Investing (aka GameStonk and other gambling events)

I’m holding cash until… IDK. Post election? Guess I’ll pay off mortgage.

It’s a Fidelity IRA - lots of options.

Assuming the old high made any sense and wasn’t just an irrational asset bubble fueled by tax cuts->stock buybacks and the global rich having few other places to put their money.

I feel like we know the answer to this one.

Uses vary, but money machine is going Brrrrrrrr in lots of countries.

The poor will just pay taxes on this forever and obviously nobody really cares about them

Increases in after-tax corporate profits due to a tax cut should result in higher stock prices - no irrational bubble needed!

(Plus, there’s no reason to think that stock buybacks increase stock prices, either irrationally or rationally.)

My thought, exactly. SELL SELL SELL!

Im just buying hundreds of dollars of spxs calls everytime the market pumps 3%+ over the last two weeks with longer and longer expirations. Eventually i will be right or run out of money.

The fact I am up against the money printer meme is not lost on me at this point.

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If I had any confidence in our capital markets actually representing the value of future profit expectations, I would be all over bear bets. I think it is much more likely that the Fed reveals that their true mandate is to make sure that the rich assholes who own everything never lose.

We’ll see if they can even manage that this time. Regardless, I think it’s more likely that they wreck the currency than allow nominal asset prices to fall significantly. I don’t know what the right way to play this is and I don’t have that much money outside of my bankroll to throw around anyways. You can try to frontrun the Fed’s money hose, but good luck beating the people with insider info.

I think that the best gambles at this point are bets on events that are unlikely, but underpriced by the market, resulting from the helicopter money experiment going wrong. There’s plenty of problems getting those bets paid though, because those situations generally include a huge increase in counterparty risk and social disorder.

I kinda like BTC. It has practical problems but in the possible worlds where a significant population loses faith in central banking, it should do very well in most of them. Splashing around at higher stakes on US-facing online poker sites is a solid bet right now (and a good way to acquire more BTC) if you know what you are doing.

We are experiencing a completely unprecedented economic event that competent, ethical leadership would have an extremely hard time dealing with. Since we have the exact opposite of that, my preferred play is to cover my ass from tail risks rather than try to get rich (other than from binking one of these amazing, massive online tourneys that have been going lately).

If you read up on Coolidge and Harding, they were as cartoonishly incompetent and every bit as disengaged as Trump. As much as we love to make fun of the Fed, pumping liquidity into the system is exactly what they should be doing (and didn’t do during the depression). The USA #1 has so many built in advantages including the ability to borrow basically for free in the worlds reserve currency and immense natural resources. It’s hard to keep it all in perspective in light of this shit show but assuming Trump doesn’t completely nuke democracy (a massive assumption), we will probably be ok.

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What was/is you price point for getting back in the market? IIRC, you had perfect timing on the getting out part.

Maybe I am becoming too much of a LOL old person, but I can’t make a case in my brain for BTC over Gold as an inflation hedge. I guess BTC is easier to collect and store on your own rather than relying on financial markets, but it just seems like there is still a lot of regulatory risk and also risk of corruption in exchanges or other players, especially if we are talking about collapse of central banking system (and presumably fiat currency). It is hard for me to imagine a scenario where the dollar is falling apart and the government does not make some regulatory moves against BTC. Gold has similar risks but I think lower.

I guess it is also possible to own both BTC and gold as a diversification.

Yeah. Just dumb luck. My gut says 12k but my brain says 18k.

I keep hearing a lot of people (not here for the most part) talk about the worst of Covid-19 being priced in and also the worst of it being over. The theory for being short the markets is if/when the markets realize this isnt going to be over in 2 weeks or 2 months and we are likely looking at this as a major drag on the economy for more like 2 years. That is most certainly not priced in. The people who think this is over keep talking about how the markets are forward looking which is obviously true. I just think the future they are envisioning isn’t likely to happen.

Obviously the Fed can just keep printing and attempt to negate the impacts. And of course my theory/premises could be wrong and everything may be back to normal and we may be having backyard bbq parties and going to MLB games spitting sunflower seed shells all over by this summer but based on what we know that seems basically close to impossible.

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If we had wise governance globally we would move away from consuming crap and cooking the planet to something much more sustainable and use this as a catalyst to do it. I can’t speak for the rest of the world but it is obvious here in USA #1 we aren’t going to go that route and instead are going to kill a large number of people in order to get back to consuming plastic crap and rolling coal to own the libs ASAP.

The sad thing is sitting at home with my wife and dogs for a month has brought into focus what is important. Which is our relationships with our spouse, friends and family. I talk with the people I don’t see in person more now than i did when I could. I am realizing I waste an incredible amount of money on stuff I don’t need and doesn’t improve my life. Distilling your life down to what you need to survive and what is really important puts into focus how pointless a huge percentage of our “normal” lives are.

Instead the almighty dollar rules and learning any lessons from this would cost the billionaires who actually run the show way too much money. So while I share your range of outcomes I think in the USA we are unlikely to have positive change.

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Yeah I’m kind of amazed at how little we’re spending right now, and I thought we didn’t have much wasteful spending before other than wine–and that is only about 1% to 2% of our family income per year and about half of what we buy goes into long term storage. (I think of it like a wine retirement fund.)

However, since we’ve been staying home we’re spending at least $2000/month less than we were. Some of that is required spending if we were not at home, (i.e. - things like gasoline), but a lot of it was apparently just money being blown at Starbucks and Target and restaurants around work and who knows what else.

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Ya i mean those $100-150 dinners out and here and there shopping purchases apparantly add up. My family has had no income for the last month and the rate we are burning through savings is shockingly slow.

wut? Haven’t even thought of selling.