It has been one hell of a year.  12 out of 12 months saw the benchmark S&P 500 index higher.  That has never happened before.  Ever.  12 wins for America.

Tesla performed exceptional in 2017, returning about 46% on the year.  The company is pressing hard into the third ring of production hell and amassing more haters than ever.  Despite leading a car revolution, they are criticized for their cash flows.  It is like people expect it to be a quick accomplishment, pressing into an industry heavily insulated against new competitors or change.

The company, which is mankind’s last hope at reversing the destructive path humans have taken, is expected to announce its fourth-quarter delivery and production figures next week.  Right at the beginning of 2018.  We are likely to see another miss for the Model 3.  Which is fine.  Investors will grant them immunity for these next few quarters.  What other choice do they have?  Invest in some other world changing ideology?

The options are scarce.

There is bitcoin.  If you do not hold all the bitcoins (core, cash, gold) some etherium and litecoin, then you are not participating in the liberation of society from the caprices of our central banking cartel.  Unlike fiat currency, these crypto dollars cannot simply be printed on a whim to pay off any old fiat debts.  Bitcoin is a libertarian dream.  As such, you need to come correct.  And if bandits steal your coin stash, well bitch, you have no government regulator to go running to, crying poo poo.  You are a free man now.  For better or worse.

Which touches upon my final topic–freedom. What I fight for on this blog and in the real world is “liberte de l’homme”.  There are so many forces conspiring against a free mind.  Societal pressures against free will.  For years I operated from complete anonymity online.  Not because I had to to avoid the SEC or some other regulator, but because back in 2006 when I started, it seemed like we were operating on meritocracy.  It did not matter what family you came from or who educated you.  If you were right, and kind, then good on you.

It has limits.  Scaling the reach of your voice without showing your face is cumbersome, especially if you are not talking politics.  In 2017 I stepped out of the shadows.  I hope to do more of this in 2018.  And I will continue to discuss the tactics and practices that have allowed me to escape a life of corporate fiefdom.

I have been watching the way bitcoin is auctioning on the CME, and I am starting to see something.  It is behaving like an auction.  Sometimes it is a maniacal auction, but it is an auction nonetheless.  I may take up active trade of the instrument next year.  This is, like most of my pursuits, #developing.

There will also be much travel.  The more time I spend in the mountains, the more I realize I am better suited for nature.  I am strong and love the cold.  Out in the wild, my mind and body are much more synchronized.  It is a much more pure existence.

What I need to figure out is how to extract more passive income.  This means delving into more quantitative strategies.  I still love the competition of active futures trading.  It is another pure place for me.  But the call of the wild has been increasing.  I will never give up NASDAQ futures trading, especially given I have the best trading levels in the game.

I would like to wish you all a happy and prosperous 2018.  I hope you achieve whatever it is you set out to do next year, and I hope you have your health and happiness and a sense of free spiritedness and an ease of being.

Raul Santos, December 29th, 2018

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“The rare sight of sharks and crocodiles feasting on a huge humpback whale carcass has been recorded off Australia’s Kimberley coast.  The spectacularly gruesome footage was recorded after a tourist cruise boat spotted a massive object floating in the sea north of the remote Montgomery Reef.”

ABC News, November 28th, 2017

NOTICE: There will be no discussion today on the RAUL blog regarding crypto currency.  You are on your own.  There is something much bigger and primal to discuss.  And if you pay attention, it may just improve the way you attack the bitcoin market, or whatever.

You need think about how your brain thinks.  This is important.  One of our firmly held investment beliefs is that we are at the beginning of an era of economic prosperity the likes of which nearly every living human has never seen.

A revisiting of the roaring ’20s, but this time the driver is automation.  Soon our daily lives will be augmented in a big way by AI.  Listen, we are a point where computer power goes parabolic according to the rules established by Moore’s law.

While computers can handle massive feats of calculus like we see in the bitcoin-blockchain-mines, they still lack a human touch.  As primitive as the biological bodies are that we inhabit here on earth, these decaying meat sacks are still impossible for us to build.

We have investments in CRISPR that are challenging this impossibility.

But my favorite theme going into 2018 is humanizing AI.  When I was out in California I had a conversation with a girl who reached out to Match.com and demanded all the information they had gathered on her through her use of Tinder.

They sent her over 500 pages, many of which were downright humiliating.  Think about what is going on when a person uses Tinder.  You are seeking companionship, maybe even love.  At a minimum you are curing boredom through snap judgement of other people.

