Investing

[Screwball]

AAPL is up about 2 1/2% and AMZN up around 13 after hours. The NASDAQ futures are up a percent. Both are trading at a 30 to 40 times earnings. 

Not a bubble.

[Tigeraholic1]

12 minutes ago, Screwball said:

AAPL is up about 2 1/2% and AMZN up around 13 after hours. The NASDAQ futures are up a percent. Both are trading at a 30 to 40 times earnings. 

Not a bubble.

Amazon just shed easily a billion in costs savings by laying off all those white collar jobs. Plus they have ZERO competition and are poised  to take over the grocery and RX game. 

Edited October 30 by Tigeraholic1

[Screwball]

3 hours ago, Tigeraholic1 said:

Amazon just shed easily a billion in costs savings by laying off all those white collar jobs. Plus they have ZERO competition and are poised  to take over the grocery and RX game. 

It is no secret on Wall Street cutting jobs make stock prices go up. I was a victim quite a few times over the years myself. As long as there is a bottom line, the next 8K, and bean counters - cutting costs will always be the plan - and people are the easiest way to do so. And in a way it should be, but usually the wrong ones.

The waste in large multi-nationals is off the charts. A lot of fat could be cut, or used in a more productive way (what a concept). It don't work that way. It is a giant cluster ****, like Office Space the movie only worse. So let's **** it up even more with AI and get rid of the people who actually helped make the trains on time. 

That's all these greedy assholes running these companies wanted anyway, a bunch of ass kissing robots. Be careful what you wish for dickheads.

[Screwball]

A little on the AI computer thing...

Had an issue with text messages on my phone. I could send and get back if it was to one person. Once there were more than one, they could get mine, but I did not get a response.  Oh, goody, here we go. I used the Microsoft Co-Pilot that comes with Windows 11.

I spent an hour trying to fix this with no luck. I then logged into my phone carrier account and tried get help there. That might have been worse than Co-pilot. Truly awful. Probably another AI bot, just worse... I ended up fixing it myself by accident. The lack of support all started out with those damn phone tree systems.

But I also noticed this. When you open Co-Pilot this is the screen. WAY at the bottom, in letters so small you need to be a piss ant to read...(I had to crop the picture because it was so close to the bottom).

Too funny

But a link to opt out. That's funny too.

Edited October 31 by Screwball

[pfife]

Thats frickin ridiculous

[Screwball]

12 hours ago, pfife said:

Thats frickin ridiculous

That's only part of the window. When you open the Co-Pilot app the first screen is not full screen, but most of it. That disclaimer is way at the bottom and very small. If you are not looking, you could miss it. I only captured part of the screen - my mistake - which makes it look bigger than it is.

[chasfh]

I don't think I have ever asked you guys anything about this before.

I have shares in a company that is connected to the administration and is considered very reprehensible. You can probably guess which one it is. (You can guess but I will not confirm either way.)

When I bought the stock, I thought of them as a good AI play, nothing more. I had no ideas about who they are or what they might engage in. Now I do.

My stake in the company has gone up by 14x (yes, that is fourteen x) in the two-plus years since I bought it and is poised to go up even more.

Ethically, I would never buy the stock today, but I already have it in hand. The question is whether I should sell out of it immediately to cut all association with them.

On the one hand, I shouldn't be supporting this company at all with my money. If my association with them entailed my giving them x amount of money every y number of time periods, then it would be an easy call: stop giving them my money. Done and done.

On the other hand, they've already gotten all the money they were ever going to get out of me over two years ago. I have not put any more money into the company, and they are not getting another penny from me anytime in the future. They already have all they're gonna get, so whether I sell today or a year from today , it will still be the same amount of money they will have gotten from me either way.

It's just that now the value of the stake I gave them my money for has exploded literally exponentially. So whether I were to sell the stock I own in them for $10,000 or $100,000 or $1,000,000, that would not change the amount I put into the company. That part is fixed and done and over with.

So, while I am loathe to claim any ownership stake in this company—such as that "ownership" is, anyway—I am leaning towards hanging onto the stock as long as it's going up so I can extract as much money out of them as I possibly can when I do sell, and I may then turn around and try to do something good with the original stake, something that's opposed to how they are helping the regime. I actually have implemented a series of trailing stop limit buys to sell it as the price drops through a series of trigger points. The price has not even threatened that first trigger, though, and the triggers keep rising with the stock price.

