Gregmal

Looks like you bigwigs are getting pinched by $30 a month with the new reset. Big drop in purchasing power!

The descriptions here reminded me of Abacus in Chinatown I think it was. Another example of selective “justice” in NYC.

It’s been a joint bipartisan effort getting here, but since it officially started in February, all the stupid sanctions and constant stream of money going over there…both Biden’s doing, have done nothing but make the bull case for energy better. This doesn’t even include the constant barrage of inflammatory remarks and rhetoric. Then add in the disastrous energy policies at home. The Big Guy is really delivering for anyone long energy.

Just look at what we re doing now in Taiwan. Then wait a few years for it to build up and same thing happens all over again but people can pretend we had nothing to do with it.

"War profiteering"! LOL So you provoke a war between a corrupt but otherwise meaningless country and another nation we routinely hate on for political brownie points, and voila now we can blame "war" for inflation and high energy prices. This is legendarily brilliant.

Took a few bucks from the MSG dividend and rolled it into VAL warrants.

What’s funny is that a year ago, this was California and NY.

See I guess I just think that there’s different levels of “acceptable” inflation that doesn’t necessarily have to translate into widespread alarm. Services is like ground zero for this. Not everything is for everyone and not everything is a life necessity. If Dunkin needs to pay workers more, and then raise prices, that’s just economics and if their product is supported by the market, it’s fine, and if not, the business has to adjust, or go away. Strawberries are probably another good example day to day for my family. My little kids love them. Some days they’re $2.50 per box. Other days $5.99. Some days I just won’t buy them. I’ll buy something else. I am not entitled to strawberries at whatever price I want. But getting back to services and not strawberries, not everyone is entitled to restaurant food. Same as not everyone being entitled to concert tickets. Anyone in Philly find World Series tickets unaffordable? That’s just life. Remember Beanie Babies? Folks wanted them, and paid crazy amounts for them. They didn’t need them. Then they got overproduced and the market got fixed. The stuff people need? I don’t see widespread affordability issues as it relates to anything solvable by hiking rates. Fix energy policy and building/construction process. Rising rates is backfiring horrible for the biggest component of the equation, shelter. And we re still woke on energy. So I’m many ways it’s a round peg in a square hole situation. On the “poverty line” folks debate… well, same as looking at tax revenue. Isn’t their economic impact, whether we send them extra money or not, pretty negligible to the entire pie anyway? This whole thing just seems radically overdone and analyzed.

Here we go again. https://seekingalpha.com/news/3897557-the-stock-market-boils-down-to-one-question-this-week-goldman Everything you own, and everything you do, all comes down to J-Pow this week. What words does he say? Control(don’t say manipulate!) the narrative. ALWAYS -Goldman Sachs

Metaphorically this is basically a scenario where you give 100 people a drug with side effects that last a year. This drug is fairly predictable, side effects occur pretty much to a textbook T. Except you give this drug to 10 people at a time, over the course of a year. By Q1, year 2, it may be understandable to be surprised at the variance between how everyone is acting because some people are done with the experience and others just basically got started. But by Q3/4 I don’t think anyone has an excuse to be perplexed by anything regarding the story or the timeline. But here? Somehow the money printing screamers have high jacked the narrative.

As long as it continues to follow and correlate to a COVID side effect than this whole circus is overdone and it’s bs. So credit basically is back to where it would have been without COVID happening and savings got a boost from stimulus and then disappeared and over shoots a bit to the downside. I don’t think this matters as much as many think, does the above include all savings or just checking accounts. I mean isn’t one of the biggest arguments about the lowly poor people? They always live paycheck to paycheck. The world isn’t just going to stop because they no longer have savings. We ll just have a normalization on the services side. Literally everything continues to follow the same path. Services probably goes strong into year end and then Q one everyone’s had big New Years parties and seen the Rockettes for the first time in 3-4 years…everything, from goods to services, from toilet paper hoarding to housing, is about to come full circle in terms of the demand waves. Services was just the last one because the dense states didn’t open up til this spring. As to the widgets, we’ve been over it with the plastic spoons. Take em away. Shut down factories. Let folks have em. Try opening back up but hampered with restrictions. Price shoots up. Over time producing them ain’t hard, and everything normalizes. Prices ain’t coming down, but they normalize as eventually you can produce enough that people don’t feel the need to pay whatever for them.

