Stock scream room

Discussion of the Stock portion of the Permanent Portfolio

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Kriegsspiel
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Re: Stock scream room

Post by Kriegsspiel » Sun Jan 27, 2019 8:25 am

It's not just the productive Californians.
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Yet another friend in LA has been blogging about the ubiquitous homeless camps in his neighborhood and how everything the city does (or doesn’t do) makes the situation worse – at enormous expense. The persistent lack of new smaller less expensive accommodations coupled with all sorts of other decades-long structural changes in the economy have created a homeless crisis. And the homeless population isn’t evenly distributed across LA. Palos Verdes, Century City, Bel Air, and Beverly Hills are relentless in their removal of undesirables. Fair-to-middling Van Nuys? It tends to absorb more than its share. His proposed solution is to gather up the homeless and relocate them.

“I am not opposed to using the Prop. H tax to pay relocation costs to the Rust Belt, or any place which would take them.”

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“At the Sherman Oaks bridge housing meeting someone suggested a sober living trailer city in the Antelope Valley. If people are serious about addressing the personal crises driving addiction and self-defeat, this is not a bad idea.”

“I think we can agree a trailer compound would have to be well off the beaten path. Not downtown Palmdale. Something like Slab City, but with structure. There’s a lot of rural space up off the 138 in northern LA county.”

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Ah yes. I can see the good people of Youngstown, Ohio and Antelope Acres so eager to receive steady flows of Los Angeles’s broken cast offs. How totally unlike Palos Verdes and Century City playing whack-a-mole and pushing the homeless over to Van Nuys… I wonder if my friend is aware of how heavily armed the folks in Antelope Acres are. Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition. Fun! link
Fucking crazy right?
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Re: Stock scream room

Post by dualstow » Sun Jan 27, 2019 9:10 am

Wow, Willie the Groundskeeper has fallen on hard times.
(I apologize in advance for this comment.I do think about the homeless. I see them daily as well).

Relocation: a Canadian cousin of mine told me they used to bus the homeless to Manitoba whether they wanted to go or not, in the 1960s. From where, I cannot recall. Toronto, I think.
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Re: Stock scream room

Post by sophie » Sun Jan 27, 2019 9:46 am

Exporting the homeless...wow, talk about "not in my backyard."

I love how people like to blame "lack of affordable housing" - that's a load of B-S. There's always affordable housing, you just have to travel a bit (like, inland in the case of southern California) to find it. The problem is you can't do that if you're mentally ill. I don't care what the official stats say, that's true of the vast majority of homeless and probably virtually all of the long-term homeless. How about passing a law making it easier to declare a person incompetent? Right now, the bar for that is too high. A legacy of "one flew over the cuckoo's nest" apparently.
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Re: Stock scream room

Post by Kriegsspiel » Sun Jan 27, 2019 11:01 am

sophie wrote:
Sun Jan 27, 2019 9:46 am
I love how people like to blame "lack of affordable housing" - that's a load of B-S. There's always affordable housing, you just have to travel a bit (like, inland in the case of southern California) to find it.
I also think it's a mistake to require landlords to maintain rental properties at a certain level. It's not heart-warming, but slummy properties are what really poor people can afford. If you require landlords to spend too much money on properties versus what they're going to be able to collect in rent, they're not going to do it. Ergo, affordable housing crisis. That's at the extreme low-end of the spectrum of course, but I suspect that the "affordable housing crisis" for lower middle class people results from the cognitive dissonance of them thinking they should be able to afford a much nicer property than they can. Or the inverse, they're house poor (rent poor?) because they won't accept living in the type of housing they can afford in their area, which probably leans towards the slummy side of the spectrum. So they spend too much of their income on a property they think they deserve, which leaves too little for everything else, and they think they've been wronged.
The problem is you can't do that if you're mentally ill. I don't care what the official stats say, that's true of the vast majority of homeless and probably virtually all of the long-term homeless. How about passing a law making it easier to declare a person incompetent? Right now, the bar for that is too high. A legacy of "one flew over the cuckoo's nest" apparently.
I think I could agree with this, but with regards to the bolded: why?
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Re: Stock scream room