If any of you were in this same position, how would you handle it?

Edited Monday at 04:47 PM by chasfh

[Deleterious]

I'm calling BS on this.  I can't imagine they want to open up their books for the world to see.

If it does happen, we will be able to look back years from now and see the exact moment the top happened.  

 

[Screwball]

Oh brother. Has everything went nuts?

[gehringer_2]

2 hours ago, chasfh said:

I don't think I have ever asked you guys anything about this before.

I have shares in a company that is connected to the administration and is considered very reprehensible. You can probably guess which one it is. (You can guess but I will not confirm either way.)

When I bought the stock, I thought of them as a good AI play, nothing more. I had no ideas about who they are or what they might engage in. Now I do.

My stake in the company has gone up by 14x (yes, that is fourteen x) in the two-plus years since I bought it and is poised to go up even more.

Ethically, I would never buy the stock today, but I already have it in hand. The question is whether I should sell out of it immediately to cut all association with them.

On the one hand, I shouldn't be supporting this company at all with my money. If my association with them entailed my giving them x amount of money every y number of time periods, then it would be an easy call: stop giving them my money. Done and done.

On the other hand, they've already gotten all the money they were ever going to get out of me over two years ago. I have not put any more money into the company, and they are not getting another penny from me anytime in the future. They already have all they're gonna get, so whether I sell today or a year from today , it will still be the same amount of money they will have gotten from me either way.

It's just that now the value of the stake I gave them my money for has exploded literally exponentially. So whether I were to sell the stock I own in them for $10,000 or $100,000 or $1,000,000, that would not change the amount I put into the company. That part is fixed and done and over with.

So, while I am loathe to claim any ownership stake in this company—such as that "ownership" is, anyway—I am leaning towards hanging onto the stock as long as it's going up so I can extract as much money out of them as I possibly can when I do sell, and I may then turn around and try to do something good with the original stake, something that's opposed to how they are helping the regime. I actually have implemented a series of trailing stop limit buys to sell it as the price drops through a series of trigger points. The price has not even threatened that first trigger, though, and the triggers keep rising with the stock price.

If any of you were in this same position, how would you handle it?

I think you are correct. You are not in any way supporting the company at this point as long as you don't buy more shares and make a contribution (even if minuscule) to bidding up the price. Resolve to yourself to tithe (or whatever part) the rest of your profits on it to some good cause and let the man contribute to some good in the world he probably wouldn't.

Edited Monday at 07:19 PM by gehringer_2

[Deleterious]

Shame they can't run their F1 team as well as they run their car company.

 

[ewsieg]

On 10/30/2025 at 7:18 PM, Tigeraholic1 said:

Amazon just shed easily a billion in costs savings by laying off all those white collar jobs. Plus they have ZERO competition and are poised  to take over the grocery and RX game. 

My brother was just telling me about a use case he was walking through regarding a competitor (kind of, same business, but they don't operate in the same region).  This company used AI to eliminate a ton of jobs in the end of Q2.  They already have publicly acknowledged with Q3 results they expect to blow past their original budget numbers due to so many mistakes on the backend which are much more costly to correct now.  

Anyone that uses AI to save money right now probably shouldn't spend it quite yet.

[chasfh]

Speaking of my reprehensible stock: it came within a dollar of triggering the first trailing stop limit sell order today.

I set the triggers at 11%, 16%, 21%, 26%, 31%, and 36% versus the high price since I placed the orders last week. If the stock ever drops 36% from its high, I will be out completely. Considering the meme nature of the stock, that's probably not unlikely. (It might seem stupid to set a trailing stop at 36%, but even once that one triggers, I will still have bagged something like a 15x gain alone on that lot.)

But you may have noticed that I set the triggers on the ones and sixes and not on the zeroes and fives. I did so purposely to evade the algorithms that sell off en masse until the drop reaches a certain percentage from its high, at which point they turn around and start buying it back en masse.

It happened a few months ago when the stock dropped from its high 25.0% practically on the dot, then immediately turned around and it's been above that level ever since.

The turnaround wasn't quite that precise today—the stock dropped 10.5% from its high before turning around—but instead of selling because I had it trailing stop at 10%, it held because I had the trailing stop at 11%.