Ok so what does this mean? The trend line is currently where it was going pre COVID. Savings shows a clear one off boost that disappears. It’s entirely stimulus related, duh. Bit worse than pre COVID, sure. Banks have loan reserves. No big deal. Otherwise, I think this crushes your bear thesis because all the current spending/inflation is from services. That’s the last leg of this bs inflation story. Tapped out consumer just means inflation caused by service industry dissipates. Game over for the “must raise rates cuz $9 Big Mac meal” crowd.

A common rule of short selling at the institutional level is to ALWAYS control the narrative. ALWAYS. Top down.

Yea I mean honestly I am sick of this whole thing, and found that video of some radical left, yes, radical left, guy blasting AOC at one of her town halls to be so spot on. Ukraine is and has been a corrupt shit hole. It’s just been a puppet and starting with John McCains prodding and US ops overthrowing the government in 2014 up til now, I am sick of seeing this play out predictably….continuing to endanger US citizens while looting the tax payer on top of it. I am partially Ukrainian too btw. For the normal people in Ukraine and Russia, it sucks. But from the US angle, these asshats are endangering us playing some stupid game. It’s not humanitarian either. There’s a reason we re in Ukraine and now pushing for conflict in Taiwan but no one even heard of Rwanda.

Think Sanjeev mentioned this one awhile ago. It’s good.

Yesterday AH AAPL was at 138 and BRK 286. This mornin? 155 and 297. When are folks gonna stop trying to predict the short term future? This shit only really works if you're in marketing and selling products to people. Handling your own money? Not so much.

Im sure theres people out there trying to trade a pivot. Im sure even amongst that group theres multiple people with different definitions of what pivot even means. Most people, IDK, who TF cares? Just find shit that works for you and deal with that. If we keep talking about "the market" but then purposely only talking about FANG earnings, we're not really talking about "the market" are we? Like I said earlier, look at XOM and CVX.

You're wayyyy too into your narrative man. If, even as you've said, this is a 12-18 month issue, staring at 25-40% declines across the board and demanding significant further downside is just being a pig. The market, as always, is full of good investments and bad ones. Stop trying to be a macro trader.

I’m not sure I’ve ever said that??? Basically my stance has been the economy is healthy, the Fed is taking the training wheels off, while also still misguided on inflation, and 3-4% rates are both normal and not a big deal.

Wouldn’t that then make something like WD40 a better target if strictly going on the valuation angle?

2am this morning I got an email from Apple that Apple TV was going from $4.99 a month to $6.99. Shrugged shoulders and went back to bed. It’s an incredible business with so many different access points to one’s wallet.

Big names in the news today. Apple, Exxon, Chevron, Amazon. Not sure I see falling off a cliff happening with the above. I mean let’s get real. Amazon never had earnings. The special guys running value funds just imagined they did starting 2 years ago.

What is a cliff? What’s been reported this quarter so far has varied. Energy is rebalancing w/ tech weighting wise. Otherwise, with all the doom porn and “terrible” reports, spy is 3800 today, yes even after Amazons pitiful quarter. Apple is up. WM is still like 5% off the ATH. Costco at $500. Are people really just going to sell these off 20-30% because some analysts say updates his book report? Or because they can get 4% in a checking account? Or because earnings will fall for a year or two? This doesn’t all seem really short sighted to you? Especially when you’ve said this is just a temporary “12-18 month reset before the economy has a decade to be healthy again”? This is why valuation shorting is dumb. Aren’t there obvious BAD businesses to be targeting. You seem to be really going down the doom porn rabbit hole lately. Is another 10-15% drawdown in the cards into year end with tax losses for everyone and the future hikes plus earnings season rounding out? No idea. Possible. I just wouldn’t get carried away, that’s all.

Eh too bad. Just when you thought the old man was gonna go ham playing the liquidate and buyback game with Mr Market. Guess we will see.