Post by Kriegsspiel » Sun Jan 27, 2019 2:47 pm

MangoMan wrote:
Sun Jan 27, 2019 1:12 pm
It amazes me that anyone wants to be a landlord in Cali, SF in particular. The taxes make charging adequate rent to be profitable, the local government makes all of the laws pro-tenant / anti-owner, and then they even talk about rent-control. Seriously?
Johnny writes about SF real estate a lot. Like:
The family that just bought [a 3 unit building] purchased it in a completely vacant condition so whoever was renting the two apartments were persuaded to leave before the sale. Empty buildings sell for a serious premium compared to those offered with protected rent controlled tenants. I have no knowledge of the particulars in this case, but the most common arrangement is for the seller to pay old tenants to leave voluntarily. That money is readily regained after the sale. I have several friends who were long time renters who were each paid $100,000 to leave desirable properties. That’s not enough for a down payment on anything here in San Francisco, but it allows people to start over elsewhere if they have a good plan. The pay outs are faster and cheaper than litigation and eviction and an extra couple hundred thousand dollars is a rounding error given the sale price.
The stove was immediately removed from the attic apartment. Without it the attic is merely a collection of extra rooms. Why rent? The legal dynamics make being a landlord in San Francisco extremely unpleasant. Rental income isn’t the primary concern for a family that can afford this sort of house. The basement was never legally rentable anyway so it’s now a storage space. The house is merely reverting to what it was when it was originally built – a comfortable single family home.[/b] link
And this one, which starts off, "Among my many friends here in San Francisco is a guy who works in the field of affordable housing."

Many of his articles make it seem like illegal apartments (like Christina Blasey Ford's) are everywhere along the Californian coast.
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Re: Stock scream room

Post by pmward » Mon Mar 04, 2019 11:08 am

Stocks getting a pretty big reversal and hard rejection today at a strong resistance level (2820). I think that we are starting to see the sell the news on the trade agreement starting to play out. Going to be very interesting what happens here. I think that this next month or two is really going to decide the fate of the long term trend. If we clear this resistance level I think that we are likely to test new highs this year. If we reject and get a next leg down, I think the 2600-2650 area is going to be the support level that will be the line in the sand where if we lose that level we are officially in a new primary downtrend, but if support holds it's a sign that the up trend that started in 09 is still in tact. If we lose 2600 things could get real ugly, real fast.
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Re: Stock scream room

Post by ochotona » Mon Mar 04, 2019 11:32 am

Ned Davis Research 3/1/19

If our Chief Global Investment Strategist’s current expectations are correct, global stocks will soon descend toward an oversold condition last seen in December. Defensive sectors would be the likely outperformers, with cyclical sectors underperforming.
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Re: Stock scream room

Post by pmward » Fri Mar 15, 2019 3:12 pm

Weekly close at 2822... Really curious to see what happens next week. Are we going to break out and attempt to retest the highs or are we going to reject and have another leg down? We are dancing right on that border line. We've rejected right at 2820 5 times since October. 10 year bond yields broke down and lost support this week, so we have a divergence of the bond market growing more bearish while the stock market is trying to rally over a very strong resistance level. Gonna be an interesting week next week to see how this resolves!
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Re: Stock scream room

Post by jacksonM » Fri Mar 15, 2019 4:52 pm

pmward wrote:
Fri Mar 15, 2019 3:12 pm
Weekly close at 2822... Really curious to see what happens next week. Are we going to break out and attempt to retest the highs or are we going to reject and have another leg down? We are dancing right on that border line. We've rejected right at 2820 5 times since October. 10 year bond yields broke down and lost support this week, so we have a divergence of the bond market growing more bearish while the stock market is trying to rally over a very strong resistance level. Gonna be an interesting week next week to see how this resolves!
No offense intended and I really do mean that but that whole paragraph is nothing but meaningless gibberish to me. I don't understand a word of it and am thankful for it.
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Re: Stock scream room

