Screwball

Here is the complete documentary minus the outtakes (which were great) Youtube (runtime 1:17 minutes); Floored

In that documentary they talked about a rule that if you hit someone on the trading floor you were fined like 300 bucks. A guy knocked someone on their ass, threw 300 dollars on his chest and said when he gets up I'm going to hit him again. A wild breed for sure.

Makes sense.

Just for fun. Youtube video. Trailer for a documentary made in 2009 about the floor traders in Chicago. Also how the computers replaced them. Our markets at one time traded in fractions. Chicago and NY had the big trading floors. Hand signals to buy and sell back in the day. Wild stuff. Once the computers took over... Great book by Michael Lewis of Moneyball fame. Flashboys - link to AMZN. Flashboys - AMZN All about how the tech and computers found more advantages to skim money. Probably back when the movie Wall Street came out (87, looked it up) they were trading in fractions and on the floor using hand signals. Flashboys came out in 2014ish. He documents the incredible progress of the tech. And that was a long time ago...

At some point do we have to wonder if AI is running the markets? High frequency trading, access for latency, packet sniffing, dark pools. The smartest guys in the room with 20 year old technology now turned over to our old buddy AI. What could possibly go wrong?

Chart porn from the beginning of the year. INTC went vertical in March it looks like. Have no clue why. There is a HUGE gap that will eventually fill. Giddy up!

I checked the futures not long ago. All good. That could change when the sun starts coming up.

I went to a few horse tracks in Ohio. Buy your tee shirt first. I bought a lottery ticket that paid 20 bucks and that was more than I made off the ponies. 🙂 Fun time though. I worked with a vendor that was a huge race horse fan. He would call to have me help fix stuff and while we did that he would talk about horses. His wife almost divorced him because of it. He was that fanatical. He wanted to bet his house on a race that he knew this horse was going to win. The odds were enough to matter, let's put it that way. She told him if you do that - you are toast. He didn't. The horse won. That still pisses me off he would say. Too funny.

Chart of the day as the market had a sad day - especially the NASDAQ. Down 1121 point by my chart porn. One of the most popular tech/chip ETFs got hammered as well (down 9 percent). SMH. Link below to their info page. SMH VanEck Semiconductor ETF

That links to what the exchanges statement says. The pigmen have to get everything all dialed in to make it look legit for the masses so they arb the rules once they let them on the exchange. They are going to make a killing anyway, but just more ways to suck money from the system. The smartest guys in the room. And besides, the IPO's are underwritten by the big banks. The 21 (not sure how many now - wow - looked it up - now 27) primary market broker dealers (the big banks) control everything anyway. It's good to be the King!

Can most people do anything about it even they wanted to stay away? I'm guessing not. Retail might get beat up, and good, they might be that stupid. The pigmen always win.

More stupidity. From Seeking Alpha. I'll save you the click but here is the link; The Pattern Day Trading Rule Is Dead No day trading rules, margin accounts, credit cards, Robinhood - what can possibly go wrong. Keep that bubble going at all cost. Who gets to hold the bag when the big kaboom happens?

Michael Burry of the Big Short fame seems to be pretty ballsy from what little I follow. To the short side. I don't get it right now. We know the pigmen of WS make money no matter if stuff goes up or down, or in the end, get bailed out. There always two sides of a trade That is nothing new. Been like that since there were markets, bucket shops, and leverage. But nothing like this in a different way. We are talking massive amounts of money today. We have 3 IPOs coming that may generate trillions (with a T) of liquidity (not sure what to call it or where it's coming from). A trillion isn't much less GDP of Saudi Arabia. At least they have oil.

Bonus chart porn. This goes back to 1995 of the S&P 500. The two humps around 2000 and 2008 are the two significant crashes. The Dot-com of 2000 and not sure what to call the one in 08. I'll just blame the banks. 🙂 Funny how the two bubbles peaked around the same level. Then there is this... Some call it a hockey stick. Some call it other things. Exponents are a bitch might be one. Let's gas this prick up with a trillion dollars worth of IPOs. Yea, that's the ticket!

Once we price the upcoming trillions from our biggest AI companies and get our 50%, when do I get the check? We gotta be rich, right? We are talking billions if not trillions of IPOs. That's a **** load of money.

Wow! A blast from the past. One of my favorite stock from back in the day. Another example of missing what should have been an obvious trade. Data centers - construction - CAT. Chart porn for proof;

How does anyone manage their money in a smart way when **** changes all the time? And this **** didn't start last week, or last year. Plus, the game is rigged. When our retirement accounts are locked into whatever deal we have, we can only manage that to a certain extent. Sometimes very limited. For example; only particular index or mutual funds. Doesn't really matter what they call them - a basket of whatever - weighted a certain way. You can only change them every so often. We don't have enough choices to protect ourselves. As you get older, or retired like me, they call it capital preservation. Now might be a good time.

This is a good read but you can't get all of it. Most, but not all, but enough. Monopoly Round-Up: After SpaceX Goes Public, Does the Stock Market Finally Fall? FTA; It's almost like the casino is rigged so the pigmen win. No! Tell us it ain't so.

The optics today can track a baseball to a few thousands of an inch from many feet away, and then digitize the trajectory in milliseconds. You ain't that good.

I have had the time to play with it over various venues, some good, some not. It is obviously better at some things than others. I seems like a souped up search engine - or maybe they just filter out all the adds and monetary ****. 🙂

They work fine now. Something did change, and probably on my end. I used to be able to see the image in the tweet or whatever you call it, now just text. Once in, neat chart porn.

$9 Trillion Collapse Machine - About the AI stuff.

I'm getting a bad link to both above, but I'm not sure why. For some reason I'm not seeing tweets in Firefox anymore for some reason.

I don't know how it will shake out this time. It might look totally different, but the old saying applies; history doesn't repeat, but it often rhymes. Given the massive amount of money we are talking about, someone's balance sheets will suffer. Why not make it banks so they get bailed out again? They are the lead underwriters in this massive bubble but have no money. How much leverage? Read this today from a Toledo News channel; $10B data center campus planned for Van Wert, bringing an anticipated 1,500 construction jobs FTA: In the end, 200 full time jobs. Then there is this; To the bold; we'll see about that. While the quest to build data centers on every corner it seems, which consume massive amounts of energy (and water), we have a wee little energy problem as well. And from Exxon CEO; We're about to make 1970s-style energy shortages great again. Few understand the history, but it wasn't the OPEC oil embargoes that created the infamous gas lines in the 1970s. The real cause was the price controls implemented by the federal government. The artificially suppressed price led to excess consumption relative to supply, which ultimately gave rise to physical shortages. Today, we're repeating the same mistakes, albeit with a different mechanism. The coordinated market manipulation of SPR releases + Axios fake "deal" news headlines have artificially surpressed prices below the demand-destroying levels needed to ration supply. In the absence of this natural market functioning that balances demand with increasingly thin supplies, we'll eventually hit tank bottoms across a whole range of energy products, with the same end result of economy-crippling supply shortages. Bottom line: the inability of the Trump administration to tolerate higher prices today means supply shortages are all but guaranteed tomorrow. **** It's not only oil, but other distillates, fertilizer, and anything else that moves through the SOH. **** I asked AI about the IPOs and what changes were made and by whom; So we are going to IPO 3 large AI companies in the face of an energy crunch. What can possibly go wrong?