Tidbits

[Spooky]

Latest Eye on the Market from JPM is pretty interesting: https://am.jpmorgan.com/ca/en/asset-management/institutional/insights/market-insights/eye-on-the-market/outlook-2025/

[DooDiligence]

 

All of the above plus the American consumer, which is not necessarily a bad thing for upcoming generations. Gonna suck for a lot of people in the present though. Chaos agents at work to consolidate the billionaires. Welcome to the matrix. Now take your medicine.

 

 

===

 

edit: Seriously though, thanks for posting this. Lot's of good info. Trying to draw my own conclusions, even though that's frequently proven hazardous.

Edited January 8 by DooDiligence

[DooDiligence]

Should we build a wall in Florida?

 

[Sweet]

 

Had this thought for a while myself but I’ve not taken any position.  

Ideally you’d know real estate well enough to intelligently pick a good company - unfortunately I don’t have the confidence that I can do this.

 

There is a Vaneck ETF that owns players involved in commercial real estate - ticker ‘DESK’ - but it doesn’t have a long history.

Vaneck have a blog about it:

https://www.vaneck.com/us/en/blogs/thematic-investing/play-the-return-to-office-trade-with-an-office-reit-etf/

 

[Ulti]

https://bilello.blog/2025/2024-the-year-in-charts
 

a nice review in charts of market randomness in 2024

[james22]

52 minutes ago, Ulti said:

https://bilello.blog/2025/2024-the-year-in-charts
 

a nice review in charts of market randomness in 2024

 

The S&P 500 would end the year at 5,882, besting every major Wall Street firm’s price target by over 400 points. The S&P 500’s actual price gain of 23% was over 21% higher than the average forecast.

 

Whoops.

[Spekulatius]

I was mentioning taxes in the Apple thread and randomly pulled up NVDA income statement and had a laugh. This is a $3.4T market cap company that makes money hand over fist and barely pays any taxes at all. Pretty much anyone with $50k income has a higher tax rate than NVDA.

 

Sometimes  you can tell a scam just by the numbers, even if you don’t know how they do it. The US tax system is a scam, there is in my opinion no question about it . It’s one reason why the middle class is hollowed out, they pay more taxes than the rich which move they income to LT capital gains and elaborate deferred schemes like the private equity guys.

 

I imagine the howling that would go on if an administration proposes a 15% minimum tax. 15% is less than what a family of two pays that makes 80k or so.

 

[Blake Hampton]

Why pay taxes when you don't have to?

The blame falls on our legislators.

[Blake Hampton]

While I'm here, I have a question for anyone interested.

How much more should I value the tax advantages of a 401(k) type account over the amount of investment options outside of it? I do think that tax advantaged accounts are incredible, especially Roths. What I don't like is that all the employer plans seem to have the worst investment options. I think I would do far better buying individual equities than the market at current prices. Thoughts?

 

Edited Sunday at 12:08 AM by Blake Hampton

[Spekulatius]

19 minutes ago, Blake Hampton said:

While I'm here, I have a question for anyone interested.

How much more should I value the tax advantages of a 401(k) type account over the amount of investment options outside of it? I do think that tax advantaged accounts are incredible, especially Roths. What I don't like is that all the employer plans seem to have the worst investment options. I think I would do far better buying individual equities than the market at current prices. Thoughts?

 

I have both. The answer with employer based 401k or Roth 401k is indexing . most of my money is in tax deferred accounts. I recommend funding Roths foremost because there is a salary cap dot hose beyond which you can’t fund them any more.

[james22]

21 minutes ago, Blake Hampton said:

While I'm here, I have a question for anyone interested.

How much more should I value the tax advantages of a 401(k) type account over the amount of investment options outside of it? 

 

TIRA to company match, then Roth.

 

Does your company allow a backdoor Roth? If so, take advantage of that.

 

Otherwise, a taxable account compares pretty favorably to the TIRA post-match.

[Spekulatius]

29 minutes ago, Blake Hampton said:

Why pay taxes when you don't have to?

The blame falls on our legislators.

It’s not t that simple because  those are companies are multinationals . They can shift taxes to any country want to with loopholes like shifting their IP to Ireland which taxes those earnings at zero.

 

As an average citizen you can’t do that. If you work on NY, you have to pay NY state taxes. If you are US a person, you have to pay the statutory tax, even if you live in a different country.

 

But this does not apply to corporations why can make business in one jurisdiction and move their taxes to another. In other an other words, the US treats corporations better than its citizens.

Thats why I think a minimum tax is a good idea.

Edited Sunday at 12:34 AM by Spekulatius

[Blake Hampton]

6 minutes ago, Spekulatius said:

As an average citizen you can’t do that. If you work on NY, you have to pay NY state taxes. If you are US a person, you have to pay the statutory tax, even if you live in a different country.