Post by ochotona » Fri Mar 15, 2019 5:05 pm

jacksonM wrote:
Fri Mar 15, 2019 4:52 pm
pmward wrote:
Fri Mar 15, 2019 3:12 pm
Weekly close at 2822... Really curious to see what happens next week. Are we going to break out and attempt to retest the highs or are we going to reject and have another leg down? We are dancing right on that border line. We've rejected right at 2820 5 times since October. 10 year bond yields broke down and lost support this week, so we have a divergence of the bond market growing more bearish while the stock market is trying to rally over a very strong resistance level. Gonna be an interesting week next week to see how this resolves!
No offense intended and I really do mean that but that whole paragraph is nothing but meaningless gibberish to me. I don't understand a word of it and am thankful for it.
It's Friday, go have a beer, then it will make sense.
PMWARD, the week after "quad witching" (today) can be a bit bearish.
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Re: Stock scream room

Post by pmward » Fri Mar 15, 2019 6:19 pm

jacksonM wrote:
Fri Mar 15, 2019 4:52 pm
No offense intended and I really do mean that but that whole paragraph is nothing but meaningless gibberish to me. I don't understand a word of it and am thankful for it.
Haha, it just means that technically speaking we are kind of at an inflection point in the market where it's likely to either shoot us back up to the October highs really fast, or shoot us back down. One way or another, next week has high odds of being volatile.

And yes I've read some interesting things about this particular quad witching. Either way, it is very interesting to see such a difference between the markets, with bond investors looking bearish and stock investors looking bullish on the economy.
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Re: Stock scream room

Post by boglerdude » Fri Mar 15, 2019 11:56 pm

> that whole paragraph is nothing but meaningless gibberish

Stocks are legal gambling and gambling is fun. At the end of the day fun is all that matters
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Re: Stock scream room

Post by Kbg » Sat Mar 16, 2019 7:26 am

It took me several years of investing to differentiate clearly between descriptive and predictive. 99.9999999% of everything one reads about investing is the former and the only thing that will improve your bottom line is the latter. Nothing wrong with stockfotainment, but it’s useless at best and dangerous at worst if you can’t put your emotional reactions on mute.
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Re: Stock scream room

Post by sophie » Sat Mar 16, 2019 8:46 am

pmward wrote:
Fri Mar 15, 2019 3:12 pm
Weekly close at 2822... Really curious to see what happens next week. Are we going to break out and attempt to retest the highs or are we going to reject and have another leg down? We are dancing right on that border line. We've rejected right at 2820 5 times since October. 10 year bond yields broke down and lost support this week, so we have a divergence of the bond market growing more bearish while the stock market is trying to rally over a very strong resistance level. Gonna be an interesting week next week to see how this resolves!
+1 to above posts.

This sounds like a Howard Cosell play by play description of a football game. A high art and very entertaining to be sure! The PP isn't nearly this much fun. Thankfully.

Pugchief, I noticed the same thing you did about corporate bonds when I was investigating the PP. Once you realize that there's no need to hold them if you already have stocks and cash, and that other investment vehicles can be regarded similarly, your investing life gets a lot simpler.
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Re: Stock scream room

Post by pmward » Sat Mar 16, 2019 9:20 am

Yeah, what I was getting at was more along the lines of what Kbg mentioned as descriptive, not predictive. I'm not altering my portfolio or making any bets on what is going to happen. But I do find it very interesting to watch. One only has to pull up a chart of the S&P to see that we've rallied up to 2820 5 times since October, and each time we've sold off. So there is definitely something polarizing about that level. If we break through it though, it could lead to a *very* strong rally. I also find divergences interesting, like how bond investors seem to be more bearish than stock investors at the moment. Small cap investors have been very hesitant the last few weeks, but large cap investors have been all in (which is especially curious with what has happened with Boeing). The divergences can resolve either way, but at the end of the day they will have to resolve eventually.