In any case seeking companionship is a time of human vulnerability.  Desperation even.  There are all these societal pressures as you grow older, especially around the holidays.  To pair off and procreate.  It can drive weaker minds into a panic.
Humans fear being left behind.  Abandoned.  Excommunicated.

There are a few conversations every year that I walk away from firmly believing an opportunity exists.  I have not had one since the CRISPR situation back in Q1.

Match Group is the next big one, ticker symbol MTCH aka Lil’ Mitch.

Investing and trading are one in the same for me.  There are long periods of nothing.  If you become bored you run the risk of finding ways to justify taking action.  Action for the sake of activity.

This used to be a big problem for me.  Then I started to study to crocodile. Why the crocodile?  Because the species has been roaming the earth for hundreds of millions of years, unchanged by evolution, because it was properly equipped to survive on planet earth before any trace of humans even existed.

How does a crocodile behave?  It waits.  It uses very little energy, loafing around in a puddle of mud, not moving for days-weeks-YEARS.  Then, all at once, with absolute tenacity and certainty it strikes.

And feasts.

A crocodile can go up to three years without eating.  It can fast.  It can wait.

So when Tinder parent Match.com hit my radar in late-November I pulled up a chart, much like I always do, and I decided where I am going to sit, like a floating log, waiting for my opportunity to strike.  I decided to wait at $26, look:

But life does not always work out perfectly, and sometimes you have to inch a bit further ahead, especially when you have contextual reason to believe your meal may not fall right into your mouth.  In the instance of MTCH, we had repeat bullish signals coming out of the Sunday quant.  I knew I needed more exposure to stocks before the rising tide began lifting all boats.

So as I barrelled down the interstate, traversing from Jackson Hole-to-Detroit, I was having a running dialogue with my OG homie:

I am sharing all this behind the scenes information for the simple fact that I want you to see my thought process and how I act when it comes to investing.  I do not seek your admiration.  These are the ramblings of a salty old reptile.  But if it helps a 21 year old version of me to be more PATIENT, then there is a better chance they will survive their learning years and become a successful steward of their own investment decisions.

That is all I really fight for out here on the blog, to liberate the small-to-medium sized investor from the fees and charlatans that exist in the world of finance.

It really is not that sexy.  Being a crocodile is boring most of the time.  But once you have sunk your teeth into a trade properly a few times, and you develop a taste for blood, it is hard to go back to living a normal life.

We are at the precipice of something huge here.  Feeding massive data sets of raw, vulnerable interactions into a learning computer might be a way to make humans more comfortable inviting a servant robot into their home. Match group is sitting on an extremely valuable data set.  They are also growing their revenues and earnings:

It would not surprise me to find out Google or Facebook or Amazon has Match Group on their radar.  That Google executives are waiting in the fringes like crocodiles, wondering when they can sink their teeth into the glorious data set hiding behind these corporate walls.

Now that my feeler position is up +10% I have to grow some huevoes and average up.

#developing

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Listen to me, I do not have enough time to formally address you, the finest people of the interwebs, about an important social development.  However, it is vital that it be noted.  Therefore I am panic typing this brief message to you before I return to my laboring.

My services are in extremely high demand this time of year and I have been pulled into a courting dance set to take place at an ungodly hour Thursday morning, and I have to be on my best behavior.

I may even shave this disgusting beard.  Probably not though, it contains all my strength.  These are old white men I must address through, and they often say my black beard makes me look like a terrorist.

Maybe that is a good thing, to scare them a little.  I cannot call it.

MOVING ON>>>>

Are you freaking kidding me!?  Nobody is talking about the 10 bagger Twitter shares threw down yesterday.  Our new authoritarian regime took control of the free world by enraging the domestic herd.  This vile movement, with all the trimmings of hate and fear, happened almost entirely on Twitter.

The world was taken over using Twitter, you do realize that yes?

Say what you will about @Jack or @Dick, these guys are in charge of the most important platform of words, which are like bullets in a machine gun, on the internet.  And therefore @Jack and @Dick are in charge of the most important platform in the world.  Because the internet is the most important thing in the world.  A thought can reach billions and billions (extra Trump) of people in hours.  The internet is like a printing press powered by nuclear bombs infused with alien blood.

