Screwball

Always interesting to watch the futures after a long holiday weekend. We are also now into what they will call the Christmas rally time of the season. I'm sure Jim Cramer may bring it up next week, or Bubblevision in general. If someone can stomach to watch long enough to see if that is true, please report in. 🙂 Chart porn, and once again back to the 10/10 candle. The market is a traders dream - volatility - cha-ching. 3 month chart by day of the S&P. Nice little profit in only five trading days, but if you stayed long over the weekend and can't do squat until the market opens on Monday morning... For those who play the market this way, they are taking quite a risk over a long weekend. Which is why many of them go broke before they get rich and live on their own island. And there is nothing worse than watching things take a **** and can't do anything about it. So what's the market look like on this fine Sunday night? Not too far above these levels are the all time highs. Which way do we go? ON EDIT: The futures market (chart above) is the cash market. The S&P is the index. They trade the futures market (you need a margin account with a brokerage) so what they call the e-mini (S&P futures) is a more accurate visual of what is going on with the money than the index.

Issues with mine too. As off 10:46.

An adult wouldn't steal from us or teach us how do do so, but that horse left the barn years ago. We are at FUBAR. 🙂

A tax we don't see which will be paid by us serfs like we always do. Brilliant!

I'm sure they will fix it anytime now. 🙂 I want some of what you're smoking.

I was always a Jim Northrup fan.

The latest S&P chart porn. Up and down. Wall Street is making a killing. Not sure what's it's so happy about the last few days. The support/resistance is getting tested. Wall Street will go on stop hunts and **** the day traders.

And think of CNBC, otherwise known as Bubblevision. They still put Jim Cramer in front of a TV camera. The best in business TV they used to say.

I can feel the pain, and with something like that you know there is no way. It looks corny to have a lanyard so us old and stupid people don't lose our phones. 🙂

I have a stack of old phones. I go through one every couple of years. Not because there is anything wrong with it but because I broke it in some way - like sitting on it - or dropping it. This one was the best. I was rewiring my furnace so I have a way to plug it into an electrical outlet hooked to an inverter so I can run it if I lose power - emergency situation only. Not far from my furnace is a drain. A simple 4 inch drain in the basement floor with a little grate on top. I had the grate off because I have plugs I put in there to keep the water backing up from the sewer (during spring raining season). For some reason I had the grate off (and no plug), not sure why. While working on my furnace, my phone slipped out of my pocket, bounced nicely a couple of times and disappeared down the drain, which of course is full of water. Nice! I got it out, but since it took a swim... This is why I buy cheap phones.

Americans are holding onto devices longer than ever and it’s costing the economy That's the one you were talking about. I started reading it the other day and gave up. It is from CNBC also known as Bubblevision.

It is all fixable, but they don't want to deal with it, so it will continue to get worse until it fixes itself. That will be the great deleveraging, deflation, and demand destruction. The alternative to that is a planned deleveraging, but nobody wants to be blamed for the pain, so nothing will happen. We can see this over our lifetimes. Carlin was right in 1991 with The American Dream - you have to be asleep to believe it. That was 34 years ago. About a half a generation.

Interesting look at the costs of living put in different terms. In the end I think he's naive about the solution, if that's what he thinks it is, but interesting just the same. It Works, If You Work It. For our economy to provide a nice life for all we will need structural reform. How bad is it? This bad.

Yea, I'm with you all the way. Another, with the RV stuff, or maybe a camper, around here anyway (no lake but maybe a pond), is the campgrounds. Some are really nice. But you still have the upkeep, weeds, mowing, ect. The campgrounds do have a lot to offer, you don't get too far off the grid, even a store. I had a buddy who I've known forever who sold his house and bought a kick as motorhome and spent the winters in Arizona, and the summers here (NW Ohio). Towed his car and paid rent at two different campgrounds. Worked for them. That's choices people make and there is nothing wrong with that.

Yea, it's like upkeep on another house. One is enough (for me anyway). Speaking of the lake, one year we went to Cleveland to see the Tigers/Indians. Night game, couldn't get into the hotel until 4 so we had plenty of time to kill. We took the route 6 from Fremont to Cleveland. It goes through a bunch of small towns, but goes along the lake pretty close. What is incredible is all the homes and money you see along that trip. The amount of money on those homes and cottages, along with their docks and boats has to be a staggering number. Neat route if one has the time. Way to rich for this cowboy.

I'm about 45 minutes from the North Coast of Lake Erie in Ohio. There are tons of boats around here. There are also a ton of them for sale. I never got it either. Like you say, the season isn't very long. Then the storage, the maintenance, etc. Not for me, but I understand those who do. There are many around here that don't do the boats, but they do a "place" at the lake. Been to a few and it's nice, but once again, the season is only so long. And when it comes to a "place" at the lake - get your wallet out. Price is directly proportional to how close to the water you are. Once place I went to was expensive as hell and you couldn't even see the water. You had to walk or take the golf cart about 1/4 of a mile. That's not being at the lake.

What's the old saying; the happiest days in a boaters life is the day they buy and the day they sell. My neighbor brought a boat home once. I asked him if he bought a boat (kind of a dumb question when it's sitting in his driveway). He said, no, are you nuts? That was my next question I told him.

