Stuff I found interesting or amusing and thought I'd share.
- Jordan Peterson on Trump's "X-Men" team.
- Reddit's "I can't believe other people do do this 'hack.'" Going to try some of these.
- Wow - just wow. Can't be unseen.
- How Progressives blew it. From the pen of a liberal.
Stuff I found interesting or amusing and thought I'd share.
- Jonathan Turley on whether Anthony Fauci had the legal authorization to act as he did. May also open him up to prosecution and maybe financial restitution.
- Steven Pressfield on DeNiro sits in a chair. Good stuff.
- Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell - everyone knew but nobody did anything (from former Reddit CEO in 2020)
- Average credit card rate now over 22%. Thanks Joe! (Via)
It really does feel as though CNBC is a participant in market manipulation for the rich. These hedge fund guys go on air and it's like they're trying to spook the herd in the direction of their trades. They tell everyone to get out when they're short, and once all the meat is off the bone, they go long, just in time for the recovery. They get to call the top and the bottom of the market. It's totally fucked.
The bailout and the pandemic just exposed how there are different sets of rules, not just for different types of investors,but for different types of businesses. Your favorite sandwich shop? Closed. If you've got 200 of those sandwich shops? Open.
The sentiment behind the GameStop situation is not going away. And GameStop stock as I type this is at $63.77 a share. Seems like many are still holding the line.
Matt Taibi has a follow-up article to the above and it is also well worth your time.
Miscellaneous thoughts and observations.
Back in November I was paying $2.09 for a gallon of gas. Today I paid $2.59 a gallon. Elections have consequences... Well you can't argue with this logic... They say the Reddit/GameStop situation is fueled in large part by people using their last stimulus checks to buy the stock. I can't help but wonder if this is true - how crazy would things be if the stimulus check was $2,000 instead of $600?... Pesticide Executives would be a good name for a band... It still blows my mind that the Patriots led Super Bowl LI vs the Falcons for ZERO minutes and still won... Obesity in the US may in fact be traced back to the phrase "Go big or go home"...
Stuff I found interesting or amusing and thought I'd share.
- Jeff Bezos to step down as Amazon CEO. Andy Jassy from AWS to take over. I found it interesting that AWS seems to be the big dog in the company now.
- Nice summary of the GameStop situation as of last Friday
- Businessman plans first all-civilian SpaceX flight to benefit Saint Jude's. Looking forward to seeing the commercial about the mission on Super Bowl Sunday.
- Speaking of Amazon - The relentless Jeff Bezos. A good look at how Amazon got to this point.
Miscellaneous thoughts and observations.
Prediction - the Biden Presidency will be haunted by the Reddit GameStop investors like John Cusak by the paperboy in Better Off Dead. "I want my two dollars!"... Yesterday was the 35th anniversary of the Challenger disaster. I feel bad that I did not mention it earlier... Twitter did Donald Trump a big favor by banning him. Now he gets to silently sit on the sidelines while the Biden Administration gets to deal with the fallout from the Robinhood/GameStop mess. This is a no-win situation for the Administration because so, so many people now "want their two dollars!"... Matt Taibbi has a great take on the GameStop situation. My favorite bit was, "The entire tale, in a nutshell, goes like this: One group of gamblers announced,'Fuck you!' Another announced back: 'No, fuck YOU!'" Read the whole thing... So when does the stampede of politicians returning campaign contributions from Citadel's Ken Griffin begin? Yeah - wouldn't hold my breath... I bet if someone on Nancy Pelosi's staff had given her the stock tip about GameStop two months ago that she'd be all up in arms about the ceasing of trading yesterday. Just sayin'...
This story just keeps getting more and more crazy.
The above is not actually Robinhood's statement on the situation. This was their actual release. In the release they announce they are restricting trading on certain stocks such as GameStop. That "clacking" sound you hear is from all of the keyboards closing their Robinhood accounts. If Robinhood was a public company I think Melvin Capital would be shorting the stock about now.
The small investors aren't taking this sitting down - they have already filed a Class Action Lawsuit against Robinhood.
Discord the hosting service for WallStreetBets shut down their server for "hate speech, glorifying violence, and spreading misinformation." They wanted to be clear they "did not ban this server due to financial fraud related to GameStop or other stock." Yeah right. The timing here is merely coincidental.