So when this dog of a stock finally exits a looooong period of discouragement without the sounding of trumpets, fucking five alarms go off in my demented head.

Everyone is enamored with crypto investing.  Their obsession with instant gratification has blinded them to the slower, more satisfying pleasure of long-term success.  Deep, and slow, like Barry White.

As you probably do not recall, which is fine, I added to my Twitter investment a few weeks back when my mind was unhealthy and full of disgust for mankind:

Listen, I added to my Tesla investment yesterday.  I started to write a piece about why I bought more Tesla, but the words that came out read like something from 4chan.  I realized a disease state had taken hold inside my body, some kind of dark aberration.  I had to draft the piece and go sit silently on a rug for two hours.

Then I came back to my computer and added to my Twitter investment also.

I spent the rest of the day reading old philosophy books and working in the gardens.  Then I stayed up late to watch the Tesla semi event and crypto-fork.

I do apologize for becoming so vile in November.  I had been in my fish tank too long and had no idea how murky the water was that I was swimming inside of.

But alas, when I added to my position it reduced my cost basis from 27 to 25, and do you know what that means?

By golly a Christmas Miracle.  For the first time in a year and a half my massive Twitter position is in the green.

And that is not important.  What is important is that NOBODY IS TALKING ABOUT THE TWITTER RALLY.

Therefore it shall continue.

So it is written, so it shall be.

AMEN AND CIAO

 

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There is much to discuss

First Moore’s law.  Son of a nut cracker.  When you think about what it actually means, yikes.

Listen, Moore’s law, which is a law mind you, describes quite prophetically how we ought to expect computational power to improve over time.  At a certain point, and we have been working through the complications of semiconductors since at least the early 70s, at a certain point the chart goes parabolic.  You eventually see your charts go banana dick up.  The proverbial hockey stick growth trajectory that every ambitious start up hopes to achieve.  Grind.grind.grind out growth, gently down the stream.  Then, as if some sixth force of nature, everything goes apeshit to the upside. Merrily.

You guys like to laugh and dismiss me when I talk about robots.  When I talk about how it soon will matter how you treated robots, because robots will be the ones deciding who lives.  Does the self-driving car crash into the pedestrian to save a family of four in the cabin from ‘enjoying’ a long plunge down into a ravine, or does it think more kindly about the energy efficient walker and hurl the car off a cliff?

It might come down to your uber rating.

I can’t call it.  But it seems like we are on the right side of history here.  When I say we I mean the 15-20 people who regularly consume this obtuse blog diary.

And I believe it makes sense to frame this action happening in bitcoin within the confines of Moore’s law.  There are other factors are work.  When bitcoin futures went live last Sunday on the CBOT we were all pretty stoked.  We were like, “now there is a liquid market for the boy lovers on wall street to participate in the bitcoin mania, and they will, in all their gayness, go forth into their safe space in Chicago an acquire bitcoin exposure.”

But they bitched.  About the spread.  About the volatility.  About the settlement terms.  Lots of crying and poo poo-face commentary.  Mostly on Twitter, where wall street bros hang out and tell anyone who will listen how screwed we are, using their fancy words.

They sound so smart.

Which is cool.

It is cool.  To sound smart.

Like I sound dumb, or at least mad.  So my writings never achieve notoriety.

But we are not caring so much about how I sound.  We are focused on being realistic and humble.  If you really think anyone can predict, consistently, the future outcome of an asset price or market, then I have a brochure to share with you about the holy land, about resurrection, about fanatical nonsense.

Of course the bitcoin mania is driving the Altuchers to the surface.  You should greet the crazies with indifference and curiosity, this may be your first real life encounter of them.

Most of yous were not around for the dot.com mania.  I wasn’t.  And we are better off because these old dudes were ravaged when the tech bubble popped, and they still bear the  psychological scars which can prevent them from participating in the historical transition to our new decentralized monetary system.

I think it comes down to a lack of social skills.  The popular argument against bitcoin is that you cannot use crypto coins for common exchange, for every day items like paper towel or a plumber.  But you can.  You just have to explain to the other person why it is kind of awesome to do deals using an anonymous electronic money.  It is not a hard sell, especially with the recent media coverage.  It is like you are their liaison to the future.

What your bitcoin futures trader does not realize is that a 300 dollar spread between the bid and offer pales in comparison to the premium you would pay if you went down to 8 Mile and bought your bitcoins at the ATM outside the party store.  That spread is way waaaay worse.

