Political Posts

[Red Lion]

11 hours ago, Parsad said:

Not sure it's fair to discount what he has to say because of his age.  There a lot of things that 40, 50 and 60 year olds forget about life as they age as well. 

I agree with this. I don’t discount his views because of his age, but because of his unwavering belief that he has all the answers notwithstanding a pretty sore track record of doom and gloom and appeals to authorities with poor track records. 
 

I do think that like many of the rest of us, a few more years of getting it wrong will likely help Blake see both sides. 
 

[Malmqky]

4 hours ago, Blake Hampton said:

 

I added some minor tweaks.

 

Otherwise, well said.

 

 

I value your perspective and think you're a good addition to this board. Echo chambers are useless and you having a differentiated opinion helps prevent CoBF from becoming one.

 

With that said, I'm going to give you some unsolicited advice:

 

- Consider the opportunities you'll miss out in life because people perceive you as arrogant, even if you're right. It's not the most talented people who get promoted/invited to events/succeed in life, it's the likeable people who are talented enough. People are also going to dismiss you because you're young. Being likeable (humble) will help counter that.

 

- This forum is filled with knowledgeable people. You should soak up all the knowledge you can from them, even if you disagree with it. Confirmation bias is a bitch, and you should try to avoid it at all costs. People challenging your opinion is something you should embrace. You'll gain the most from inversing, as Charlie Munger taught. If you aren't constantly challenging, inversing, and changing your opinions/adding nuance to them, you're stagnating. Don't dismiss, discuss.

 

- You should consider what you bring to this board. Posting Buffett and Dimon quotes and interviews is a low value add. We all have seen these videos and quotes. If you truly are seeing something we are all missing, why don't you post some better content? Longer, more nuanced, more in-depth content written by yourself. Are you preaching at us or trying to help us? I'm serious. What's your motivation here? If it's to learn and help your fellow investors, what you're currently doing isn't helping us, and no one is learning. Give us actionable ideas. Please help me understand why I should be in oil for example.

Edited May 24, 2025 by Malmqky

[Malmqky]

23 hours ago, Blake Hampton said:

 

Even before the election, I came to the conclusion that Trump supporters fell into one or both of two camps: greed and ignorance.

 

Of course, the ignorant camp far and away exceeds the greedy camp in sheer size, but it was always interesting to me how businesspeople generally assumed that Trump would be good for them. The orange man is nothing short of a sociopath, who I don't think is capable of caring about anyone outside of himself. The second that anyone gets in the way of something that he wants, in any facet of life, they become the enemy. Unfortunately, in a way that history could probably show a thousand times over, poor and desperate people looked to him like some sort of god that would deliver them from all of their problems. I'm not so certain that we've seen the end of this sort of behavior, and the really scary thing is that he could be just the beginning: Gavin Newsom is in the pipeline for 2028 democratic nominee.

 

Take a distraught populace, promise to deliver them the entire world, give them an enemy, and you'll own them.

 

 

What's the point of posting this? To offend people? You can't seriously think this is going to persuade anyone/teach anyone anything?

 

Do you really think things are so simplistic that you can reduce Trump supporters to only two camps? And I'm not a Trump supporter for the record.

 

I think it's a better use of your time to try to understand why Trump happened and not jump to conclusions like his voters are deluded or stupid or greedy. The answer isn't simple.

Edited May 24, 2025 by Malmqky

[Spekulatius]

I think @Blake Hampton being 23 year old and posting here on a long weekend Friday night in an online Gheezer forum is gross misallocation of time and resources.
Age appropriate investing for him should be investing in himself or finding a great girl preferably with a good job and / or some money. I think the return on investment would beat time spent here and for sure sounds like more fun to me.
 

Edited May 24, 2025 by Spekulatius

[nsx5200]

The grand trend is that globalization in trade and automation have caused the well paying skillset to change.  There is a huge population that got left behind from these larger trends.  If you think about it, this was what happened in the middle east in the past.  They used to be the bleeding edge in terms of inventing the best math system (decimal), most food production, etc... They've been left behind in terms of industrial revolution, green revolution (many of it due to its localized climate change), technology/computer revolution and it seems like they're going to miss the upcoming AI revolution as well.  The whole rise of the Taliban, ISIS, whatever, are just futile attempts to make the middle east great again.  Their strategy is to take the middle east back to pre-modern era, the historical golden age of the middle east.  This same strategy is used by the current administration, and marketed to the population that got left-behind.  Similar attitude and trends are showing up in the United States in the form of xenophobia, anti-technology(especially big), anti-trade, anti-progressive.  Realistically, ignoring and even fighting these grand trends(via these crude tariffs) is unlikely to work, and IMHO, neither party is offering any real solution to solving it.  If there are proposals to actually solve them, there is no real political will to implement them as they require long-term investment in education, public infrastructure, research, etc.  Stuff that takes years to see results from.  The boomers, which holds pretty much the political power in the US, are too old to really care about investing in the future generations, and they care much more about preserving their wealth to give up cuts in Medicare/Medicaid, social security, and to paying more taxes to pay for future investments.  The young generation, unfortunately, don't have enough money and fingers into the political system to really fight for their long-term success.  The rise of the Facebooks, the Tiktoks also promote even shorter-term behavior over long-term behaviors, to the detriment of the younger generation.  Even the stock market, with its focus on short-term profits have eroded many long-term crucial capabilities such as manufacturing, ship-building, etc.