Morgan Housel has a post upon the situation titled, Why It's Usually Crazier Than You'd Expect. This paragraph struck me:
The reddit campaign to push its stock up started two months ago. At first shares rose a little. That caught people's attention, those people bought, which pushed prices up more, which caught more people's attention - and on and on - until this week when virtually every investor in America is paying attention to GameStop because it's risen so high, and it's rising high because every investor in America is paying attention to it.
Hmmm - what else happened two months ago? I know Morgan's post was titled "Why it's crazier than you'd expect" but I won't go there or speculate.
Well one thing that also happened about two months ago was Janet Yellen was made Treasury Secretary for the Biden Administration. The same Janet Yellen who made millions giving speeches to Wall Street firms. Including Citadel which is at the center of this controversy. Found this bit interesting:
Citadel is founded by Ken Griffin, a major Republican donor who has funded the presidential campaigns of establishment candidates including Mitt Romney and John McCain.
Is it me or is there one name conspicuously absent there?
Of all the things I read on the situation today - this resonated the most with me: An Open Letter to Melvin Capital, CNBC, Boomers and WSB. This was the key line, "We're not enemies, we're on the same side."
Amen brother! Amen! I hope all who view this situation with an open mind take away that message and in many ways take back the country from the elites who don't think rules apply to them.
Stuff I found interesting or amusing and thought I'd share.
- Interesting take on the GameStop situation. Full disclosure I don't own any stock in the company. (HT Steve Layman)
- 6 life lessons from David Goggins
- GameStop, Barstool Sports, and the Mets. Can't wait for GameStop: The Movie! to come out. That could be this generations version of Airplane!
- Naval Ravikant - How to get rich without being lucky. One of those things you just need to read from time to time. Such great wisdom especially during this crazy time..
- WHO advisor (and Biden supporter): Covid-19 pandemic likely started via lab leak. Gives me hope that some on the fringes of the Biden Administration are willing to tell the truth about China.
Miscellaneous thoughts and observations.
My big fear regarding the Reddit / GameStop situation is that it just could give China and Russia ideas on how to fuck with us...Just a reminder that the CBO (Congressional Budget Office) said up to 14 million Americans could go without heath insurance if the Individual Mandate was removed from Obamacare. It was removed and the actual number of uninsured Americans was closer to 2.5 million with the majority of that number young people who did not want to pay for health insurance... President Biden to sign Executive Order forcing professional sports leagues to cease using something called the "Disabled List" and instead change to something called the "Differently Abled List"... I have to wonder how many of those 2.5 million uninsured were young people who used the money they would have paid for health insurance plans and instead bought Bitcoin or GameStop stock?... Evidence of society getting lazier: in the 1950's it was called "pornographic movies," in the 70's it was shortened to "porno's" and today simply "porn." In 20 years it will just be "P".... Meaty Appendages would be a good name for fake meat chicken wings (or a gay gym)...
"The GameStop thing is a reminder that investing is not a study of finance. It's the study of how people behave with money, and sometimes those behaviors are incredible." - Morgan Housel
"A man always has two reasons for doing anything: a good reason and the real reason." - J.P. Morgan
"It's vampires all the way down." - Toxic
This thread does a great job explaining what was actually happening here. And it is clear that who is the "good guys" and who is the "bad guys" is simply a matter of perspective. My view is that perhaps they're all bad guys.
Matt Taibbi did a nice job explaining why Robinhood is one of the villains of the pandemic. And to a degree I agree with him. But on the flip side - people are going to Robinhood for conveniences they can't get elsewhere. Is that bad? Citadel pays Robinhood for the data and order flow so that they would have milliseconds to perhaps take positions on those trades. Is that bad or just the way trading has been done since the days of the Rothchilds?
The hedge fund managers like Melvin Capital Management who were shorting GameStop stock? They are clearly the victims of this situation but were they the bad guys who got what they deserved? I'm not a fan of short-selling in general but the argument of short-selling GameStop in particular is pretty logical. GameStop is a Blockbuster-type brick and mortar store operating in a Netflix-type world. And GameStop doesn't have the best of reputations among what would be their customer base (I can personally attest to this).
What about the Reddit users on WallStreetBets who manipulated GameStop's stock? Yes they really stuck it to those 'blood-sucking short sellers." But many of them also made fortunes while doing it. Like this one user who brags about turning a $50,000 position into $22 million. Am I supposed to be rooting for that guy?
It's a crazy situation and I think I have to agree with Toxic, "It's vampires all the way down."