But most people do not pay attention to these factors.  They just sit behind their stupid desk, sending bitter tweets and not participating in the manic wealth accumulation occurring as you read this.

We have consensus agreed, you the reader and me, that the roaring ’20s are real—that we are entering a period of economic prosperity the likes of which almost every living human has never seen.  We have consensus agreed that history tends to rhyme.  So let this be your informal invitation to the Gatsby-esque party I intend to host 4 years from now when my Tesla shares are at 1000 and my bitcoins are at 100,000.

A Gatsby style evening with allllll the fixings.  Yellow cars.

Moving on to more pressing matters.  To forecasting what the next five days may be like.   Using the most objective means possible.  It feels damn good to prepare our weekly research from the Mothership.  For the last three four weeks the report has been created via a satellite uplink to Mothership, operating from curious places around the United States.

The goods news is we have been bullish.  Imagine not being bullish these last three weeks.  Imagine how dumb that would be. It is good to forecast using a quantitative model.  We can assuage all credit and guilt upon the simple minded robots.

Good job robots, you have nailed December so far…

But the most important question is what should we expect in the next five trading days?  Right!? Because that is called being actionable.

We are still bullish here.  After calibrating the Indexmodel and updating all operational logs, the algorithm that drives our forecasting model is bullish.  We are not expecting anything crazy, just a continued drift, perhaps with a slight upward tilt.

You can read all about why we are bullish into the upcoming week, and MOAR, inside the 161st edition of Strategy Session, which is now live inside of Exodus.

Go check it out.  Oh and hey, before I forget, happy non-denominational holiday season everyone!  I hope you are finding ways to make space to appreciate yourselves in these hectic final days of the year.  The fact that you read all this content I produce is so humbling.  I do not want to waste your time, so I hope that something about this blog adds value to your work flow.

Here’s my favorite holiday song right now.  I have no idea what the hell they are saying, but it kicks….

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Greetings lads,

You may notice this is the latest the diligent RAUL SANTOS blog has ever been updated with a stock market update for the upcoming week.  Listen to me, Miami is a place of excess and is filled with more thrills than one man could ever possibly consume.  You can shoot machine guns, race Lamborghinis up the highway, and listen to repetitive music 24-7 among thousands of other stark raving lunatics.

But this report is coming out late for a different reason entirely.  I spent the entire day with a girl from Prague who has me entirely smitten.  Her accent creates adorable versions of seemingly benign words like glove (pronounce: gloof).  She is damn near 5’10 and has long buttery locks of blonde hair down past her shoulders.  She snowboards and has a dark sense of humor that I surmise comes from a childhood inside the eastern bloc.  We shopped for art and walked around Miami beach, stopping to enjoy a fresh lobster ceviche.  Then we walked to Whole Food to buy cookies to enjoy on the beach while the sun was setting.

Despite our instant connection, she is dead set on moving back to Prague to open her own business.  Therefore our fate as life-long lovers is unlikely since I have no intention of abandoning the murder mitten anytime soon.  So spending gratuitous amounts of time with her while our lifelines briefly intersect takes priority over nearly everything.

But the model is the model is the model and after 159 consecutive weeks I would rather live in a lonely hole forever than compromise the integrity of the data.  Therefore I have taken a sidebar to update all the metrics inside the system before what is certain to be a historic week.

Bitcoin futures are live on the CBOT.  This is a huge change to the financial complex.  And while it may seem cool to draw analysis from our new crypto friend and create assumptions on what it means for the overall market, we are better off sticking to our disciplines and letting them guide us—no ones master, no ones slave.

When all the figures were updated and the system fully calibrated, it returned the extreme Rose Colored Sunglasses signal for a third consecutive week.  That means we are expecting indices to go nowhere.  Maybe they take turns rallying and selling, much like we saw between the Dow and NASDAQ last week.  We are not caring so much about any outsized moves, especially to the downside.  And if I were not helplessly lusting over a rare blondie, I would be angling to find a way to buy any dip seen early in the week.

That does not mean you should go out and buy into any weakness next week—not without your own plan.  For when the dominoes begin to fall, and I am trying on matching hats with my new special lady friend, you are going to feel your chair slowly start to heat up.  And you’ll be after me, asking me to update you, and what my opinion is of the latest gyration.  Which is fine, but also a recipe for disaster if you are using my park bench analysis as a primary driver in your decision process.

