GREETINGS FROM HOME RENO HOUSE FLY

Before I moved in the central air busted and I needed to replace it. The first night at the house the refrigerator broke and I can’t get a new one until 7/6. Today while the painters painted, one of the young lads doing ceilings on stilts had a fucking seizure and fell straight down into a desk and almost killed himself. It was a terrible thing to bear witness to and reminded me of how lucky I am to be healthy. I often get caught up in the rat race of needing to do things because MUH WORK or MUHHHH goals and I forget to enjoy life.

Truth is, and this should come as no surprise to anyone who knows me, I stopped trying to find joy in life a long time ago and now just focus on short term achievements as a weight station towards some sort of equanimity.

If I fell off stilts once per mouth in an epileptic seizure I’d probably just blow my brains out and get done with it. But not everyone is as grim as me, which is probably why I want the banks to collapse. You see, it’s all connected.

I made 31bps today and remain heavily short banks.

If commodities was one area of long during the coming fires, the banks are the opposite — the exact place to avoid.

Let me show you something.

Those are the MONTHLY returns of BAC during the 1973-74 recession. Those add up to roughly -70%. At the present, BAC is DOWN 27% YTD. Should we cascade into a full blown stagflation bear — expect to see banks at the vanguard lower. They encompass everything that is wrong and are exposed a half dozen places that can hurt them.

OF COURSE I am talking my book, now long FAZ in size. But even after I close this trade out and move onto bigger and better things — you should expect to see shares of XLF dive the fuck lower as America descends into full blow depression.

The only area of the market that has a chance to make it out of the great fires of 2022 are war stocks and commodities. We haven’t even seen a single German freeze to death due to lack of Russian gas. As NATO preps to increase its army to 400,000 from 30,000, it is inevitable that Russia and America will find itself in mortal combat by Fall. At that time, thanks to EU reliance on Russian energy — the entirety of Europe will be glassed over in ice.

If you’re not trading and interested in daily moves and instead prefer longer time horizons, I can think of no better area to “bet” on the market than energy and food.

The market might be down today — but commodities are way up and I would not be surprised to see an upside reversal predicate on nothing more than boredom and lack of grim news. The news is out there — but the market isn’t interested right now.

There is ZERO chance we rally from here until Labor Day, absolutely and positively zero. We might look good now, as the futures poke higher amidst no news. But at some point earnings will get in the way and the economic data will dictate the direction, which will be inexorably lower.

Having said that — what if I’m wrong and markets rip higher?

There’s zero chance that I’m wrong too, so you’re gonna have to live with that also.

“But, Sir, the NASDAQ is cheap?”

Based upon what metric?

Look, I slept in my new house for the first time last night and the refrigerator already broke. I’m not particularly cheerful right now, having spent the entire weekend STACKING and PACKING boxes — filled with my useless junk. My garage is brimming from floor to ceiling with sealed boxes and the inside of my house looks like a vacated museum with relics strewn about in maximalist fashion. On top of that, the fucking painters are coming now. On top of that, I lost my computer charger and several other items in the move. So don’t ask me about the specter of a summer rally with all of this doom cast around me now.

Wall streeters are famously retarded and always get caught off guard, raped and ravaged by the markets. Essentially, 95% of fund managers are long only morons who have tricked their clients into believing they’re special by performing at the market. This is why the market flushes out hard during periods of dislocation, as the permanent bull cadre of investor become extinct and extracted from the game of play. These people will always tell you they were up 9% on rally days, yet disappear for weeks at a time when markets are down and when they do show up, they magically have unlimited funds to average down again and again and again and almost always win using the Martingale Strategem.

These people, naturally, must look at their faces in the mirror and know before they fall asleep at night —- they’re god damned liars.

Moving on, WTI is lower tonight and futures soft. For weeks the market hasn’t give a shit about the war, most likely because it’s slow and grinding and NATO is losing. The most important topic for the market now is economic vibrancy, or lack thereof. As such, one can most adeptly monitor such things in the price of crude. As you can see below, the price has been trending lower.

