Investing

[Tigeraholic1]

14 hours ago, Screwball said:

Interesting chart porn of the day. Silver must be the new tulips. What a ride. First chart a 3 year by week. The horizontal yellow lines go back 5 years ago. Nothing related to today. Haven't looked at the chart for quite a while.

As you can see it didn't do much for quite a while, then went up a bit in April/June of 24 until April of 25 and took a ****. Then went nuts. Looks like a hockey stick. A closer look;

I'm not sure what's going on here. Is it a tulip thing or... Silver needed for data chips?

On the other side of the coin (no pun intended) one would think the ass kicking winter has already brought us would drive the price of Natty Gas up, no? Well, it kinda did, but what's going here the last few days or week?

Looks like a gap to get filled there too.

Yes, sliver is used in many industrial applications.

[Screwball]

The pot stocks are flying today, some up 30-40%.  Most are small caps so they trade like a penny stock so you can make a killing - and get your face ripped off as well.

Silver is taking a breather so far today, down almost 5%. Gold down a little but gave up quite a bit from open. I'm kinda with this guy;

This probably has something to do with it, especially recently. 3 month chart by day of the dollar index. The metals usually trade inverse to the dollar index;

[gehringer_2]

11 of 12 Fed Rev Presidents reappointed. Powell might be on his way out but it's business as usual for the system.

[Screwball]

Well, you have people like Neel Kashkari and Austan D. Goolsbee on the FOMC, but I don't think Neel (cabin a woods or some sort of horse****) Kashkari has a vote right now. Goolsbee is a ghoul and FOS up to his ears.

Neel... I remember people defending that little creep back during TARP days. Spit!

[Deleterious]

Whoa.

 

[Screwball]

EV investments. Needs infrastructure to scale. Don't forget the crypto mining uses uses lots one may never consider. Add the data centers and the demand that comes along with them. Remember the "going green" push to use renewables and new tech for power? How long will it take to scale, if it can?

Tracking electricity consumption from U.S. cryptocurrency mining operations - from the eia.gov

How Much Additional Power Will Data Centers Need by 2035?

Crypto is a small percentage but I would guess location may matter for a grid.

Edited Tuesday at 01:14 AM by Screwball

[gehringer_2]

38 minutes ago, Screwball said:

Don't forget the crypto mining uses uses lots

Europe came close a couple of years ago but backed away from banning the so called 'proof-of-work' system of Bitcoin's which is what sucks so much power. It may yet happen though.

[Screwball]

Funny, from that EIA report:

Quote

Electricity demand associated with U.S. cryptocurrency mining operations in the United States has grown very rapidly over the last several years. Our preliminary estimates suggest that annual electricity use from cryptocurrency mining probably represents from 0.6% to 2.3% of U.S. electricity consumption.

I had a little AI conversation with my Aussie buddy. What kind of numbers are we talking about. Somewhere between .6 to 2.3 percent of US annual usage according to that EIA report. How much is that and what does it to?

That sounds nuts, but that's what it says.

 

 

Edited Tuesday at 04:53 AM by Screwball

[Deleterious]

When billionaires day drink.

 

[Deleterious]

They cant get memory for it.

 

[Tigermojo]

29 minutes ago, Deleterious said:

When billionaires day drink.

 

 

[Deleterious]

 

[Screwball]

4 hours ago, Deleterious said:

When billionaires day drink.

 

A fine line between a genius and an idiot... If Space X IPO's at some point, he might be our first trillionaire.

[Screwball]

How about some chart porn. First the S&P. Since the recent highs from interest rate euphoria the S&P is now back inside that long candle from back on October 10. Yellow arrow are the rate cuts.

And then there is this one - Silver.

The June 24th bubble at $35.195 to today at $67.18. What a ride! That's almost a double in 7 months. 

[Deleterious]

They might be the first ones to pop.  One of the companies loaning money for data centers turned Oracle down today due to high debt load.

 

[Screwball]

Yea, let's take a peek a some of them. First ORCL

How about NVDA

The MAGS ETF is holding up, but a big red candle today;

They are suppose to go from the bottom left to the top right...

 

[gehringer_2]

42 minutes ago, Screwball said:

They are suppose to go from the bottom left to the top right...

 

[Deleterious]

This is what I mentioned earlier.  I didn't realize it was a Michigan data center, though.  I swear, we must have 50 different proposed data centers in this state.

 

[Deleterious]

They were missing some data due to the shutdown.

 

[Deleterious]

Pretty crazy.  

 

[Screwball]

That has been going on for quite some time. I can only imagine how far it has come today (I've been retired for over 6 years). If you can automate a process and eliminate people, they will. I'll give you a couple of examples.

1) I worked for a tire company. I was in the mold division. We made the tire molds that made the tires. They were made out of aluminum (sometimes steel but those were different animals). Our raw material was a big round piece of aluminum. It was a large ring. It would come in on a truck and the shop guys would mount it on a large plate. From there it was turned, shaped, and machined with boring machines and 5 axis CNC machines. Once mounted to the plate it was never touched again by human hands until the final assembly and  placed in a shipping box. This was going on in the early 2000s.

2) Assembly plant. This one happened to be washing machines. This is where the automation really pays off. Any repetitive task is target for automation, robots, whatever. They have X amount of assembly lines with workers adding parts at various stations along the line that might be a quarter of a mile long (or longer). The parts come from a warehouse on little trains pulled by a little truck like vehicle. The truck would pull 4 or 5 wagons behind it full of parts. They would go from the warehouse to the proper line, and proper line station, get emptied by a person, then return for more parts at the warehouse. This went on all day every day. There were dozens of these things all over the plant. They were driven by a person.

Not anymore. They put something in the floor so the train could follow because they put sensors under the train. The sensors followed the path in the floor. The slowed them way down for safety. You could walk faster than the train but they never stopped except when unloaded and loaded. This eliminated every train driver for each train for each shift (3 a day 7 days a week). This was over 10 years ago. That was by far not the only push for automation. Anything and everything that could be automated will be automated, period.

The rest of the story, and kind of funny. The workers could see the future and what this automation/robotic push was going to do. So the natural thing for them, and maybe the only way to fight back, was to sabotage the automation. By accident, they found out a simple bag of potato chips could stop a train. Turns out, a bag of chips bought out of the vending machine had a reflective (silver looking) inside. Guessing it was to help keep light out of the bag. An empty bag of chips with the bag fully open sitting in the aisle where the train ran would make it stop. The reflecting bag messed up the optics of the robot sensor and it would stop dead in the aisle. They would have to call maintenance or someone to come fix it and send the little guy on it's way again. In that world the LAST thing you want to do it stop the line.

One day I was there and the process guy told me they had to tell the vending machine people to remove all the potato chips from the vending machines because it was causing too many line shutdowns. Too funny - take that automation.

Edited 13 hours ago by Screwball