Still stubbornly hanging onto my Dow shorts I got just before Easter at 22k-ish. It’s all pretty surreal. Nothing but horrible news and the country on the verge of crumbling yet Dow up 3k+. STONKS indeed
You and me both. I have been stubbornly holding spy puts with 7/17 expiration as they have devalued to almost nothing. At this point I’m just riding them to 0 because if I sold and it tanked I would be way more upset than just losing it all.
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How is it surreal?
How is the country on the verge of crumbling?
How would the civil unrest tank the market?
Anything that represents a threat to the status quo should be a negative for STONKS. Covid is far from over. The economy is in shambles.
I’m not saying any of that will affect stocks. Stocks are so disconnected from reality at this point that nothing matters that I can tell. There is a legitimate chance we are hitting all time highs in Covid cases and STONKS at the same time in the next few months.
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I feel like this unrest is good for online based stocks (FAANG etc) which make up huge % of the indices and as such they could rise out of this. At some stage the enormous valuations of tech companies could catch up to them but that may not be until post election.
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I get that.
But if your belief is that both Covid and the civil unrest isn’t being accurately acknowledged then there are far better instruments to use than SPY puts, imo. The insane market caps of the companies that move SPY are best positioned for the shit that’s been happening.
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If you want to make a random short bet, I’d look at Marriott. Trading at 31x earnings that are sure to decline. Their best customers are constant business travelers who aren’t coming back any time soon. I see no upside, but what do I know.
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As I’ve said on here a few times, I feel like with the devaluation of $$, maybe everything other than a) Italy-level hospital crunch or b) some systemic collapse like derivatives in 2008 - might be already priced in?
I don’t think any of the super smart guys think covid is just going to disappear in a month, and obviously they can see the riots, although they did get a lot worse this weekend.
But then again someone itt described it as robbers in a jewelry store knowing exactly how much time they have to keep grabbing stuff, until they have to bug out. That was a great analogy.
So who the hell knows. If the market somehow gets back to Feb. highs in the next month or two - I’m out until it drops again or covid goes away. For the same reason I balanced out of my individual stonks when they hit all time highs in the last couple weeks. There just can’t be much upside from there. But I’m just not confident enough either way right now to say there’s more downside than upside.
As our resident sports, money and politics Oracle, Riverman, always tells us - buy and hold can only fail if you get scared and bail out of the market. So I believe that mantra, until I don’t.
Three years ago, an old high school teacher of mine left me about 50k. A financial adviser back from my home state called me to tell me.
I was really close to the teacher so was going back east for the funeral but was only there one day, so he agreed to meet me on a Sunday morning.
Mind you, this adviser, he was like 80 years old. He offered me a bunch of options that had absurd intro fees that I’m sure he was juicing on and just became increasingly more desperate to give me something. Honestly I irrationally felt bad for the guy and I’m sure that’s what he depends on to some extent. I was taking time and thoroughly examining all of the options. But everything he had to offer was a scam.
Eventually I had to say listen, thanks, but I don’t live here and I’m not interested in any of these options so I’m going to pass on using them. This guy, who later research revealed is a nutjob Trumper, just went ballistic, screaming at me that I wasted his time after all he had done for me, etc. Then he moved towards me.
I was an inch away from being slugged by an octogenarian. I’m pretty weak but I would have won this one. But I often have kind of out-of-body experiences and in my head I was already laughing like, I can’t believe this old dude is about to punch me. If I hit him back, might he die?
Financial advisers are grifting scum.
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I dunno. I wouldn’t want to have graduated college in the early 70s - when it was pretty much a nonstop recession, punctuated by a rise and crash in the late 80s, until the late 90s.
I guess houses were cheaper and gas was 50 cents a gallon. But everything else sucked - TV, movies, architecture, music, sports stadiums. NY and SF were cesspools that people couldn’t leave fast enough. The Hollywood sign was falling down and no one cared. It was like the whole country just gave up.
Financially, graduating in the 70s would have been damn near optimal. You would have had just enough to amass some decent wealth and then by the time you get to the 90s you just park it in the market and you’re set.
Above assumes you had an in demand skill that would have allowed you to have steady employment throughout. Most of my acquaintances in that age range are rich as fuck unless they got cleaned out by multiple divorces or really stupid investments.
I graduated in the middle of a recession in '92. Unless you had a degree like accounting or electrical engineering it was pretty much impossible to land a real job. I had friends that mailed off 100s of resumes to no response.
Most of my friends didn’t even bother. We just waited tables and fucked around. The show Workaholics was basically us. At one job I had - every waiter had a degree and the manager had a masters.