More than that, oil stocks have gotten annihilated, down more than 20% from their highs. I’d posit the most important thing for markets now is for Vladimir Putin to make more money selling crude in the coming weeks, as summer wanes and the autumn and winter looms, especially for the Germans, who will most assuredly face the coldest winter in decades.

My move is complete and House Fly is in complete disarray. We never really thew stuff away from our 6br home in Princeton and stored it in our first NC home’s garage for 3 years. Now with this new house, a much smaller home than the NJ monster, our two car garage is packed to the ceiling with junk. The interior of the home is in complete shambles and the painters are coming Monday.

TBH, I’ve purchased maybe 5% of the junk and just financed this hoarding for the past decade plus, as I am now in possession of a complete junkyard.

First order of business will be to throw all of this stuff away when my wife isn’t looking.

The workers ripped apart my $12,000 horse hair mattress — but I’m not mad at them because their job was hard and this type of collateral damage is to be expected.

Their leader was asking me about the economy and we started small talk, moving into the war chat which he knew nothing about. He’s too busy to pay attention to such nonsense, which unto itself is illuminating.

Ok, I’m gonna head out to eat now.

More later.

It’s always comforting to see the NPC’s at peace with markets surging higher — especially since I know they’ll all be flayed alive in the coming fires.

Over the last week we bore witness to an 8% rally in the NASDAQ, based off a little of this and a little of that. This has once again emboldened the permanent bull class of imvestoor to remain obstinate and boast of their returns largess, as they meander between their multi-layer fictions. It’s all an elaborate scam — but they enjoy being lied to and never consider selling because it would fracture their world view.

I, on the other hand, have no world view, only moments of passing interests and contempt.

I finished the week where I began, flat, and have a full roster of old man stocks with a monster sized hedge in FAZ.

HAGW, I will now proceed to break my back moving more boxes.

Once again healthcare and tech are hard off session highs. They’re still up, but if you chased into the melt up you’re now down 3% for the session.

Chasers will never find respite in a bear market.

I actually don’t think we will pull back too much more into the close. Hell, we might even close at the highs. Whether we can follow through is another story.

Because financials are holding the market up and I happened to be 15% weighted FAZ, I doubled down and made it 30% because nothing says conservative like having 1/3rd of your account long an inverse ETF into a short squeeze on a Friday.

I’ll need to accumulate some longs into the close.

Listen to me:

You’re being coddled again by a benign tape in the midst of a full blown economic collapse. The winds of war are raging and everything you once knew about globalization is over.

Hence, investoors are once again diving into this ARTIFICE head first.

Don’t you know it’s a trap? Aren’t you aware of the fact that nothing can stop the collapse?

I was mostly long into the open and collected my gains and kept my 15% position in FAZ intact. I might still close it out just to be done with it. I will not chase and I will not be influenced by what others are doing. Even if I barely do anything the next week, I shall not cave into the notion that stocks are priced to bid higher for 2022.

It’s also important to remember that my opinions are just that and not prophecy. I am wrong at times and have been known to do a 180. Nevertheless, I am highly convinced of the bear case, but also can never rule out the power of mobs and the influence greed can have on markets.

The movers are scheduled to move house Fly to its latest and greatest locale tomorrow. Over the past two months I’ve been quite busy with mortgages and a competitive housing market and more recently moving boxes and packing boxes and moving giant televisions into the new place, where it seems will once again prove to be temporary, as I shuffle around the country like a gypsy in search of a carnivale.

Over the next month or so, we have numerous projects all lined up that includes the installation of a library, new floors, carpets, paint, hardscaping etc. The point here is to fix things up to a standard and then after it’s all done complain about it not being good enough, because we’re all so entitled spoiled rotten brats with nothing to do other than to needlessly meander in the creation of our own manifestation.

I will take this opportunity to escape into the golfing fields, perhaps for good, becoming a pro tennis lad serving balls at the speed of light.

As it pertains to markets: very bullish. But don’t forget, it’s Friday.