Investing

[Screwball]

Issues with mine too. As off 10:46.

[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.

 

Edited Monday at 02:11 AM by Screwball

[Deleterious]

He is nominating Screwball for Fed Chair.

 

[Screwball]

26 minutes ago, Deleterious said:

He is nominating Screwball for Fed Chair.

 

I would make Paul Volcker look like a piker. 🙂 There would also be an immediate market crash. 

I have not followed close, but odds of another cut next week? Looks so. The news tomorrow might be the Hassett guy for the next Fed chair starting in Feb?, a dove who wants to lower rates. He's only one vote, but they work for the bankers so it don't matter anyway. He's just the head of the bull**** machine.

I don't know that the Fed deserves as much blame as they get, given congress has to spend the money to be monetized. At the same time, they are a bunch of bull**** artists presented as experts. I worked with a guy who's son worked for the Richmond Fed. He told me about some of the research projects he worked on. They really do good stuff when if comes to collecting data, but they have proven to be quite inept at their two mandates. 

If the economic numbers, which they have, were properly evaluated, they tell a much different story than the numbers the Fed uses to make their decisions. They should know that - and they do - and don't care. 

[Screwball]

Speaking of Paul Volcker, I watched some old clips of him in front of congress years ago. It wasn't pretty, or fair. He made them look like fools. Dude was a smart guy. There isn't too many people who could carry his jock strap.

Another was in 2010/2011 after the banksters blew up the world (in 2008/2009) and congress decided to bring them all in to explain. From Jamie Dimon of JPM, Lloyd Blankeinn of GS, on down the list of about 8 CEO's of Wall Street's largest banks. Hilarity ensued. The banksters exposed these idiots for the worthless frauds they were, and it wasn't even close.

A Robinhood day trader could have asked better questions. And of course, if by chance, one of them did (and some (not many) ARE capable) they get shut down pronto - because we can't have that.

Edited Tuesday at 03:56 AM by Screwball

[Deleterious]

 

[Screwball]

Another interesting chart. Incoming chart porn. I'm not sure what's driving this. Silver is on a real tear, especially since the low back on September 4th of $41.065. Hit a high of $59.47 earlier tonight, but has given back a touch of that.

A three month rip of about %45. Cha-ching!

Compared with gold (purple line). 

They usually trade similar. I wonder if some of this money is coming from crypto?

 

[Deleterious]

What?

YouTube star MrBeast is moving into financial services

[Screwball]

OK, I'm going to admit stupid here, but I've never heard of this guy. I read the one article and tried to make sense out of it, this paragraph caught my eye;

Quote

The trademark application aligns with a 2025 fundraising pitch deck that outlined plans to expand into fintech, which was viewed by Business Insider. That deck described customized offerings that would target MrBeast's audience, supported by financial literacy content. The deck listed nine potential offerings, including student loans, insurance, and credit insights. It said the company would launch by partnering with a fintech company to leverage its existing infrastructure "while avoiding regulatory, credit risk, and capital requirement."

There is more but not much makes any sense to me. Does he sell cars too?

[gehringer_2]

4 minutes ago, Screwball said:

OK, I'm going to admit stupid here, but I've never heard of this guy. I read the one article and tried to make sense out of it, this paragraph caught my eye;

There is more but not much makes any sense to me. Does he sell cars too?

that part that caught my eye was $400M in income but losing money because it doesn't cover his hosting costs. It seem like this is an era of trying to deny limits - whether it's Tesla, Nvidia or NCAA football or this guy hawking utubes, no-one wants to hear that there is a limit of how much of anything you can sell. But there always is, no matter how big or long the party runs before the end. 

[Deleterious]

It's becoming a pretty standard play for the big social media moguls.  Build up a huge audience and then start putting your face/name on products and push them to your fans.  Mr Beast has toys, food/snacks, and now financial services, I guess.  He has 450 million subscribers on his YT channel.  If he converts 5-10% of them, he will make a lot of money.

Selena Gomez has over 200 million followers on IG.  Most are young girls/women so she starts a beauty company and is now a billionaire.  Hailey Bieber just sold her makeup company for a billion dollars.  All the Kardashians push products and Kim is a billionaire.  

[Edman85]

7 hours ago, Deleterious said:

What?

YouTube star MrBeast is moving into financial services

This should go about as well as HawkTuah Coin.

[Screwball]

11 hours ago, Deleterious said:

It's becoming a pretty standard play for the big social media moguls.  Build up a huge audience and then start putting your face/name on products and push them to your fans.  Mr Beast has toys, food/snacks, and now financial services, I guess.  He has 450 million subscribers on his YT channel.  If he converts 5-10% of them, he will make a lot of money.

Selena Gomez has over 200 million followers on IG.  Most are young girls/women so she starts a beauty company and is now a billionaire.  Hailey Bieber just sold her makeup company for a billion dollars.  All the Kardashians push products and Kim is a billionaire.  

Thanks. I had no idea this kind of stuff was going on. Selena Gomez - 2 million followers? I don't even know who she is. That might be a good thing. What a world.