It is nice having a portfolio that will work no matter what happens so I no longer feel like I have to act on these things. I can sit back and watch them with a curious eye as opposed to with worry. That's where the tone that Sophie picked up on, where I was looking at it like a football commentator that's just simply describing what I see as opposed to someone that is either fearful or greedy. For the first time in my investing career, I'm actually not worried about what the stock market is going to do. That's a wonderful thing! That means the risk I am taking is finally in line with my risk tolerance and that I'm diversified enough that no single asset can destroy me.
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Re: Stock scream room

Post by jacksonM » Sat Mar 16, 2019 1:43 pm

ochotona wrote:
Fri Mar 15, 2019 5:05 pm
jacksonM wrote:
Fri Mar 15, 2019 4:52 pm
pmward wrote:
Fri Mar 15, 2019 3:12 pm
Weekly close at 2822... Really curious to see what happens next week. Are we going to break out and attempt to retest the highs or are we going to reject and have another leg down? We are dancing right on that border line. We've rejected right at 2820 5 times since October. 10 year bond yields broke down and lost support this week, so we have a divergence of the bond market growing more bearish while the stock market is trying to rally over a very strong resistance level. Gonna be an interesting week next week to see how this resolves!
No offense intended and I really do mean that but that whole paragraph is nothing but meaningless gibberish to me. I don't understand a word of it and am thankful for it.
It's Friday, go have a beer, then it will make sense.
PMWARD, the week after "quad witching" (today) can be a bit bearish.
Well, I already had a beer or two or three before I made my post. And enjoyed a pipe later on.
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Re: Stock scream room

Post by jacksonM » Sat Mar 16, 2019 1:48 pm

pmward wrote:
Fri Mar 15, 2019 6:19 pm
jacksonM wrote:
Fri Mar 15, 2019 4:52 pm
No offense intended and I really do mean that but that whole paragraph is nothing but meaningless gibberish to me. I don't understand a word of it and am thankful for it.
Haha, it just means that technically speaking we are kind of at an inflection point in the market where it's likely to either shoot us back up to the October highs really fast, or shoot us back down. One way or another, next week has high odds of being volatile.

And yes I've read some interesting things about this particular quad witching. Either way, it is very interesting to see such a difference between the markets, with bond investors looking bearish and stock investors looking bullish on the economy.
Thanks but I still don't understand a word of it. If someone has adopted Harry Browne's idea of a "permanent portfolio" how is any of this even relevant?
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Re: Stock scream room

Post by pmward » Sat Mar 16, 2019 2:40 pm

I don't think that investing in a permanent portfolio and taking an interest in the markets and what drives them are mutually exclusive. Matter of fact, Harry Browne was very interested in the way markets behave and what drives them. I mean without that interest there would be no permanent portfolio... And if you read his book "Why the best laid investment plans..." you will see that he actually was a big fan of using support and resistance levels in VP investments. I personally find watching the way the different markets and assets interact in regards to changing political and economic backdrops fascinating. Just because I'm in a permanent portfolio doesn't mean I need to stick my head in the sand. Just because you don't currently understand something doesn't mean it's not worth discussing.
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Re: Stock scream room

Post by ochotona » Sun Mar 17, 2019 9:21 pm

2nd half of March after options expiration can be weak. I wonder if we take a dip, or stay up at these levels...
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Re: Stock scream room

Post by pmward » Mon Mar 18, 2019 8:46 am

ochotona wrote:
Sun Mar 17, 2019 9:21 pm
2nd half of March after options expiration can be weak. I wonder if we take a dip, or stay up at these levels...
We definitely have broken above resistance this morning at the open. Let's see if it can hold it. The market could just pause here for a couple weeks to work off the over-bought conditions before rallying to new highs. I still think that technically the odds look higher for another leg down since this last rally came on weakening momentum (momentum has been trending down since about Jan 23). I still am anticipating a volatile week either way. But who knows? Markets have a mind of their own sometimes. We don't really have a real catalyst up or down at the moment.