 

I expect to see companies that continue to focus on learning and long-term investment over short-term gains to do well, and I hope other sees maintaining institutions that have those qualities as worthy of keeping around (ex. Harvard, NIH, etc).

[Blugolds]

@nsx5200 interesting compare/contrast of trends, hadn’t thought of some of those points. It’s clear there are those being and will-be left behind. Struggle to return to “the glory days” of those in the Middle East and those here in the US. 
 

Interesting to think about where that tipping point of resistance is, I assume it correlates with the percentage of the population that is left behind. Small niche industry isn’t going to make waves, but it obviously takes less than 50% to make a huge impact. Also when considering the losses, it’s interesting to think of what happens when the majority of the population IS brought along with an Industrial Revolution, plenty of jobs, improvements in living etc. 

 

thanks for the post, good thought exercise 

[james22]

3 hours ago, nsx5200 said:

The grand trend is that globalization in trade and automation have caused the well paying skillset to change. 

 

Just wait until AI comes for the symbolic analyst jobs.

 

https://instapundit.substack.com/p/the-coming-symbolic-analyst-meltdown

[RichardGibbons]

15 hours ago, james22 said:

Secondly, it's the lack of any demonstrated ability to draw correct conclusions, whatever the age. 

 

Virgins, 23 or 40, cannot give sex advice.

 

They haven't earned the right.

 

This is one of those things that is trying to sound wise, but is the opposite.

 

Like, have you been a senator or congressman? No? Then you can't comment on federal politics because you're a federal political virgin.

 

Have you done a Ph. D in climatology?  No? Then you can't comment on climate change or climate policies.

Are you a medical research doctor? No? Then you can't comment on the efficacy or safety of vaccines.

 

Have you been to China? No? Then you can't criticize, compliment, or really say anything about China.

 

The criteria for whether someone's ideas are worth listening to is the validity of the reasoning behind their ideas.

Edited May 25, 2025 by RichardGibbons
Reduced the level of disrespect.

[Gregmal]

10 minutes ago, RichardGibbons said:

 

This is one of those things that is trying to sound wise, but is the opposite.

 

Like, have you been a senator or congressman? No? Then you can't comment on federal politics because you're a federal political virgin.

 

Have you done a Ph. D in climatology?  No? Then you can't comment on climate change or climate policies.

Are you a medical research doctor? No? Then you can't comment on the efficacy or safety of vaccines.

 

Have you been to China? No? Then you can't criticize, compliment, or really say anything about China.

 

The criteria for whether someone's ideas are worth listening to is the validity of the reasoning behind their ideas.

Generally speaking yes. But I think with enough data points you can evaluate things on a scale with different weightings. The lowest for instance is a perma bear who’s short something on fundamentals that then goes down for macro reasons. Market goes up or down both short term and long term. Essentially a 50/50 shot either way. They’ll claim a victory but over time you can see if the logic(as you said) is valid. Look at more complex stuff where maybe there’s 3-4 or 5-6 variables that require inference. The more “calls” the short seller makes, the odds change from 50/50 to something more substantive in terms of arriving at a conclusion about competency. But when you make calls about stuff with 5/6+ variables and over time have been wrong about the 50/50 80% of the time and the 5/6 underlying assumptions prove to be wrong 75% of the time…you have a reasonable basis to conclude the process is junk.

[RichardGibbons]

10 minutes ago, Gregmal said:

Generally speaking yes. But I think with enough data points you can evaluate things on a scale with different weightings. The lowest for instance is a perma bear who’s short something on fundamentals that then goes down for macro reasons. Market goes up or down both short term and long term. Essentially a 50/50 shot either way. They’ll claim a victory but over time you can see if the logic(as you said) is valid. Look at more complex stuff where maybe there’s 3-4 or 5-6 variables that require inference. The more “calls” the short seller makes, the odds change from 50/50 to something more substantive in terms of arriving at a conclusion about competency. But when you make calls about stuff with 5/6+ variables and over time have been wrong about the 50/50 80% of the time and the 5/6 underlying assumptions prove to be wrong 75% of the time…you have a reasonable basis to conclude the process is junk.

 

Yeah, I agree. This is totally how you decide if someone is competent.