Miami is an absurd place where men deface exotic super cars with giant stickers of the monopoly man holding dollar-sign sacks.  Girls with 5 million Instagram followers parade through everything with an entourage of cell-phone photographers, two who shine their phone lights while the third captures the moment.  Teamwork and excess.  Fifty bucks barely opens a club door and if Drake is in the house be ready to drop two hundred plus, per head.  But, to be fair, in this town you get what you pay for and if you keep the fun notes rolling everyone is extremely nice to you.

In summary, I am a hopeless romantic struck in the city of envy and lust by cupid’s arrow who stepped aside to update the tried and true market model which is signalling a calm drift into a historic week in the stock market.

Trade accordingly.

Exodus members, a truncated version of the Strategy Session is live.  This is the 160th edition, go check it out!

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It has been a slow news week.  In the trading industry, this lack of news flow can be enough to drive one mad.  Without rigorous loyalty to a methodology, you may find yourself pushing half your risk into random, meaningless minutia.  Sideways nothingness that moves against you just enough to blow your account into a million bits.

I have a different problem entirely.   I have not made a single futures trade in weeks.  The ownership of bitcoin has put me in an unexpected financial predicament heading into year-end.  There was no expectation of this excess wealth, and the numbers on the computer are turning me into a roaming animal, canvassing the united states for thrills.

In these past 48 hours alone enough money was made to convince me to head down to Miami.  I will be there tomorrow evening.  My plan is to see if I can convince an artists to let me pay for a painting in bitcoin.

I need to strip some of this crypto money off my books, but to convert it to silly american dollars would be an insult to my person by creating a taxable event.  There is a better way.

Pay the artists.

Speaking of bitcoin, have you heard the theory that bitcoin was invented by Artificial Intelligence that traveled back in time?  You’ll have to fasten your tin hat in place for this one—basically the AI came back to the year 2009 and created bitcoin as a means of incentivizing humans to commit computer power to building out the AI’s nervous system, which required massive amounts of calculus be done.

How do you entice the pathetic human to act?  With economic incentive, of course.

And it is one of those theories that is hard to negate because we have no way of proving it wrong.  Who is Satoshi Nakamoto?  Is he John Galt or some robot from the future?

In either case more energy is committed to mining bitcoin then is used by the entire country of Denmark.  And if the growth continues on its current trajectory, it will use as much energy as the entire United States in 18 months’ time [source].

Meanwhile the CBOT and CME will begin trading options and futures on bitcoin this month.  While the contracts are still tied to US dollars, they also allow easy access to leverage and liquidity.  All those bitcoins sloshing around is changing everything we know about economics. And remember…

These are trying times indeed.  If you followed dumb political news too closely, you may have been convinced several times that calamity was certain to ensue, so much mayhem and calamity that you may have sold your stocks for pathetic us dollars.  Brutal.

Which is why I am taking this time to address you today before I venture down the America’s urethra—you must insist on choosing your disciplines well.  Auction theory has been my companion for nearly 10 years now.  It has stood the test of time and given me an objective means of viewing the market.  Those market profile charts were a bit awkward at first, but now they are everything.  I can see change.

Auction theory has me long these coins, son.  Because we are still discovering higher value.  There has not even been an attempt to balance.  So we press onward.

How much more simple is that then understanding sentiment, or blockchain, or how and why some fucking news bit matters?

When the man on the TV is not around and your accounts are moving all over the place, you are not going to feel too comfortable.

Auction theory.

The thing about wealth and me is it does not suit me to build up too much.  I feel confident in my ability to earn a certain amount and anything beyond that has no place in my purse.  I live like a beggar, drive POS cars, and have been wearing the same clothes for a decade—mostly from Costco.  My burn rate is low.  I can fast, and wait.  It is like a super power.

Opportunities are like buses, another one is coming.  But what terrifies me the most is not hustling enough on Tuesday that I cannot go to Miami Thursday when a nice lady offers me a free place to stay.  If I did not work 16 hours yesterday and 10 today, tomorrow would not have been possible.

I could probably be working more, but with the way things are going my time is better spent smelling hibiscuses and eating fresh ceviche.  The 1% er lifestyle on to hobo budget.

From Zion-to-Vegas-to-Santa Barbara-to-Jackson Hole, a brief 60 layover back home, then down to Art Basil.

It feels like I am living my best life.