Either way, I hope the bump holds to the close today as I have a sell order pending on some stock mutual funds today to cover my rebalancing, I need to purchase some more gold and cash to incorporate my 401k into my GB and pay Uncle Sam.
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Re: Stock scream room

Post by dualstow » Mon Mar 18, 2019 9:02 am

pmward wrote:
Sat Mar 16, 2019 2:40 pm
And if you read his book "Why the best laid investment plans..." you will see that he actually was a big fan of using support and resistance levels in VP investments.
Is that right? I’ve read that book and I only remember him comparing technical analysis to horoscopes and superstition.
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Re: Stock scream room

Post by pmward » Mon Mar 18, 2019 9:12 am

dualstow wrote:
Mon Mar 18, 2019 9:02 am
pmward wrote:
Sat Mar 16, 2019 2:40 pm
And if you read his book "Why the best laid investment plans..." you will see that he actually was a big fan of using support and resistance levels in VP investments.
Is that right? I’ve read that book and I only remember him comparing technical analysis to horoscopes and superstition.
He said most forms of predictive technical analysis, like Elliot wave theory and the like, are BS. Which I agree with as well. But he was a big supporter of support and resistance levels because they have a reason to be significant, in that people are trading those levels, remember those past battles, and still have emotions tied to them. Even more true in these days where algo's are programmed to trade based on past support and resistance levels. He recommended that any speculative trading be around support and resistance levels to protect their speculations (buying only just above support, and having a stop loss just below a support level at all times), and he used this extensively in his speculative trading days. Support and resistance levels don't try to predict the future, it's more of just a confirmation that something is either going as planned, or not going as planned. If in a speculative trade something starts to not go as planned, one should get out ASAP. So in the case of right now in the S&P 500, if someone were speculating on it, we just cleared a resistance level of 2820, so one would increase their stop loss to something like 2800 or 2810 to be just below the resistance level we just cleared, to protect the downside and lock in gains. There's no prediction here, it's totally neutral as to where the market goes from here, it's just an effective form of risk management when doing speculative discretionary trading.

Now, he obviously said for the PP to not worry about these things and just buy, hold, and rebalance regardless. It would only be useful in a VP.
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Re: Stock scream room

Post by ochotona » Mon Mar 18, 2019 9:37 am

I think the CTA robots think a lot like us humans - they were designed to be us, but faster. If we hold certain levels, they buy. If we break certain levels, they sell. Very very very quickly. But humans can beat machines because if we are open-minded, we have context; they don't, until someone codes in that context. Also, an individual's investment time horizon is different from the fund manager's career survivability time horizon, so an individual can act differently and not worry about getting whacked.

I think I'll be getting back into equities after Q1 rally is tested a bit more, regrettably buying in higher than where I sold, but it happens. But I will go in with a light touch, something like the HBPP equity allocation of 25%. At which point I don't care about buy or sell signals. At some point the market will stop going sideways. It has been going sideways really for a long time. Jawboning and FOMO can't keep it up forever. Reality has to set in someday. When it does I shall jump in with the robots...
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Re: Stock scream room

Post by pmward » Mon Mar 18, 2019 10:26 am

Haha, yeah you're seeing why I swapped from trading to PP. Because it's stressful trying to be right on the way out and way back in. It's also a lot of work. I did alright trading, but it just wasn't worth the time investment. Someday, if I feel strong convictions in something, I might take my 20% VP built into my GB and so some speculation with it. But for now, I'm enjoying not having to worry about every turn the market makes. I also will never touch the 80% of my portfolio that is in PP, as I think it makes sense to always have some of each asset that way one doesn't fully miss out on market participation if they are wrong in their speculations.

Actually, coming from trading was what made PP seem so appealing to me. Contrary to popular belief, trading is not about offense, it's about defense. Capitol preservation is the #1 priority. Capitol appreciation is a distant second. When implementing a trading system one is always defensive minded. It's generally recommended that building a system where you have to be right any more than 1/3 of the time is a recipe for disaster. So you implement a risk management system where you can be wrong 2/3 or even 3/4 of the time but still turn a profit. Generally, most trades are kind of meh and account balancing doesn't do much, but catching one big trade can basically make your entire year. So coming from a defensive oriented mindset, I just couldn't go to a buy and pray stock and bond only approach. The defensive aspects of the PP philosophy are what really attracted me. Also, like the PP, generally trading underperforms during strong bull markets and massively out performs in bear markets. So it's a very surprisingly similar mindset and an easy transition.
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