed for having partisan biases as well. So you absolutely know they could do it if they wanted to. Not to mention the Armageddon sized liability lawsuits they’d face. We will never truly know the truth.

Question, if there was a link to the vaccines, does anyone think we'd ever get the truth from the bureaucrats within government and the medical community?

Probably the most reasonable assessment I’ve heard is from Jeff Gundlach. Can anyone explain to me how we top May/June/July/August ‘22 prices next year? It seems far more likely we get something negative than it is we see 4-5%+.

Between now and summer you have some of the biggest components of this inflation lapping their super spike peaks. March is where oil and many commodities lap the war spike. Rents already started in august. Q2 is where you really get interesting because you’ve got the $5-6 a gallon gas and nationwide housing price peak. Then again I’m always amazed at how they come up with the actual figures so who knows. Like it’s still hard to believe cpi in July of 2021 was 5%….there are normal things that from July 2020-July 2021 increased hundreds of percent. Everything increased 20-30%. CPI 5…..then a year later, when there really wasn’t even a fraction of the increases we saw from 2020-2021…9%….so who knows.

Basically would you rather own the internet, or simply the medium through which people access it. Pick and shovel is usually the best approach.

Ole T Boone LOL. Same with the Sandridge founder who’s name escapes me. It’s part of my aversion to individual companies here. I am the patsy at the table with energy specifics. I hear the folks who know a thing or two talk and am like yea, I’ll be holding the bag. So I generally stick to futures and etfs plus maybe some of the big proxies like XOM et al. All you gotta see is the backdrop through, and it’s clear as day. Energy still a no brainer as it has been for 18 months now.

I think the biggest thing is really understanding what you own. When you do it’s easier to understand market movements, especially knee jerk ones like we have seen a lot of this year, aren’t really meaningful. I always think “does Elon Musk or James Dolan sit around shitting in his pants because his company stock might be up or down next week or next month?”. Or you know during COVID when every piker and gambler shorted Simon Property and then after years of no interest in the stock basically every member of the board buys a boat load in the market at $50? Or look at VRE a few weeks ago? The punters and speculators bid it down to $10 and then you see insiders load the boat. Then a third party who knows those assets well offers 60% premium to those prices. Who panicked? Just the people who let the market convince them that their assets were worth the daily quote.

Overall pretty chipper. These sort of situations to me just kind of set the table for whatever comes next and an environment where you have more options to invest than just stocks isn’t all that terrible. So bigger picture it’s exciting. Performance wise, modestly down. Been fluctuating every day lol. Q1 did over 30% and Q2 gave it all back. Since then pretty much just been gyrating with a slight downward trajectory. Biggest thing this year has been luck/skill(not gonna argue which!) and discipline. Preferred Apartment was a massive position and got bought and Bill Ackman has been a weasel but didn’t fuck PSTH holders. So both those anchored things and provided a lot of capital at really useful times. A number of other holdings got bought which was fortunate as well, or at least had bids which allowed for reratings in the face of a poorly trading market. In fact I’ve probably had more buyouts in the last 12 months I’d had in my entire career before that. Number of longer term holdings have gotten whacked but having the capital to rotate has just turned that into an opportunity. VRE and JOE for instance where both situations I really liked but just needed better entry points to make them big. So we got that. Only point of alarm really has been the degree to which things really can go absolutely anywhere on a short term basis. There’s so much short term nonsense and bad actors in the market that you really have to respect that. Something like VNO which I keep an eye on has really blown my mind. You’d think like COVID bottom doom at least somewhere represents what a peak negativity valuation would be…ok maybe +\-10-20% from the COVID bottom, and then boom, bottom falls out like twice as badly. MSGE too. Like you line up the fundamentals and over many years follow stuff and get comfort levels with stuff, and the game changes! So important to be disciplined and just stay nimble but also keep the bigger picture in mind. Trading I’ve done a lot less of, intentionally as late last year and early this year I decided to try to build a more durable long term portfolio. But trading as a whole, especially this year, reminder of rule number 1. How do you know a trade is over? When it stops making money. Important not to keep banging heads against the wall chasing past pots of gold when the opportunity has moved elsewhere.

More selective than I."Its booze" is generally my only criteria LOL

In fact Id say that the majority of the time regardless of the market being up or down, the overwhelming majority of people are ignorant retail traders trying to get rich quick, promotional folks trying to gain followings, and fruitcake hedge fund guys/analysts trying to manipulate short term narratives. Its why we need another @dealrakerstory about focused long term investing or maybe just a trip to google to find a story of the latest 85 year old librarian who left 8 figures of bluechips to the local food pantry.

Yup. The prevailing sign of, idk if you have to say "bottom" but maybe peak negativity, is huge cash allocations, high volume put activity, and a general fear that "tomorrow" the market will be down.

At 2pm investors decide they want to buy stocks and then sell stocks and then buy stocks and then sell, sell, sell based upon perceived commas and semicolons embedded in Powell delivery of remarks.

Yup. Purposely kept secret 95% of normal market participants don’t realize. Market is totally rigged short term. Go look up the SEC investigation into short selling. Most frequently manipulated stocks? AMZN, JPM, AAPL, WFC. Now imagine what it’s like for small caps? Filth on WS is the main reason why most people have no business doing anything but buy and hold.

Ah, the wage price spiral theory with an academic cult like following and real world occurrence rate of like 1/20. Darn shame they don’t have futures options on plastic spoons. At least the most vulnerable will be ok for a while now.

The media commentary is utterly remarkable. You’d think investing has officially been reduced to nothing more than a weird amalgamation of scrabble and bingo. What will he say? How will he say it? In what order will he say it? Good grief.

I actually think a basket of the NKE, LVMH, etc outpaces the FANGs. The FANGs had a half decade of indisputable fad like following. It’ll take more than 6 months to unwind that. My guess is 18-24 months.

So with this figure at least we can temporarily stop saying 6% loss of purchasing power? Until that pay increase translates to higher cost of plastic spoons at least.

It’s almost like, in a way, all this ridiculous hard ass talk backfired. Shouda just raised and kept his mouth shut. But this is what happens when academics get spoon fed self serving bullshit from Wall Street scumbags. They get hypnotized and drunk and actually go publicly say things like “there’s gonna be pain for American families and millions need to lose their jobs even though it probably won’t work”…my god what a fool.

The Fed is trying to solve an issue that isn’t solvable at their level. We keep hearing about how shelter is like 1/3 of the CPI. All they’ve done is make that situation worlds worse. Energy? LOL. Put a sock in Big Guys mouth to start. And the solution otherwise?? is to hurt the economy and take peoples jobs so the record levels of put options and cash held by Wall Street guys egging them on can benefit. Ooooh boy. I wish them luck. Gonna be fun either way.

Joined you guys. Swapped a bit of Berkshire into Google at the close.