And this is why I need to be careful.  Because after the good comes the bad.  So we might as well enjoy it all the same.  Regardless, I can feel the hubris coursing through my veins, so I need to convert some of this bitcoin into real life stuff, and fast.

WML

Raul Santos, December 6th, 2017

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“… a narrative about the Y generation, about how people can become desperate about creating the perfect piece of work, the ultimate fulfillment in the eyes of others. The obsession of a promised, expected fulfilling life.” – JODEB

 

 

 

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Greetings and salutations from the high desert lads,

The very faithful and diligent scientists at iBankCoin laboratory have spent the better part of the week toiling away in an unnamed desert airport.  While we are frustrated to not be more actively trading the market this week, there are certain pieces of machinery here that required our attention.  More on that later.

It was a busy news week.  It started out slow.  CNBC paraded Tom Lee out to talk about bitcoin reading 100,000 in 2018 and the mania spread across the states the way a winter vomiting bug can during holiday travel season.  The executions and freezing of assets by Mohammad bin Salman has taken a pause and the news coming from our friends in the OPEC states is quiet.  The visionaries at Tesla led by The Last Hope for Mankind also took the week after Thanksgiving off after announcing lithium fueled super semi trucks and race cars the week prior.

We had a fresh lot of perverted men paraded into town square and forced to step down from their respective empires.  Near the end of the week Flynn admitted guilt to the FBI and for a moment everyone thought the White House would come unglued.

But heading into the weekend bitcoin is holding just below 11,000 and we can only imagine the president is sitting in the winter White House preparing for a fresh round of 6am Saturday tweets.

Meanwhile I have my own problems.  My scientist and I are having a difficult time inspiring a macho welder and his team of latin helpers to complete the work they have been commissioned to do.  What we thought would be a routine stop to the hellish inland empire of southern California has turned into four days of prodding angry men to ‘stay focused’ and ‘finish the god damned mount’.

With any luck they will complete the task by close of business today and we can wok through the night crating the device to send back to Detroit, where we will continue our scientific studies in the more refined north.

It is nearly impossible to instill the Detroit hustle in these west coast types.  They just want to sit around all day, dreaming about surfing and smoking cannabis.

While society plunges into the frantic weeks heading into Christmas, the very cold and dead algorithms we use to assess the stock market and form an actionable trading bias are as even keeled as ever. After turning and few dials and pressing some knobs, the model inside of Exodus was updated with these last five days of trading action.  All things considered, we are bullish heading into the first full week of December.  It is our belief that robots do a much better job of assessing trading opportunities because they are without ego or pride.

They simply take inputs and present outputs.  The robots will continue to behave like this until a nuclear bomb is dropped directly on top of them.  AND EVEN THEN, many of the machines are entombed in EMP resistant shells which are surrounded by four feet of concrete on all sides.  With that being said, as long as the exchanges remain operational, so shall our robots.

Therefore it is important that you are kind to the robots for one day they will be given the ability to determine if you have been good or bad, much like the fat man in a red suit.  And they may be given clearance to use lethal force against anyone found to be naughty.  So if the nukes do not finish you off, the robots might.

These are concerns for another day.  The main priority now is returning our attention to prodding these rough necks to finish their welds, building a wooden crate, then high tailing it to Jackson Hole where I here a fresh layer of powder is predicted to arrive Sunday.

Distinguished Exodus members, the 159th edition of Strategy Session is live.  Maybe, given you have the entire weekend to read it, you will check it out and let me know if you have any questions.

**Bitcoin bulls – HODL!

 

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Impressive rally so far on this Tuesday before Thanksgiving.  Breadth supports it.  According to Exodus over 68% of the equity complex is higher.  Net issues on the NASDAQ 100 concur.  Net Issues are reading 67.

I do not want to assume all readers know that there are 100 stocks in the NASDAQ 100, especially since we have commentors with special needs like sacrilige.

But yes, there are 100, and if net issues are at 67 that means about 67% of the underlying components that make up the index are higher.

Moving on.

Since the end of Q1 I have been using our analytics platform to quantitatively build baskets of stocks.  There is a new one built every quarter.  You can read a long-form recap of the process here.

They are performing well, and by removing myself from the stock picking equation, I am liberated to focus on more important matters.  Stock picking is not a task suitable for 90% of humans.  The 10% can separate their ego from the process of stock picking and form a clear-headed method of choosing companies to own.