I dunno what it was like in the 70s but I assume jobs weren’t just falling off trees like they have been from pretty much the late 90s to now, punctuated by a couple of relatively brief rough patches in the dotcom crash and financial crisis.
Yeah, that’s the kind of stuff I was limiting my observation to. Also back then it may have been easier as college grads weren’t as dime-a-dozen as they were in the 90s.
That’s true.
The funny part is trying to imagine your quality of life as say a college grad making $20k, which was good money in the early 70s. You’ve got 3 channels of shitty network television. Jaws hadn’t even come out yet.
Here’s the top 10 movies in 1972:
Meh, godfather is good. Then there’s watching Ned Beatty get buggered and a whole lot of bleh.
I guess you still had Zeppelin, Stones and Beatles going strong - but in their waning phases. Okay maybe Zeppelin was still peaking. They might have been the best thing about 1972.
Sports just sucked all around. Brutalism was the architecture style of the day. Every college campus has some horrible building from that era they wish they could tear down. Like you can’t even brush up against it w/o cutting yourself.
What else was fun about the 70s? Jungle bushes on women and ridiculous amounts of body hair on men? Fondue? Roller disco? I guess the cocaine was good if you could find it.
Yeah, I agree with that.
I think financially it would have been better. But in nearly every other way it would be worse.
The sweet spot for me might have been mid 80s. Still get to ride the wave on the stonk market while also living the good life for much of my reasonably young adulthood.
How do they know exactly how much time, though?
I think I’m with you on this. Very promising news on treatments, vaccines, or a summer letup due to being outdoors could sway me. In the mean time, I’ve been shifting a bit towards stuff that I feel has more limited downside. I’m weighting more towards QQQ instead of VTI and VOO. I’ve been entirely in US stocks so far, I’m thinking it’s time to change that.
I graduated in ‘08 into the financial crisis. I felt like the last 6-18 months, people my age +/- 2-3 years were finally getting on our feet and back on pace for retirement, owning homes, paying for kids’ college, etc. It was the first time I had friends buying houses, maxing retirement account contributions, investing in the stock market for more than pocket change, etc… Annnnd COVID-19… Annnnd societal unrest.
I am blessed to be in a good position right now, all things considered, and compared to others my age… So I’m not complaining too much here as far as my personal self, but if we had gone maybe 3 more years without hitting another once-in-a lifetime crisis, I would have been set up very nicely. Now, we’ll see. That said, if I graduated into a “normal” American economy, I’d probably have 2-3 times the net worth I currently do. For a lot of people my age, that difference would be far more dramatic.
I mean, I know people who graduated from very good colleges and spent 3-5 years working in Starbucks, waiting tables, etc. I don’t mean to denigrate those jobs, but if you spend like $60-180K on a degree, that’s not what you’re signing up for, and it’s not like the student loans aren’t still sitting there.
I can beat this. I mailed off 100s of resumes in my field with no response, then mailed off hundreds for shitty jobs out of the classifieds/Craigslist as like a barista, mall shop cashier, overnight security guard, overnight hotel clerk, lunchtime waiter, etc and couldn’t get hired for those because I was “overqualified” and they knew I’d jump ship as soon as I got a job in my field. I would walk shopping malls and pop my head in every single store and ask if they were hiring, end up with 4-5 yes’s, and apply. I did that for about a week and couldn’t get anything. A year out of school, I ended up working 3 part-time jobs at once, the highest paying one was $10/hr.
Lol this was not my experience graduating in '08. I don’t think it was until '11 or ‘12 that it was somewhat easy to get a random job for $7-10 an hour as a college graduate. And don’t get me started on how depressing it was to graduate after 21 or 22 years of being told you can be anything you want to be, do anything you want to do, reach for the stars, etc, only to find out you can’t even be a barista or flip burgers and end up sitting at your parents’ house sending our job applications.
Did you read everything above? '86 here.
Still jungle bushes though. :(
I came of age during aids scare = constant condoms + fucking hacking through that shit with a machete like Dr. Livingston I presume. The condoms had a tendency to grab your hairs and her hairs and get them rolled up together like a Chinese finger puzzle. Bad times man.
I remember the first girl in college who shaved, it was like - what is this miracle? I can feel skin!
But yeah it’s not like us dudes were manscaping back then either. It’s like masks - if one party does it, you still get most of the benefit.
I’m drunk btw.
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haven 't seen most of those but The Getaway is a good movie. Sam Peckinpah and Steve McQueen. And Deliverance is a great, great movie. Deliverance and Godfather in the same year? Not bad!
Pedro taught us how to handle irrational old farts.
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