When you look at a map Superior is way up there (cold), and goes way West too. I find the ships fascinating. Back around the mid 80s the company I worked for built a machine for a big Ford foundry in Windsor. I went back and forth each week for about a month. Had another guy with me. Few years before he worked at the shipyards along Front St. in Toledo. He said he could get us in, and he did. The Fitz and the Anderson were not uncommon to Toledo, so they dealt with some big ass boats. The Toledo shipyards had a couple parking spots for the ships. Depending on what they were, they would place them in different positions in what would eventually become a dry dock. They would sit on huge bundles of railroad ties of different sizes to accommodate the version of ship and where it parked in the bundles of ties. Once the ship got in, they sealed it off from the Maumee river and pumped the water out. Between the two docks was a railroad track with a crane. It would lower 10 by 40 foot plates of 1" steel into the now drained out hole. Once lowered 30 to 40 ft down in the mud, it was moved into place by block and tackle by the workers in the hole. It was then welded into place. Ships run in the summer, they fix them in the winter. The pattern shop, not far way, was a huge building where they layed out scaled templates for the fab guys to repair the ships. They didn't have any windows. If it was zero outside, it was zero inside. I was there in 1986 I think. It looked like 1886.

Again NO SPOILERS I will only say this was a great read. This kinda connects. My neighbor who I grew up who was a few years older than me went in the Navy. Maybe Nam years, not sure. Out of the Navy he went to work as a merchant marine on the great lakes until he retired. He now lives in Huron, Ohio. His sister still lives in the hood about 2 blocks away. I told her I would love to see him (we have stories - been 30-40 years) and she brought him down to my party garage last year one day. Only for an hour, but it was a hoot. Next year I'm gonna get her to do it again, and I want to ask him about what it was like out there on the lakes. I'm sure he sailed it all, but it would have been after the Fitz. I wouldn't get in a row boat.

Example; the last big ticker I worked for had Vanguard. I liked them, Jack Bogle, and their thesis on investing. The problem was, I could only change it every 3 months. I was probably one of few who cared about that. If you didn't change your positions each quarter, they would put it all in their stock. Don't want that. Some of the guys there were buying the snot out of our stock because it was going up like a rocket. While they where doing this, and you did your homework, the top 10 executives who must report buy/sell had been selling the **** out of it. Ding, ding, ding. In March when they reported earning the stock shot up over $200 bucks. A month later it hit $211. Everybody was happy as a bunch of pigs in the mud. Until they weren't. Mid July, it was $142.

This is where we disagree. Timing is everything. The math is indisputable. Wall Street banks make billions of dollars because of timing the markets every quarter proven by their earnings release. That said, that doesn't necessarily apply to us. Most of us don't have the ability to manage the money we contribute to our retirement account, whatever flavor they may be, and take advantage of the market if what they they call "fiduciary duty" was what it should be. The guy you are sitting across the table at your local Edward Jones spent $75 to pass a test and now gives you lifetime investment advice. How ****ed up is that? Nothing in the world is more corrupt that Wall Street and the money behind them. It's a dog eat dog world and we are wearing dogbone underwear.

That's why this looks nuts. Since the March 2009 low to where we are today, the market (S&P) has went up 939%. Annual return (CAGR) is over 15%. They put Bernie Madoff in jail for promising 13.

When the banksters blew up the world in 2008/2009 the market went from 1550 to 666. A loss of 57% in five months. You need 133% to get it back. How long is that going to take?

This is one of the great conversations on the markets. How do you play them, how do you invest? It's the biggest casino in the world, and even more punitive. Let's look at some chart porn just for fun. This is as far back as my software can go. A chart of the S&P going back to around 1930. It is obvious, that over all those years (almost 100) the candles go from the bottom left to the top right. That's a good thing. That also makes a case that you put your money in and it goes up and up and up. Sure looks like it. How old are you? When are you planning on retiring, with enough money to live the life you want to live, and how much does that need to be? Sure, I have a 401k, I'll be fine. That's what my Edward Jones guy tells me, or my personal banker. Below is the chart porn from 1930. The yellow circle is from around 1990 to 2013ish. As you can see the run-up from the 30s until the Dot-com bubble blew up it was as good as it gets. The greatest bull market in history. If you became working age around 1940 and invested you made a killing. The next chart gets us a little closer to today. The great bull market ended on March 1, 2000 and peaked at $1552.87. By the week of October 10, 2002, it was at 768.63. We then went another 5 years to the week of October 10, 2007 when it took another ****. Isn't that wild? So from October it went from 1550 to 666. You can do the math. Same with the first one. Now look at it. Up and to the right. How long you think that is going to go on? Timing matters. There isn't much anyone can do about it, you are stuck with what is available, and most importantly, how old you are. Some are lucky, and some aren't. I know people from both crashes that had to work more years because they lost their ass in their 401ks.

They have courses to teach you. Here is one of them: 10 five minute videos to teach you what stocks to buy. Outstanding. Too bad some of the guy who spent years learning the markets, how to read balance sheets, technical analysis, and how to manage a portfolio didn't get this deal.