So now I have a chance to enjoy a run up above the current high price the triggers are pegged to, if it happens. And if it doesn't, the stock will sell off at the exact same level I have it at right now once the price drops past it.

 

 

[Screwball]

4 hours ago, ewsieg said:

My brother was just telling me about a use case he was walking through regarding a competitor (kind of, same business, but they don't operate in the same region).  This company used AI to eliminate a ton of jobs in the end of Q2.  They already have publicly acknowledged with Q3 results they expect to blow past their original budget numbers due to so many mistakes on the backend which are much more costly to correct now.  

Anyone that uses AI to save money right now probably shouldn't spend it quite yet.

Interesting.

As someone who lived in the belly of the corporate beast, dealing with budgets, and corporate bean counter mentality...This is all Enron accounting. Unrealized gains. Profits promised in the future.

The current AI bubble is a perfect example. Those who studied or lived through the past have already watched this movie. It doesn't end well.

[Screwball]

I would have pulled the rip cord and ran off with the money long ago.

I don't get all the stops. You only need one. 36% probably shouldn't be one of them. If the position loses 36% your gonna need around 56% to the upside to get it back.

But since we have a endless supply of money printing you might be good.

[ewsieg]

17 minutes ago, Screwball said:

Those who studied or lived through the past have already watched this movie. It doesn't end well.

You're just overreacting </WorldCom employee who went to work on a midnight shift the day the accounting scandal was reported and watched our stock shrink to nothing (first time I learned stock could still go up and down outside of Wall Street hours) while his boss huddled up with other mgmt in a conference room at 4am and came out with nothing more than 'folks, business as usual, you're all expected to be hear on your next scheduled day, and we'll be able to answer questions soon'.>  

[Screwball]

7 minutes ago, ewsieg said:

You're just overreacting </WorldCom employee who went to work on a midnight shift the day the accounting scandal was reported and watched our stock shrink to nothing (first time I learned stock could still go up and down outside of Wall Street hours) while his boss huddled up with other mgmt in a conference room at 4am and came out with nothing more than 'folks, business as usual, you're all expected to be hear on your next scheduled day, and we'll be able to answer questions soon'.>  

I read all the Enron books along with all the Wall Street scandals. The phone stuff was wild too. Grubman name rings a bell. He was a Wall Street analyst. It was all about booking **** in the future - creative accounting - add in Arthur Anderson. At least some went to jail over that ****.

We have a high dollar college in town and one of the Alumni started and sponsored a speaking thing about 6 times a year. We got free tickets to see Sherron Watson speak at one of the first ones. She was great. I can't imagine sitting next to Jeff Skilling and the other corporate goons spilling her beans in front of congress. She had some nads...

Edited Wednesday at 02:20 AM by Screwball

[Screwball]

I had to look back into history.

From Wiki on Jack Grubman;

Jack Grubman

Link to Amazon book;

Confessions of a Wall Street Analyst: A True Story of Inside Information and Corruption in the Stock Market

This is a really good read.

[Deleterious]

One of the GOAT traders is retiring.  Pelosi will not seek reelection.  

[Screwball]

1 hour ago, Deleterious said:

One of the GOAT traders is retiring.  Pelosi will not seek reelection.  

They should erect a statue of her along side the big bull out in front of the exchange. Maybe something like Lady Justice riding a broom.

[Tigeraholic1]

1 hour ago, Screwball said:

They should erect a statue of her along side the big bull out in front of the exchange. Maybe something like Lady Justice riding a broom.

She is just a savy day trader ergggh politician.

[Screwball]

37 minutes ago, Tigeraholic1 said:

She is just a savy day trader ergggh politician.

There are some heartbroken traders out there no doubt. She was quite the Jesse Livermore and had quite a few followers, and this is only a few.

[Screwball]

Maybe now they can get a bill through congress to stop insider trading. They don't need one I wouldn't think, since it's already illegal... But laws don't matter to those pukes so give it a shot. We'll see who has a thimble full of integrity. I would take the odds it never passes. 

[Screwball]

[Screwball]

That image was actually AI generated. I used Twitters Grok. First, I asked if it could make an image. Yes, what do you want? I explained, and about 30 seconds later it gave me a choice of two. Wouldn't me and Grok have copyright rights? Giggle. For fun, I said thanks, and it asked if I wanted to add confetti.

The world has went mad.