Number of job holders holding multiple jobs up 6% since August last year… seems sustainable
Normally I’m first in line to relentlessly mock gold bugs… but Ray Dalio is saying ‘buy gold’ lol. A moment like this is probably a great example of ‘even a broken clock is right twice a day’ for gold bugs. Probably no harm in having 5-10% in gold.
Gonna be a crazy whiplash day
Powell speaks at noonish, Trump already tweeting economic stuff, bad jobs report
Gold and silver were down like 2-3% and just spiked up to positive within the last 10 minutes
Why not wait for a downswing and snatch up stocks at a discount?
Gold and bitcoin strike me as equally speculative, and I don’t think there’s any reason to believe that one or the other is going to be especially safe in times of chaos. If you think you might need cash in the next 2 years (e.g., for a down payment on a house), you’re better off just sticking it in a CD or money market fund if you don’t want the risk of equity investments.
Been playing around with a few hundred in robinhood to YOLO options
Infuriatingly did an amazing play that should have been a 6+ bagger but I sold out at 100% cause I was a bitch
Basically bought a bunch of $7 CLF calls with 9/6 expiry the day that it CLF dropped like 15%+, bought at .10. Stock went up 5%+ the next day and I decided to sell at .22, immediately goes up another 5%+ yesterday and the calls were up to ~.70.
Today I got a lot of $28 BAC puts
The problem with going to cash because the market is “obviously” over valued is you never know when to get back in, plus transaction costs.
I’ve spent years trying to find a way to do something other than buy and hold index funds. And I think for certain people, like professional real estate developers/investors or people with operating companies, it makes sense to deploy capital there (though not commercial real estate right now in lots of places, but I digress). But the evidence clearly suggests buy and hold is best.
This article is what finally convinced me to stop:
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Yeah gold and bitcoin are not equally speculative. One was the only form of money anyone cared about until the 70’s and is viewed as being valuable by the entire human race… the other only exists in an electronic form and is traded in places with rampant wash trading. Gold isn’t going to zero, bitcoin on the other hand has a very significant chance of just being the biggest pump and dump of the last 100 years.
If anyone wants a mega-YOLO play, Mallinckrodt is at an all time low of under $2, probably going bankrupt and fucked, but someone bought 40k Jan 2021 $6 calls yesterday and now 40k $13 calls today
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I bought a Tesla a couple months ago–it’s an amazing car. I have free charging at work plus free supercharging, so I basically never have to pay for gas!
I wouldn’t ever dream of buying Tesla stock, but the idea that it’s fated to go to zero is kind of strange. They have complete domination (at least in the US) of the battery EV market. None of their current cars even have any serious competitors. And there are several plausible directions to expand their niche (Roadster 2 to compete with Taycan and supercars, Model Y for mid-range crossover market, Semi and Pickup for those markets). The autonomy angle is interesting too. There’s no doubt that the currently hyped timelines are garbage, but Tesla has a big advantage from having a huge installed sensor base to cull training data from. I assume they collect data from every time the driver takes over and whenever the AP system is confused, and I understand they also run beta systems in observer mode to see what they would do and compare to what the active AP and/or the driver do. I’m sure they’re behind Google on software chops, but they have a lot better data.
Someone also wrote those calls! Why would you think that the buyer is smarter than the writer?
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Every major car company is way ahead of Tesla in autonomous driving, EV technology, literally everything. And those companies have billions of dollars of cash and, unlike Tesla, make money.
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Elon’s boring company stuff seems way more interesting and important an endeavor although it’s not likely to go anywhere either.
I absolutely don’t, hence a “mega-YOLO play.” Its basically a lottery ticket, vast vast vast majority of the time you lose, especially in this case with them probably going bankrupt. At the same time, those $13 calls were selling at .25-.30 /contract, so that’s a $100k+ yolo bet by some entity.
People don’t realize just how far ahead Google is in self driving because they aren’t really advertising it very hard… because it’s not finished and they don’t have to pump it to get funding. Uber in particular is drawing dead. There’s a large chance that the only real self driving tech Uber has is now-several-years-old Google tech that was stolen by that guy who just got charged for stealing it.
I’m sorry but anyone who has used Google maps for GPS in the last year or two understands just how much data Google is collecting on things like where stuff is and traffic patterns. Combine that with literally millions of test miles and you’ve got something scary. They absolutely plan to just arrive with level 4 automation ready for release one day.
They aren’t going to partner with the Uber’s and Lyfts of the world. Google does not need their help to build an app or market, and doesn’t care about their drivers/customers at all (Every Uber customer already is a Google customer effectively, and the drivers obv don’t matter cause the car is automated).
Google is going to share the minimum amount of wealth necessary with car companies and nobody else. Everyone else is going to get shut out unless they can come up with their own, probably significantly shittier software for autonomous cars. I don’t see them ever catching up tbh.
In addition to that, the car companies are starting to let google into the cars. Their shitty glitch filled navigation is really pissing customers off.
Been looking at this: Unusual Stock Options Activity - Barchart.com
Someone bought like 41k AAPL $195 puts with nov expiry out of nowhere, $18 mil… has to be some entity hedging?
Sure, they’re just releasing cars with fewer self driving features and shittier batteries for the lulz.
No they’re planning to just license Google’s software. Why try to compete with fucking Google on software development as a car company? That makes zero sense from any perspective.
As for the batteries they’ve correctly assessed that there aren’t enough batteries available at a price point that makes business sense. They aren’t trying to become battery companies either. Car companies are only barely in the auto parts business in general. Some other company makes almost everything they assemble their cars out of and they don’t plan to change that model going forward.
If Elon was smart he would have just made batteries for car manufacturers to build EV’s out of. The gigafactory is the only intelligent thing TSLA has done business wise that wasn’t just idiotically reinventing car manufacturing, which is, at best, a mediocre business. Trying to compete with Toyota on assembling cars is super stupid from a table selection POV.
I guess it’s possible that every major car company has better EV tech than Tesla, but they don’t actually produce any pure EVs that are plausible competitors to any of Tesla’s cars, so it’s hard to tell with any degree of confidence. I’m genuinely curious what this is read is based on? Is it just big car companies saying that their tech is better?
It’s also worth being skeptical that other car companies are making a profit on their EVs. That’s a little hard to believe given how few they sell. And if they sell too many, they start to lose the EV credit, which is 20% of the sales price. Tesla actually has a very healthy gross margin on their cars, they’re just below-minimum-viable-scale for a modern car company, so they can’t amortize R&D/SG&A over enough units. It’s certainly true that, in order to be long-term viable, they need to have the Model Y be successful and/or push down manufacturing costs so that they can lower prices and sell more units at the same margins. It’s a big challenge, but I don’t know why you would think that it’s impossible.