I fought a hard war and consider myself to be just as brave and valiant as the US army in Afghanistan. I had went 95% cash just before the initial collapse, where markets dropped off a cliff and into a crevasse following the Fed minutes. Then I got back in, slightly, and found myself in the inextricable position of having to STOP OUT one by one into a collapse.
I set stops at -1.5% and ended up 95bps, down from +1.9%, with 68% cash.
My sense for tomorrow is chicanery. The market is complete shit and it might open up in the morning, at which point you’d be wise to sell. Should be gap down, you’d be wise to buy. Do not expect a grand happening, for that is reserved for either September or October. Expect to be frustrated. Expected loosely lower prices — because nothing is good anymore and growth is going to be zero soon. The economy is going to be bifurcated, VAXXED v NON-VAXXED and that is going to have a profound effect on margins and consumer spending.
Ultimately, online vendors win and win big. For now, we punch thru the sludge and try to extract whatever we can.
I took out the trash and leveraged long into what I thought would be a melt up and nailed it — all thanks and praise to the Stocklabs oversold Algos — flagging on its 12 month OS (RARE), encouraging me to partake in wanton acts of depravity.
As presently situated, I am +200bps, up from down 100bps. I haven’t turned the ship around like this in quite some time. There is a boldness in me that wants to keep buying and buying until I can’t buy anymore. But the pragmatic side of me understands the market cannot be trusted and gains must be captured when they can. Today’s market is not tomorrow’s and that is a narrative that has held strong since February.
My advice is to milk what you can out of today and cash up before the close.
In Stocklabs I built my own indices, segregated by market cap. In this I am able to correctly peer into the market and see what it’s truly doing, never beholden to the Dow, SPY or NASDAQ weighted indexes. Breadth is strong amongst small caps (66%) and weak in the larger caps (44%) which is why you see the indices lower.
Underneath that odious veneer is a decent tape. I took TNA into an overnight hold and just sold for a 2.2% gain. I was, once again, caught flat footed in the wrong stocks this morning — heavily weighted into large cap old man stocks. I had to book them out and replace them with technically strong stocks — all algorithmic based. I haven’t done an iota of technical analysis in over 2 years. Everything I do, all of the stocks I buy, are based upon the algos in Stocklabs.
I won’t delve into the political situation during the market day — but I will relay to you an urgent recommendation to consider, perhaps, profiting from the coming vaccine passports via YOU.
I did my best — gave it all that I had. I took an 85bps loss and turned it into a 3 bps gain. I feel like Tom and Jerry in the episode when they FEASTED LIKE KINGS on a single bean.
My bias is long and I’m in a pastiche of large cap stock, several consumer staples, one Chinese burrito, and some VAX plays. I will sacrifice to the Gods tonight, in an attempt to assuage them and put me back into their good graces.
I traded myself back to green. No miracle, just precise and careful trading — taking small gains and making sure losses were limited to under 2%. The market has been showing signs of improvement and I have since positioned for a long directional move higher, even in small caps.
In a market down 177 NASDAQS your inclination will be to sell, in order to preserve whatever wealth you have left remaining in your bullshit brokerage accounts. Often times you’d be correct — selling into a bad market is usually a good thing. But, and however, there are times when mean reversion kicks in and the elasticity of the market all but assures a reversal in the current trend.
Here is the penny index in Stocklabs — down for a 5th consecutive day.
Barring another surrender by the Unites Steaks in one of many battlefields we have open around the world, we are more likely to bounce from here than to trade even lower.
In a market like this, during late summer, you’re not likely to see fireworks. Instead, you’re likely to see a grueling and repetitive narrative play out as asset allocators shift money from one idea to the next. Gone are the days of high growth and small capped stocks powered by Biden’s ESG dreams. What we now have is KR and CPB and slow old companies, like Biden, who pay out dividends to their lazy shareholders.
The market is rewarding sloth and stagnation — the opposite of excellence. Betwixt all of that are runs in vaccine stocks — because basic human rights aren’t permitted lest you take your medicine — a medicine, might I add — that does not work and is not protecting people from contracting the virus or dying from it, let alone the thousands of people who are dying and/or getting injured from it. In other countries, where there are less bootlickers and more honest people, like Singapore, they’re paying people instant settlements for taking the vaccine that came with the occasional heart attack. In Europe Poland is doing the same — establishing humanitarian based slush funds to compensate people for their pain and suffering for getting a vaccine they didn’t need, nor want, up until the fuckheads in the media and in government put a gun to our heads and said “take this or starve.”
In America, the very notion of vaccine side effects or death are dismissed as conspiracy theories and shouted down by the bootlickers who suck on all of the dicks in Washington DC. These same people will tell you the war in Afghanistan went according to plan and as long as there are a few women in power in Kabul — all is fine.
Markets are poor and the country is rich. We’ll find a way to rig prices higher — but for now I am hiding in large cap — but eager, as always, for a break higher or lower, makes no difference to me.
If you smoke pot, just know, you’re a degenerate. The Taliban would cut the heads off 95% of you infidels, rightfully so. Speaking of which, I feel like cutting off my own head, drawing down 240bps because I jumped into today’s snakepit with a 25% allocation into cannabis. This loss is worse because my core positions were ALL UP, old man stocks doing well at a time when most momo stocks got blown the fuck out.
I also exacerbated things by trading and trading poorly, booking several intra day losses — extended my MTD losses to 1.7% — the only time I have been in the red on a MTD basis for the last 10 months.
So what now?
