The Car
I tend to obsess over things, micro-manager extraordinaire. Last night I lamented over my stupid fucking broken Macbook Pro, because “it’s brand new” and “I was so careful with it.” Bad things happen to good people all the time, total randomness, unpredictable ‘black swan’ events. I know a person who owns a fairly large natural gas business in New Mexico. He is my age, making millions per annum. Fifteen years ago he was living in his car, destitute and without coin. Then the natural gas boom came and he got ‘rich as fuck.’
From 2002-2007, he bought 10 homes, mostly for rental income. He took the rest of his savings and put it in stocks. He entrusted me with a very small amount of money, reserving the lionshare of his $3 million for his own caprices. He started to buy some penny stock, not because he had an edge, but because it was going down. I promised him he’d go ‘back to the car’ if he continued his reckless investment philosophy. We’d talk for hours. I’d chastise him, continuously, for his behavior. With 5 kids, you’d think he’d treat his money more carefully.
The natural gas boom ended, with the collapse of prices. His account fell 100%, losing it all in a penny stock scam. One stock, one bullet, and his investment career died.
The market can provide you with an incredible amount of wealth– and by extension happiness. But it’s gambling. Don’t think it isn’t–because it is. Control your inhibitions and never ‘go back to the car.’
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vQqK_vUHrZI
Top pick: VHC
46 Responses to The Car
VHC is ripping, curious what the ashes from Ben’s blunt will tell us.
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That it will return to $30, where it should be purchased with all haste and due acrimony.
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I love story time with the Fly
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That’s why I live IN A VAN, DOWN BY THE RIVER!
Here’s some more election day fodder:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZA6XTUOtmPw&feature=youtu.be
Cool story bro, but what happened to Bernanke’s blunt??
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False alarm
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when FB is the new market leader, and cramer tells me zuckenberg is now jaimie dimon, i slowly walk away from the computer being neither long nor short patiently waiting for my 10% flash crash
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It was a good quarter.
But the market is still soft. We need a short covering frenzy, otherwise elevator down.
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not much appetite so far for the cover rally.
how many more days do we give it? and do we exit prior to vote?
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I know an ex-millionaire here in Orlando area delivering pizzas.
“Diversified” into real estate near the peak (totally outside his field of expertise).
Yesterday I make good $$ daytrading SMH etf long and today I make $$ short SMH etf.
Done for the day.
What a country.
Trade, invest, or go into business with what you know. Check the ego at the door.
“Control your inhibitions…” – words to live by. Excellent story (as usual)
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I like the story, sadly, it happens so many times. It applies to many aspects of life, there are no shortcuts, don’t go for the quick score based on hope, reach your goals based on knowledge.
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“total randomness”
Good sir, I don’t believe in such a thing.
Even random number generators must be programmed to pull a number based upon the internal clock and select from a random number table. If the internal clock changes the selection down to the nanosecond it still may be beyond human control, but that doesn’t make it random.
There are what appear to be chance events all the time, but they are the result of cause and effect and sometimes a combination of causes that work differently together than the sum of its parts. We may not be able to accurately predict how all the multitude of variables work together to produce every individual specific event, but that doesn’t mean there are a number of “causes”. Effectively without knowing who variables work together in combination we may be best proceeding as if there is an element of randomness to it, but that is not randomness, just that there are components which we don’t understand.
Certainly a dice roll would seem random, but it is merely responding to the laws of physics. Not just gravity, but force, acceleration, torque, angle, spin, bounce, resistance, etc. If one were able to control every single one of the variables involved in the component of a dice spin exactly, they could control a dice roll.
Nothing is random, only “unpredictable” given the amount of knowledge that one knows.
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And the amount of control which one has
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I believe in chance, not fate. Things happen when they do and perhaps they are mathematically predictable, if you had the time to map it out.
For the most part, when a person gets ran over by a car, it’s random.
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how ’bout when a person gets run over by the Cocaine train to Hedonism? Mathematical?
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Pure luck
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No kidding around about poverty and living in your car. And here is the thing… of the destitute and homeless, those who still have a car are the lucky ones, the well-off homeless. Sleeping in your car may seem fun, but try it on a night when it is 26 degrees.
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You sound like you’ve done it before.
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Before I knew him , a friend was homeless for a while. He worked his way out of it. There is a whole process to surviving it intact.
Some people have to do it to escape domestic situations, although this may not be as serious if an end to the situation is in sight.
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you would think that if yuo had to live in a car, you would move someplace warm… Unless of course you had a job or maybe gambled so much money away you couldn’t even afford gas.
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What if the car is a FAZmobile?
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KABOOM
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4 more years of Obama and everyone but the socialist elite and banksters will be living in a car with his favorite 2 books on the dashboard – ‘Animal Farm’ and ‘The Koran’
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Exaggerator
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True, Animal Farm will be banned as “Literature Against the State.”
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once all books are transferred to digital, they can erase it with one button
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You are wrong about living in cars. We will all be in dorms, 50,000 per block working at FOXCONN right next door. After all, didn’t 0bama promise up to bring our jobs back from China?
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VHC ripping
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VHC is a calculated ‘gamble’, wouldn’t you say?
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Of course.
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Are you playing this for a settlement / buyout potential or jury verdict in VHC favor (since they already did so in the MSFT case)?
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In for the win. That’s all.
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Terell Owens would say, “I loves me some VHC” (if he wasn’t bankrupt).
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“I tend to obsess over things, micro-manager extraordinaire.”
You should make it so it doesn’t say “developing” on the main page even after you’ve updated the post. Might cause you to lose clicks.
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No
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It’s not very difficult to figure out but for those who can’t, this site is not for them.
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BTW– Mrs. Jake busted her MacBook Pro as well (actually, it was the little Jakette, checking out a Taylor Swift youtube)…. was it your hinge that got messed up too?
So much for the single body aluminum casing… “on to the next” as JayZee would say…
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No it just died. It won’t turn on.
My other mac died last week, hard drive.
Two in one week.
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they’ve programmed in a kill switch to make you upgrade and boost earnings.
the ghost of jobs lives on
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I am almost certain Verizon degraded service to older cell phones in order to steer the customer base to Smartphones.
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FLy,
are you still in DECK, that sucker keeps falling even before earnings are out. Are you holding it through earning.
thanks
Bill
sell it.
I am not sure.
Curious, legitimate question – will you add, sell or hold FFIV here? No position.
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Fly, I see you liked the video that I posted yesterday
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Not the same video, but Kendrick kills it
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