 

I guess the debate is, when you don't actually have any real data points, how do you come to a conclusion? And the two positions seem to be:

1. You don't need to evaluate anything. Just conclude that the person is incompetent
2. There's a possibility that the person might have valuable perspectives, but you can only evaluate that by looking at their reasoning

[DooDiligence]

10 hours ago, Malmqky said:

 

I think it's a better use of your time to try to understand why Trump happened and not jump to conclusions like his voters are deluded or stupid or greedy. The answer isn't simple.

 

Ohhh, yes it is.

 

 

[DooDiligence]

For those who missed it the first time around, I present you with the tip of the iceberg of corrupt incompetence.

 

 

 

[james22]

1 hour ago, RichardGibbons said:

The criteria for whether someone's ideas are worth listening to is the validity of the reasoning behind their ideas.

 

Firstly, there's been no reasoning shared, just Blake's observations and conclusions.

 

Secondly, of course we should consider the reasoning (if shared), but let's recognize the limitation:

 

Unlike a mathematical proof, there's no logical argument that can establish the truth of any political or investing reasoning. It is impossible to demonstrate that any such reasoning is definitively true or false.

 

(No one's yet changed their mind in this 460 page thread because of some irrefutable argument.)

 

1 hour ago, RichardGibbons said:

There's a possibility that the person might have valuable perspectives, but you can only evaluate that by looking at their reasoning

 

No, we can also evaluate the perspective by looking at the author's track record.

 

That's why we bother to test any hypothesis, no matter how elegant.

 

Hussman's reasoning is arguably more impressive than Buffet's, but we can see it doesn't survive testing.

 

1 hour ago, RichardGibbons said:

Like, have you been a senator or congressman? No? Then you can't comment on federal politics because you're a federal political virgin.

 

Have you done a Ph. D in climatology?  No? Then you can't comment on climate change or climate policies.

Are you a medical research doctor? No? Then you can't comment on the efficacy or safety of vaccines.

 

Have you been to China? No? Then you can't criticize, compliment, or really say anything about China.

 

Nah.

 

Firstly, knowledge, skills, and abilities are not so narrow. Many are shared between roles.

 

Secondly, general intelligence (especially pattern recognition) maps across all roles.

 

One can argue if your success in one role has relevancy in another, but if you've demonstrated NO success in ANY role, why should anyone listen to you?

 

And wouldn't it seem pretty unlikely for someone to have the ability to accurately assess Trump voters and yet be unable to demonstrate the underlying KSAs in any other way?

[james22]

6 minutes ago, james22 said:

And wouldn't it seem pretty unlikely for someone to have the ability to accurately assess Trump voters and yet be unable to demonstrate the underlying KSAs in any other way?

 

This would actually be a funny Cassandra-like curse, to know all things macro, but never be believed because otherwise mid in every way (education, career, accomplishments).

[RichardGibbons]

Thanks for your responses, James. I think I'll leave it there. I think we've put forward the arguments, and people can decide for themselves which strategy is optimal.

[DooDiligence]

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2025/05/sue-trump-oval-office-racketeering.html

[nsx5200]

I find this article to be illuminating to the underlying operating principals of Trump and the current administration:

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2025/05/steve-witkoff-putin-russia-ukraine-diplomat/682805/ or https://archive.ph/lwBL5

 

NotebookLM's summary:

"This Atlantic article focuses on Steve Witkoff, a real estate billionaire and friend of President Trump, who has taken on a significant and unconventional diplomatic role. Despite having no formal diplomatic background, Witkoff is involved in complex international negotiations, including those concerning Israel and Hamas, Russia and Ukraine, and Iran. His approach is characterized by a transactional perspective and leveraging his personal relationship with the president, which has reportedly superseded the traditional duties of the Secretary of State and drawn both praise for his unconventional successes and skepticism from foreign policy veterans."

 

The bolded items are also qualities that Witkoff shares with Trump, IMHO, and explains why many of the signature actions doesn't seem fully vetted, even though they have good intentions behind them.  It's a bit unfortunate that the current administration doesn't take the time to better vet their actions, and requires a bit of iterations back and forth to reach a more reasonable 'solution'.

 

Disclaimer: The Atlantic leans heavily to the left, but this particular article, IMHO, is less opinionated and focus more on the interview and facts.  Caveat emptor, and calibrate accordingly.

[cubsfan]

1 hour ago, DooDiligence said:

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2025/05/sue-trump-oval-office-racketeering.html

 

Such a lovely wacko article defending the scumbag law firm that engineered the $3M payment between loser Hillary Clinton and a lying foreign intelligence officer to interfere in a US election.

