Stock scream room

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Kriegsspiel
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Re: Stock scream room

Post by Kriegsspiel » Sat Jan 26, 2019 7:56 am

ochotona wrote:
Wed Jan 23, 2019 9:28 am
Completely out of ideas, so buy back shares, get my bonus, pump and dump.
Hey, they're not totally out of ideas on how to spend dat money.
Messaging startup Hustle projected the picture of Silicon Valley largess. The company spent millions of dollars raised from investors such as Alphabet Inc. GOOGL 1.62% on expensive new hires, on-tap kombucha, arcade games and a six-figure salary for its pedigreed chief executive.

So it came as a shock to many employees earlier this month when co-founder and CEO Roddy Lindsay sent them an early-morning email announcing mass layoffs. Before the week was done, even the espresso machine was ripped out of the kitchen at Hustle’s San Francisco headquarters.

Hustle is hardly the first startup to spend lavishly in an era of technology riches. What is new these days: The bill is coming due.
. . .
“The unbridled optimism that inhabits our world,” said startup investor Sunny Dhillon, “is getting a shot of realism.” link
The spokeswoman said about 70% of the company’s operating costs go toward salaries and benefits. Hustle paid Mr. Lindsay $125,000 a year, which the spokeswoman described as more than 60% below market rate. Last week, Mr. Lindsay agreed to reduce his annual pay to $55,000, she said.

Mr. Lindsay has told associates he is bringing in a new high-level hire for strategic help. The new executive is well-known, according to a person briefed, for having helped liquidate Pets.com during the dot-com bust.
:D
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Re: Stock scream room

Post by Kriegsspiel » Sat Jan 26, 2019 1:57 pm

I've been listening to Joe Rogan's podcasts recently, and I'm on his (superb) #910 with Gary Vaynerchuck, and he said something that made me think of this thread (well, that article I just posted, but I felt like sharing anyways).

At 1:39:20:
Gary: And then you had the worst wave [of tech entrepreneurs], which was the people who blindly just thought, because they were 22 and wore a hoodie, that they were gonna invent the next Facebook.

Joe: Yea there's a lot of posers, right?

Gary: You understand that there's a very big difference between being an entrepreneur... and being a successful entrepreneur. But the market right now, everyone's like 'oh, you're a CEO and an entrepreneur?!' Like as if you won. That's like me saying I'm a basketball player. I play basketball, but I'm not making any fucking money. And so yea, we have a real issue in fake entrepreneurship right now. Everybody thinks it's cool; it became cool.
It's like these tech companies have been infected by a meme that says they have to have arcade basketball games and ping pong tables next to their desks. Even if they're not successful enough to retain their employees, they want to LARP like they're Facebook or Google.
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Re: Stock scream room

Post by dualstow » Sat Jan 26, 2019 5:37 pm

These posts remind me of articles about San Franciscans resenting all the dot comers moving in. They were pleased by the last real bust. Alas, it looks like they’re there to stay. (Except the wise ones moving to Austin and other places).
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Re: Stock scream room

Post by ochotona » Sat Jan 26, 2019 8:29 pm

dualstow wrote:
Sat Jan 26, 2019 5:37 pm
These posts remind me of articles about San Franciscans resenting all the dot comers moving in. They were pleased by the last real bust. Alas, it looks like they’re there to stay. (Except the wise ones moving to Austin and other places).
Californian binches, fu**ing stay out of Texas
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Re: Stock scream room

Post by dualstow » Sat Jan 26, 2019 9:36 pm

O0
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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.
Image
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.”

Image

“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.”

Image

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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