Well, I re-allocated into BIG CAPPED stocks, with several trading one’s mixed in. My sense is for a draw down, since I am accustomed to that now and no matter how hard I trade — the result is still the same.
To my next point: We will trade great again, this much I am sure. We will find a great market or a theme and make up all losses and propel ourselves to new highs. But this summer doldrum tape is toxic and no conducive with a strong market — the sort of tape one wakes up early for and looks forward to trading in.
This can be a ruinous tape, one that lures you in and then chops your head off. Be careful and never diamond hand trade — because that’s utterly stupid and memes only serve to make people laugh and fuck themselves.
The underlying theme is both inflationary and deflationary. We have rates sinking lower and at the same time a heightening of prices. Biden just announced the largest increase in food stamps ever, +25%. That’s a staggering about to give to the poor — people who are more or less useless as much as they’re worthless. In America, however, we reward mediocrity. For example, our Sec of Defense, Lloyd J. Austin III, was the lad who presided over the rise of ISIS in the Middle East. Instead of punishing him, he got promoted.
This is who our government is and who a solid faction of this country is — programmed after decades of cultural cancer — imbibed to become drug addicts, anti-family, anti-God, anti-self hedonists. Quite literally Satan, if such a person exists.
Heading into this week, we stare down the barrel of an inferior army, trapped in an airport, beholden to their good graces after 20 years of bombing them into caves. We must be bribing the fuck out of them, or perhaps they view the victory as complete and would rather not risk damage to their cities.
Bottom line: Markets do not seem to give a fuck, as usual. I, however, am doing poorly and blame it on my inability to sell these fucking pot stocks — -2% heading into final hours of trade.
We’re swimming lower now and we can only surmise the mood on Wall is dour after seeing a weekend of national humiliation play out on teevee.
The nightmare isn’t over yet, as we are still in the process of evacuating Kabul, shooting people along the way — dropping them from 1,000 ft above from cargo planes. Under normal circumstances in a normal country I’d be devastated by these events, feeling hurt due to national pride — but my country hates me so I hate them too. I know it isn’t a normal thing to say, but it’s true and I know there are millions out there who feel the same.
I empathize with the servicemen and I know a lot of them and I know it’s not their fault. But these wars…what more can I say other than these wars aren’t what the American people ever wanted and we certainly do not want more of them — especially since we have come to see their sole purpose is for grift and callous regard for life.
When this chapter in American failure ends, I will once again try to ignore politics best I can because it makes me sad and I hate spending my energy on things that are hopeless.
Early going I am -1%, heavily invested in old man stocks and hedged via SRTY. I am down because my pot stocks are getting smoked. I still like defensive stocks here.
As a member of the last generation who played baseball in the streets and used the street lamps outside to tell me when it was time to head home for the night, I find today’s culture to be inconsistent with my values. Then again, I recall seeing the old WW1 fuckers sitting outside my building in their lawn chairs scowling at me and my friends for being pussies and not partaking in the sort of horseplay they did in the late 1800s.
My Grandfather was a brusque man and said a lot of crazy things in public, used to flirt with all of the old ladies in our sitting area — walk around with a pocket radio on all the time listening to the ballgames. Dinner was 6pm sharp and if I didn’t make it home at 6pm — I was lectured and corrected, but I was always fed. During dinner, my Grandfather would turn the television to face the dining area so we could watch Three’s Company — about a show with a man living with three women but had to pretend to be gay in order for the evil landlord to allow it.
After supper, I’d run outside and play with my friends again. During summer nights it was manhunt or hide n seek or we had a gamed called “Midnight Madness” which we copied from a movie back then. You had teams divided and a game master leave clues in the form of riddles leading to the final destination — lots of fun.
As I got older we stopped playing sports and tag and instead opted for trips to the mall to see movies and also harass the girls in the mall for their phone numbers. Eventually, as time went on, we’d be drinking beers and smoking pot in the neighborhood doing the same nonsense every single day until it was time for college.
Life was, at least for me, very simple. Find a career and a woman, make money, get married, have a family — go on trips, plan for my kids’ college, and now I am seeing them either off to college or on their own to become independent citizens doing productive things.
The idea of growing up during this era is something extremely distasteful to me and I am fairly certain it’s not just me being older and crankier. The sense of entitlement and victimhood is as pervasive as it is ridiculous. You don’t deserve anything other than what you have coming to you.
I deal with these things by drawing whatever humor I can from it and go about my life while both acknowledging but also ignoring every single thing I read about in the news or by my government. If I got upset over every single fucking thing I read in the news, I’d go insane. You cannot control these things, so do not emotionally invest yourselves into their world.
Humans create beautiful things, mostly all of the time from love and inspiration. I am an avid cinephile, enjoy the arts, enjoy making creative drinks, enjoy writing and reading the classics. I have not read more than 2 or 3 modern era books — because back in my 20s I made the conscious decision to first read ALL of the classics. Needless to say, over the past 25 years I have read most of all the classics that you can think of and a lot more that you’ve never heard of. I find reading, even more so than watching good movies, is an excellent form of escapism and can truly help you understand the problems you have now were endured by others in the past and that cycle will continue for as long as humanity exists.
As you could imagine, music is mostly Al Bowly, Stan Getz, and many of the Big Band era greats, only intermingled with classical music.
I choose to not participate in the post modernism experiment, but truly wish all of you well who’ve embraced it. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe the old fuckers from the 1890s in front of my building were right and I am a giant pussy, unable to withstand trench warfare and mustard gas attacks.