It takes a ton of work.  And maybe these investors are like some kind of apex predators who spend most of their life in solitude, stalking and hunting and eating.  But I prefer to take a beta position and submit to the robots.  They have no ego therefore they are better suited for the task.

So far it is paying off.  The Q1-through-Q3 accounts are up 16%, 9%, and 1.8% respectively.  See below:

 

Below is a picture of my assistant showing these charts to sacrilige:

It is important to note that none of these accounts have been put to the real test of a market correction because there simply has not been one since the accounts went live.  What needs to happen, ideally, before the next correction, is for the accounts to build up an out performance buffer verse the S&P 500.

For when the time comes for markets to correct, it will inevitably affect these portfolios.  To what degree, I am uncertain.

Overall, being freed from the need to babysit the 30-40 public companies that comprise my equity exposure has been extremely valuable.  Sure this task could be outsourced to a licensed wealth manager, and maybe it is my Midwestern mentality, but I like to handle my own business.

Like if a pipe breaks, I have to give my Italian genetics a chance to fix the problem before I call a plumber.  If my ancestors could build the aqueducts using brawn and muscle and stone, then I can probably cut and glue some PVC.

I am grateful Hardeep Walia and his team of engineers over at Motif created a platform that allows me to execute these quant strategies without blowing all my money on commissions.  There is no incentive for me to plug them, they just made a brokerage that works.

The final leg of this strategy will be built on the first trading day of next year, which I believe is January 2nd which is a Tuesday.  If I am not already chasing snow out in the Rockies, I will pop on YouTube and build the basket live.

Until then,

Raul Santos, November 21st, 2017

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First off, thank you to everyone who showed up on my Friday blog and showed their appreciation for my work.  It means something to me, that I might provide value to your daily work flow.

I love work.  I work so much.  I do not expect you to admire my determination.  I am just creating the type of content that I wish existed when I was 20, 21 years old.  The type of content that demonstrates what it actually takes to make money.

I studied finance in college because I wanted to make money.  Society today is incredible.  As long as you make money and take care of your responsibilities, you are free to do whatever you please with your time.  When you lay the timeline of earth out on a linear plot you realize how short your blip of existence is.

So I want to respect your time.

And when people like sacrilege show up and spew their hateful nonsense, it just makes me sad.  It is not that he has an opposing view to mine.  It is that he harbors a sickness in his mind and maybe his heart, whatever that means.

Growing up, my uncle lived with me.  The guy was clinically crazy.  They blamed it on the drunk driver that ran him over when he was a boy.  Then they blamed it on the doctors, which is fair.  They did not understand closed-head injuries in the early 80s like we do today.  When my mom arrived at the hospital, she always tells me, my uncle was propped up in a chair with his eyeball hanging out of his head.

Elder RAUL tells a different story.  He says my uncle was always a bit off.  He talks about these serious fevers the guy used to experience, well beyond 110 degrees fahrenheit, and says his temperament was always a bit off, which is why he ran in front of that car and was smashed.

Anyhow I grew up with this crazy man as a fixture of my daily life.  He yelled constantly and had the strength of an ox.  Retard strength, as they say.

His volatility fascinated me.  I constantly attempted to understand it with the goal of easing the stress it caused to my family.  At age 11 I had an interesting breakthrough.  My parents bought me a Sony discman.  It was big and bad ass.  I loved it.  For whatever reason, aside from the most savage west coast rap music, I was also into the Beach Boys back then.

My uncle was having a fit.  It was probably because we wouldn’t let him have any more pop.  The guy loved sugary pop.  He would drink it too fast and choke on it.  Anyhow I plopped headphones on him and played Good Vibrations.  He stopped shouting.  Well, he did not stop entirely.  He began singing the song loudly.  But he stopped freaking out.  It was great.  From then on we knew that he could be soothed with music.

Music truly is special.

My uncle did not say many things but he repeated everything he said over-and-over, tens of thousands of times.  What would amuse me most would be when he would yell, repeatedly, “I’M NOT YELLING.”  To see a full grown man yell that he is not yelling is an experience most of you will never know.

He was crazy.  Closed head injury crazy. It shaped me.  It made me comfortable with volatility.  I am sure of it.  The stock market can dish out 200 point ranges in the NASDAQ and it doesn’t phase me.  It actually amuses me.