[Screwball]

MIT study finds AI can already replace 11.7% of U.S. workforce

Maybe the 11.7% can start a youtube channel or a financial services company and get rich. 😉 

[Deleterious]

I get nervous when they start talking about a time crunch.  

'TIME IS OF THE ESSENCE' | Whitmer supports Michigan's biggest investment ever: Multi-billion dollar AI data center

Also pretty skeptical on this claim.

Quote

Whitmer said DTE Energy already supplies the power the facility needs and that Oracle will fund any additional grid upgrades without raising rates for existing customers.

They project about 2,000 permanent jobs.  450 on site and 1,500 additional jobs throughout the county.  

[Deleterious]

We are running into our first problem with AI.

We noticed across all of our websites that we are losing clicks from Google.  Down 25%-35% depending on which site.  Business is good, so it didn't make sense.  But someone figured out people are no longer going to Google to get restaurant suggestions.  They are opening up their favorite AI and asking it where to eat out.  That is a problem because we know how to manipulate Google to remain high in their search results.  We have no clue how to manipulate AI.  

[gehringer_2]

3 hours ago, Deleterious said:

I get nervous when they start talking about a time crunch.  

Yup. Number one tactic of someone selling something that isn't necessarily what it's cracked up to be is reduce the available evaluation/decision time.

[gehringer_2]

3 hours ago, Deleterious said:

We are running into our first problem with AI.

We noticed across all of our websites that we are losing clicks from Google.  Down 25%-35% depending on which site.  Business is good, so it didn't make sense.  But someone figured out people are no longer going to Google to get restaurant suggestions.  They are opening up their favorite AI and asking it where to eat out.  That is a problem because we know how to manipulate Google to remain high in their search results.  We have no clue how to manipulate AI.  

Every system can be gamed - it's  just a matter of deciding if the effort is worth it. 😉

 

[oblong]

I used ChatGPT in San Diego when I wanted to go to a brewery but also a place with decent enough food for non drinkers including a 78 year old aunt and a comfortable setting.  It worked.  The follow up questions were concise and on Target. It does what Google did 15 years ago. 

[gehringer_2]

48 minutes ago, oblong said:

I used ChatGPT in San Diego when I wanted to go to a brewery but also a place with decent enough food for non drinkers including a 78 year old aunt and a comfortable setting.  It worked.  The follow up questions were concise and on Target. It does what Google did 15 years ago. 

LOL - this. It's like one thing AI is doing out at the public level is working for people who never figured out how to frame successful queries to the existing search engines. There is value in that - it does take a certain level of experience with digital data to have a sense of how to narrow a search to get to what you actually want. If AI does that for people that's something.

[Screwball]

I'm sure everyone has noticed this who has played with it. It seems to me, you get the best results when you give it as much information as you can up front. That said, it also seems, some things they/it will do very well with, other things, not so much.

On the downside, I was reading an article today about how this changes our educational system. It's really easy to ask HAL what percentage change is X to Y. No need to understand the math.

That's part of the reason I quit teaching last June.

[Screwball]

4 hours ago, gehringer_2 said:

Every system can be gamed - it's  just a matter of deciding if the effort is worth it. 😉

 

I'm not sure anymore. I told my buddy a year ago I am now owned by Google and Amazon. I have no privacy, none, zero. They know more about us than we do. There are companies traded on the NY stock exchange who make money by data mining our ****.

1984 wasn't suppose to be an instruction manual. I worked in and with IT since we had IT and you could see where it was all going to go as it progressed via the technology. So did crazy Teddy. 🙂

[oblong]

2 hours ago, gehringer_2 said:

LOL - this. It's like one thing AI is doing out at the public level is working for people who never figured out how to frame successful queries to the existing search engines. There is value in that - it does take a certain level of experience with digital data to have a sense of how to narrow a search to get to what you actually want. If AI does that for people that's something.

It was a Sunday and my first choice was closed. It was the night Skubal pitched on Sunday Night Baseball against Texas.  I met a guy from Livonia who moved to Phoenix and goes to SD a lot.  He said it’s a popular destination for folks there.  
 

we stayed near the ocean and had plenty of places to pick from that we could walk to and are not terribly picky.  It’s more about compatibility for our son. (No small places, that kind of thing).  But it was exhausting after a few days using Google to do a small amount of research. I’m on vacation. I don’t want to spend more time on my phone than i have to. So on Sunday my wife said “I know you want to go to a brewery”.  It only took about a minute overall.  Just wanted a relatively decent variety of food options beyond something thrown into a deep fryer out of a box from Sysco or Gordon’s.  I understand it’s a brewery. The beer also had to be good. Settled on Ballast Point.    I told the staff AI said they were the best option.  

[Deleterious]

 

[gehringer_2]

7 minutes ago, Deleterious said:

 

Headline seems backward though - I would read it to say Warner is splitting off the studio then being bought, but it appears to be the opposite, Netflix is buying the studio and the cable ops get thrown overboard, which makes more sense.