The firm, Perkins Coie, hides $3M payment from Clinton, while Christopher Steele makes up

the phony Russian collusion dossier. So the firm, insulates itself from Russian operatives that

attempt to unseat Trump as a viable Presidential candidate. All hidden and paid for by Clinton & Perkins Coie, the destestable DC law firm. This law firm is certainly fortunate that they did not suffer the same fate as Arthur Anderson - and get completely shut down. But they claim Trump is the Russian operative!

 

And you gotta love the plug at the end of the article for Harvard - with it's systematic antisemitism that continues to run crazy with Hamas loving students & faculty. Just think, a university that set up 

"safe spaces" and "cry rooms" for emotionally devastated students when Trump won his first election. Then, that same administration, instead of providing any safety against the anti-semites - allows physical violence, take over of building, damage to the university - with little or no consequences to the anti-semites they protect.

 

 

[DooDiligence]

Top Paul Weiss lawyers leave firm after Trump deal

 

Love it. If they won’t fight for themselves, how can any potential client trust they'll fight for them?

[cubsfan]

12 minutes ago, DooDiligence said:

Top Paul Weiss lawyers leave firm after Trump deal

 

Love it. If they won’t fight for themselves, how can any potential client trust they'll fight for them?

 

Don't shed any tears for the King of the Scumbag firms, Paul Weiss Law, whose sole mission previously was to provide lawyers for much of the disgusting lawfare against Trump.  

 

The firm had to be shitting bricks when Trump won the election. He rightfully revoked the security clearances of 1000 of their lawyers, knowing they could not be trusted with national security issues.

Trump learned his lesson from the first term.

 

Once the firm agreed to can (or let resign) many of the worst players - Paul Weiss Law, as a firm was allowed to survive.

[WFF]

EU tariffs now delay to July 9th after a good call. 

 

https://www.cnbc.com/2025/05/25/trump-50percent-tariffs-eu-july-9.html

[adventurer]

7 hours ago, WFF said:

EU tariffs now delay to July 9th after a good call. 

 

https://www.cnbc.com/2025/05/25/trump-50percent-tariffs-eu-july-9.html

It was a beautiful call. There has never been a call like this before. I don`t think it ever happened in history. 

[Parsad]

On 5/24/2025 at 5:29 AM, Gregmal said:

LOL this is kinda wild. While I agree age isn’t a qualifier or disqualifier, at some point there’s enough overlap to draw some conclusion. 
 

Again, I totally relate. I started my business very young and along the way ran into so many egotistical “I’m superior because I’m older folks”. But I also had to put up the results to warrant my swagger. The difference between LeBron and a beer league guy at the park whom runs his mouth is that LeBron makes the shots. 
 

So as it relates to the above, just to provide some context;

 

-people whom were in the market since 2006 are complacent,

 

-the bottoms from recent general market volatility were “just the beginning”,

 

-Buffett should not be questioned,

 

-the inflation call that is now bordering on being in perpetuity 

 

-the oil is a must own because of inflation and Buffett 

 

- @gfp and anyone else buying bonds is an idiot

 

-Fairfax is untouchable because it owns way too much duration, duration being defined as anything longer than 2 years

 

- @james22 and anyone who owns crypto are bubbles breathing greater fools

 

Amongst other things….

 

This in the face of many, many members here whom have taken the time to generously share their experience and stories and even relate on many fronts to the interesting dilemma of being young and smart in the market where things might not appear to make perfect sense to you. Actually let me rephrase that last sentence. Being young and smart in a market that’s euphoric and everyone’s dancing til the music stops and you’re certain you’ve got it all figured out because everyone else is dumb. 

 

Prem has probably made more shots than most people in insurance and investment history...certainly not perfect and certainly missed many...but he's made more than 99% of the people out there.  Yet, regardless of age, I've seen plenty of people criticize him on here over the years...under anonymity, with no proven record in 99% of those cases, and with the same swagger that you describe in Blake.  So he's certainly not the first, not the youngest, nor the only one! 

 

We have no fucking clue about James or anything he's done.  Could be sheer bravado...could be a fucking superstar...but we know nothing about him.  How is that any different than Blake or most people on here?  So age is probably the very last quantifier or character to judge by!  Cheers!

[Parsad]

On 5/24/2025 at 11:52 AM, Spekulatius said:

I think @Blake Hampton being 23 year old and posting here on a long weekend Friday night in an online Gheezer forum is gross misallocation of time and resources.
Age appropriate investing for him should be investing in himself or finding a great girl preferably with a good job and / or some money. I think the return on investment would beat time spent here and for sure sounds like more fun to me.
 

 

+1!  Cheers!

[Parsad]

On 5/24/2025 at 9:11 PM, DooDiligence said:

For those who missed it the first time around, I present you with the tip of the iceberg of corrupt incompetence.

 

 

 

 

You will get zero responses to this, since it is indefensible and none of the supporters will admit that.  Even if it is his own words...they just won't say anything.  Cheers!