Screwball

Here's another one I missed:

We flew in to Tampa, stayed in Clearwater Beach, went to Lakeland on a weekday. Rt. 4 I think it was. Should have been a little over an hour trip in good conditions. Took about hour 15 going there. Game at 1. Must have hit work traffic going home, plus a wreck somewhere so the maps re-routed us. 3 hours to get back. Not fun. It is a really nice park. We were maybe 10 rows up between home plate and the 3rd base dugout. I could see the guys with radar guns behind the plate. It was late March. We were lucky with the weather, they said the week before wasn't good. If you are a Tiger fan, a must do.

And if Lloyd Blankfein thinks this is a good pick, it probably is for him, but not us. But then again.. Thank you professor Blankfein.

There are more than a few that look like that. I've been watching these markets for a long time. Moves like this are not normal. The old guy Art Cashin who worked for some big British bank as head floor trader, and did CNBC everyday during the dot-com bubble (he was a treat), can't remember the name, said they went in there everyday for years waiting on it to blow up. It eventually did. Same in 08/09. Before it blows you can see the rivets popping, the steam leaking out, and the various rattles and shakes here and there. This isn't normal. 🙂

I wanted to respond to this one, and had something typed up - then thought better of it. I can't stand Weisnthal who who should be sitting on a shelf at Home Depot in the tool department, but he's retweeting Lloyd "fricken" Blankfein. Really? This is Krugman level suck up and horse****. This was re-tweeted by Weisnthal idiot. Do you not remember who the **** Lloyd Blankfien is? Where is Rod Sterling?

We are not far away. I gave up on baseball. They brought me back a couple of years ago when they went nuts in the second half. Then I found out about Skubal. As an old pitching fan kind of guy, I loved to watch him work. What a treat. So I'm kind of hooked again. I did the bucket list thing in 2019 and went to Lakeland for a ST game. Booked them the first day - great seats - great trip. Would have liked to see of the old picture in the clubhouse with a cleat mark in it was still there. Shoe thrown by Mr. Leyland. He was my guy. I'm still here so they have a chance to win one more before I'm in a urinal. Florida traffic sucks.

Yes, stone, my mistake. Not sure about the Harris thing. I might have confused myself.

I only want to say this, and I will say no more. I don't know how much of this stuff is true, and nothing would surprise me. I have read about this Epstein stuff for years, for the record. If this takes down Trump, and if he is guilty, I hope it does. But don't stop there. There are a whole bunch of other sick ****s who were also a part of all this. They ALL need to pay the price. Nothing less is acceptable. I have a daughter. Nuff said. And probably better off not said.

For some reason I think a curling rock weighs around 40 pounds. I don't know how I know that. Looks like fun. After bowling night was over, we used to go to another bar and play shuffleboard. Probably a 20ft table. Threw sawdust on the top and threw little metal pucks. Another sport. 🙂 It was all just an excuse to drink beer. 🙂 Sorry for the distraction.

Piling on; Note this is an ETF (exchange traded fund). Not the same as owning an underlying stock or asset. All ETFs have shrinkage.

Perfect. And it's not like we haven't seen this before... Even us keyboard warriors saw this coming.

I don't remember the year, sometime in the late 70s. I bowled in a pro-am at Imperial Lanes in Toledo, Ohio. You bowled 3 games and a different pro would bowl against you each game. Earl was there, and probably **** too. The big tournament started like on Thursday and would be televised on Saturday. Big stuff. We were before that started. I was lucky, one guy I didn't know, and the other two were **** Ritger and Dave Davis. Davis was a tall lefty. He shot about 190 on the lane I was on. The next game he moved one pair to the right, made an adjustment, and tossed a 279. Dude had a big ball, and natural like most lefties did. Earl was a machine. So smooth. Made it look easy. It's not. Those guys bowled hundreds of game a week. Saturday afternoon was about watching the tournament that week. Great stuff. Now a dying and soon to be dead sport.

Silver is butt ugly. It has recovered a bit this afternoon, but what a sell-off (3 month chart by day); Today by minute;

The selling started last night. Today the entire market is down. I read a bunch of different takes on why, but they are all over the place. Option expiration might be as good of a reason as any, but these are the metals so there is the paper vs. physical thing, and the different exchanges they trade on. Also, the dollar index is up which trades inverse to gold & silver.