 

But this does not apply to corporations who can make business in one jurisdiction and move their taxes to another. In other words, the US treats corporations better than its citizens.

 

It's okay because Trump will make it better.

 

#SaveTikTok

[Dinar]

1 hour ago, Spekulatius said:

I was mentioning taxes in the Apple thread and randomly pulled up NVDA income statement and had a laugh. This is a $3.4T market cap company that makes money hand over fist and barely pays any taxes at all. Pretty much anyone with $50k income has a higher tax rate than NVDA.

 

Sometimes  you can tell a scam just by the numbers, even if you don’t know how they do it. The US tax system is a scam, there is in my opinion no question about it . It’s one reason why the middle class is hollowed out, they pay more taxes than the rich which move they income to LT capital gains and elaborate deferred schemes like the private equity guys.

 

I imagine the howling that would go on if an administration proposes a 15% minimum tax. 15% is less than what a family of two pays that makes 80k or so.

 

While I agree with you in theory, I think in most cases, like Nvidia, the reason that the company does not pay much in tax is because it does not make much money, that is GAAP profits overstate reality and are higher than IRS taxable income.  The culprit lies in the options expense.  Check out what is reported to shareholders and what is reported to the IRS, IRS numbers matches what employes are taxed on.  

[dwy000]

5 hours ago, Spekulatius said:

It’s not t that simple because  those are companies are multinationals . They can shift taxes to any country want to with loopholes like shifting their IP to Ireland which taxes those earnings at zero.

 

As an average citizen you can’t do that. If you work on NY, you have to pay NY state taxes. If you are US a person, you have to pay the statutory tax, even if you live in a different country.

 

But this does not apply to corporations why can make business in one jurisdiction and move their taxes to another. In other an other words, the US treats corporations better than its citizens.

Thats why I think a minimum tax is a good idea.

Keep in mind that if you add from the cash flow statement, for that same year (Jan 2024), in addition to the tax expense of $4,058 they also paid down $2,489 in deferred income tax (a cash expense) and another $2,783 in cash taxes related to restricted stock units.  So combined thats $9,330 in cash taxes on $33.8bn of pretax income.  

[Spekulatius]

7 hours ago, dwy000 said:

Keep in mind that if you add from the cash flow statement, for that same year (Jan 2024), in addition to the tax expense of $4,058 they also paid down $2,489 in deferred income tax (a cash expense) and another $2,783 in cash taxes related to restricted stock units.  So combined thats $9,330 in cash taxes on $33.8bn of pretax income.  

Thx- yes I am aware of the option/RS expense. Those show up on the employee W2 and the employee pays them. I can see the rational for adding them to the company tax bill, since it’s real compensation.

 

I am not sure about the deferred tax item. I think this is a carry forward from prior years where they actually paid no taxes per income statement at all.

[Blake Hampton]

Something interesting I've noticed is how Buffett was sounding alarms non-stop on the trade deficit pre-2008. Afterwards, almost nothing.

 

Why? Did his perception towards the dollar change in some material way?

[Sweet]

 

 

[Fly]

5 hours ago, Sweet said:

 

 

 

Counterpoint, retail is trading trump/melania coins. They will get burnt and learn the lesson the hard way and rotate into BTC over time. This is a common path for retail players for several cycles now. 

[Gregmal]

6 hours ago, Sweet said:

 

 

This is kinda stupid if you think about it. If you start a company, you also own 100% of it...thats just common sense, not a gotcha moment. 

[dwy000]

59 minutes ago, Gregmal said:

This is kinda stupid if you think about it. If you start a company, you also own 100% of it...thats just common sense, not a gotcha moment. 

It's the whole crypto argument.  If you start a company there's probably something underpinning the shares that people are buying into.  Here's there's nothing.  At least DJT pretends there's a business behind it for people to buy into. 

[Sweet]

2 hours ago, Gregmal said:

This is kinda stupid if you think about it. If you start a company, you also own 100% of it...thats just common sense, not a gotcha moment. 

He’s saying that these memecoins are little different from bitcoin.  Saw some Bitcoin guys complaining about the $TRUMP grift.

 

Edited 20 hours ago by Sweet

[Sweet]

Even though I’m from the UK, I somehow missed it, but UK banks have been ripping this past year.  
 

Quite a number of them have nearly doubled - Barclays, Lloyds, Standard Chartered, Natwest.

 

https://stockmark.it/uk-banks-lead-ftse-100-performance-as-interest-rates-bolster-profits-in-2024/?utm_source=chatgpt.com

 

I see some EU banks have done well too.