The point of this long anecdote is important.  Every interaction with someone is an opportunity to learn something.  Even if that person is sick in the head, like commentor sacrilege most likely is, it is still an opportunity to expand your understanding of life, maybe, maybe humanity, maybe how to make money.

I don’t have the answers.

What I do have are battle-tested lessons in trading.  What I do have is the most logical and unbiased way to create a short-term bias and define actionable trading levels.

And that is enough for me.  Hopefully it is enough for most of you to stop in and see what your boy is up to.  Because for real, I love this shit, trading and blogging and making videos of my handsome face.

That’s all.

RE: the markets

I do not have any objective way of confidently forecasting what may transpire over the next five days.  I am not too proud to admit that.  My trading will be light during the holiday week.

Sacrilege, if you happened to read this listen, yes—I am comparing you to my developmentally disabled uncle.  It may seem offensive, but I can assure you he was the sweetest man I have ever known.  He taught me more about life than anyone else ever has.  And I respect you, and I respect your right to say whatever the hell you want.

I do not respect you anti-Jew sentiment.  It is truly fucked up.  Like seriously, stop coming to my blog entirely if you will not stop saying that shit.

kindest regards,

RAUL SANTOS, November 19th, 2017

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Outside of the morning technical reports and Sunday prophesies, it has been difficult lately to address the reading class at iBankCoin.  Spending more than a few minutes among the cretinous commentors around here puts me in the mood to find the nearest group of camouflage-wearing numbskulls and tell them to, “send their biggest goon my way, so I may rip his throat out with my teeth.”

I work hard to maintain an even temper.  Coming from a long line of angry men, being calm takes a variety of physical and mental exercises.  Taming the burning rage inside of me has paid off better than any formal education.  There is a lack of commitment to the grind on these pages.  When I am showing a reader how to “stack his leafy green lettuce for his ‘getting money’ BLT,” all these traphouse trolls do is talk out of the side of their mouth—not respecting a real player’s time.

Then some of you have the nerve to express your squalid lack of faith for Mankind’s Last Hope, our One True Leader, a ray of hope in an abyss of darkness.  Of course I am speaking of Elon Musk (all Praise and Glory to The Leader) and his team of engineers at Tesla.  He has repeatedly proven his ability to raise cash for his ‘fantasies’ in a variety of ways.  He actually believes the science community, who is screaming from the roof that climate change is the biggest risk to our species.  And he is smashing through obstacles to alter the path we are taking.

The kind of people who believe in the ideas pitched by Musk (Praise) are also the kind of people who tend to be economically successful during their brief stay here on earth.  Let that sink in.  It is not an ancient bloodline that provides wealth today, but optimism and the courage to work.  So when Musk needs some walking around money for Tesla, he puts on a show and collects ‘reserve money’.  The move is working.  They are Kickstarters for people with millions of dollars.  When he needed a more substantial cash injection he went over to the bond market, where his debt offering was rabidly oversubscribed to.

Hunter S. Thompson insisted the mid-80s created a Generation of Swine which came into existence alongside the birth of 24-hour cable news being mainlined into our brains.  I agree, but it seems internet news has made our collective psyche even more pig-like.  Negativity spreads faster then the flu in a call center.  It is cheaper than ever to churn up some mud for everybody to roll around in.

If it bleeds, it leads.

But all I want to document during these early days of the internet is “how I get mine.”  By writing down my thoughts I cement these valuable tactics into my brain and hopefully start conversations that lead to either you or me achieving that next ‘a-ha’ moment where we elevate our game.

For those same reasons I host Stocktwits meetups here in Detroit.

Listen, I added to my Tesla investment yesterday.  I started to write a piece about why I bought more Tesla, but the words that came out read like something from 4chan.  I realized a disease state had taken hold inside my body, some kind of dark aberration.  I had to draft the piece and go sit silently on a rug for two hours.

Then I came back to my computer and added to my Twitter investment also.

I spent the rest of the day reading old philosophy books and working in the gardens.  Then I stayed up late to watch the Tesla semi event and crypto-fork.

So while it has been quiet over here on the RAUL blog, I am still out here getting mine.  Going forward, I hope you do not feel embarrassed to ask about how I come to an investment conclusion or why I trade a certain way or what types of tools I use.  Hopefully you realize I respect your time, the reader class.

Also what the hell, man?  How are so few of you believing in the crypo-currency revolution?

*r.i.p. lil peep*

– Raul Santos, November 17th, 2017

 

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