Warsh has been on the FOMC so an expected pick in a way. I would have bet on the other guy who's more of a dove and voted to lower rates. So this is kind of a surprise, but a pick just about any President could have made. Gold and Silver slammed today. Not sure why.

Disclosure; That article is behind a paywall for me. This is a "market" thing. When the value of the dollar (against another currency) goes down, the "purchasing power" of our money is less. Market 101. The dollar index they are talking about is the value of the US dollar against a basket of other currencies so it is going down against many. Depending on what flavor of economic/fiscal theory you buy into, this comes into play. In this case, a cheaper dollar is good for US exports. On the other hand, it is bad for "our" consumer because our money doesn't go as far. When TPTB decided globalization was a good thing and took advantage of environmental and wage arbitrage through slave labor and 3rd world countries to exploit and dump waste, our goose was cooked. We went though the industrialization era of mass produced automobiles and other products - the hey day of American workers - to shipping our jobs and production all over the world. The giant sucking sound as Ross Perot said. I lived it, I watched it. I even helped it happen, and I hate that. But I had to eat. It's too late. All the jobs we lost are not coming back, and on top of that, any that can be replaced by a robot, will be. Even if they tried, it would take years. That's assuming the ****wads running this place actually give one good ****. But they don't. I don't know if they are all actually this economically illiterate, or just play the role on TV.

Yes, there has been some updates that were not good. I redid a laptop to new drives and more memory recently and went to Win 11 at that time. Some of the updates killed settings I spent hours getting the way I wanted. Spit again!

I went through the digital transition from the beginning. At first, I thought, wow, this is pretty cool - tech guy an all. Then spent years in IT, or IT adjacent, and learned first hand how ugly it can get. I tried to be the most safe, protected, unknown person in the digital world. I have now thrown in the towel. They know more about us than we do. Spit! You can't beat it.

The tech in these cars is off the charts cool and amazing. I hope people realize this also helps us mortals. Like the things we learned from space travel but these machines don't get off the ground. 🙂

I worked in a bowling alley back when Earl was king of bowling. The guy was a fricken machine. He had 25 300 games and this was back when the lanes were not as easy as they are now. Incredible. But I was curious. From his Wiki page; Dude had game in multiple sports.

Something happened around 8:20 this morning. Both gold and silver took a ****. Silver went from $121.785 to $106.61. It has now recovered some and its back to 112 ish. That was a big move in about an hour and 10 minutes. In other news, MSFT is getting smoked to the tune of 12%. META is up around 7. Also of note, crude oil has been up the last three days and is now $65+ a barrel (WTI). It's been around 60 or lower for quite some time. Probably due to weakened dollar.

Weird, when we turn the scope into us little people - I'm old. I bought my first house in 83. My second in 2000. The first one I paid almost 8 percent interest and had to have like 20 percent down. In 2000 my rate was %6.875, and much less of a percentage down. Don't remember the exact details. Kinda weird too, even given those rates at the time, both were 30 year loans to keep the monthly payment as small as possible, so that mattered (they offered 15 year too). It was cheaper to buy than rent. If you could save up enough money for the down payment, you might as well give that X amount a month toward the property and eventually own it. Even at that time is was cheaper than the equivalent rent. I don't know about elsewhere, but I'm guessing almost everywhere, it's even worse now, and has been getting this way for a long time. I had a 350 dollar a month house payment in 2000 (small house, kids flew, didn't need much, frugal). This place could easily rent for more than a grand today. That's nuts.

Target isn't the same as what the numbers tell us, but I get your point. This is the deal with interest rates. What is the price of debt/credit? Some think interest rates should be punitive as a throttle of credit creation. Others think they should create all they want. Why not, the more money, the more there is to go around, right? What's not to like? Again, library's full of this debate.

What 1% rates would those be?

If they don't, they damn well should, or they shouldn't be in it to begin with. They are for day traders and stupid people. Maybe that's the same guy. 🙂 Daily Rebalancing & Compounding: Impact on Leveraged ETFs