Looking for new investment options? Well, here’s an opportunity that you won’t wanna miss!
The ETFs will be America First themed, the company said, adding that all the ETFs under the brand will be collectively known as the “Truth Social Funds.”
My got. The amount of money he’s fleeced from his faithful through crypto, memes, and NFTs is already staggering.
Surely the SEC will make sure these are reasonable and well run?
I went to a retirement seminar last night put on by one of those financial firms that specializes in retirement planning. Mainly for the free dinner 
but I thought I’d see if they had anything useful to say.
The seminar was fine, but the questions from the attendees (mostly older people, as you might expect) were just asinine. At least four people asked breathless questions about these “new investment options.” And how cryptocurrencies (especially the one “backed by the President” 
) fit into retirement planning. 
These cultists just can’t wait to be fleeced…
Yeah, regular people have no business investing in private equity or lending. I’ve worked for PE and have seen how the sausage is made. It’s great if you’re one of the billionaires with class A ownership. But I’ve seen employees get screwed when “allowed in” out of the goodness of the PE shops heart.
So we shut down the government and we revise the job numbers that were expected to be +50k down into the negative. So of course the market soars.
Tesla is of course going to $1000 to make it the most valuable company in the world despite no good news in years. At this point I’m barely paying attention but I guess it has something to do with Elon propping up the stock’s value by taking out loans (with tesla stock as collateral) for billions to buy more tesla stock with so that the price is driven up andhis stocks are more valuable so that Tesla pays him more money (his pay package is based on stock price). Some sort of crazy infinite money glitch where rich guys can just make their own assets more valuable by buying more of it, and then companies that are only rich because of the value of that stock then pays the guy for making its stock value so high with the value of the stock he made high. I’m not sure if I said that right, but the whole fucking thing is nonsense anyway.
Seems like the sort of thing a regulator should shut right down, but we don’t have that sort of thing anymore in this country.
Market is at an all time high but I think that’s deceptive – the value of the dollar is crashing, and so the ratio of dollars to stocks changes. Like if the dollar’s fell by half overnight then in theory all stocks would double in nominal value, not because they’re actually worth more, but they’re worth the same and the dollar is worth less. I think a lot of the apparent gains over the last few months have been of this variety.
Fundamentally I don’t think anything has changed with our bad economic policy going to inevitable lead to some sort of crash. I still think it’s Wile-e-coyote running far off the cliff and not falling until he looks down. And the longer we keep running off the cliff before we finally look down, the worse the fall is going to be. The market can just run on the wishes of investors until reality slams it back into place and we’re going to have one of the great “once in a generation” crashes.
But what the hell do I know, none of it makes any sense.
I tried to predict when the market would crash and failed and lost a lot on that. I ended up buying a bunch of gold under the assumption that the declining dollar and economic uncertainty would cause its value to rise and it is up about 25% since I bought in a few months ago. There would’ve been better investments but at least that’s working out okay. The other half is in European defense stocks which have cooled since their big gains but are still mostly steadily gaining. To be honest I tuned out since my big play when the economic policy went crazy and it seemed completely logical and inevitable that the market would crash and none of that shit happened. Since none of it makes any sense to me I’m not terribly interested in playing the game.
Retired, so naturally a bit conservative, but in the last couple months I’ve had ~50% of my stuff in cashish/bondish ETFs waiting for a big pullback…and I’ve been missing out on a lot of growth. Hurts my feelings, but still probably the most sane thing to do.
I said the same thing to my wife this morning: Everything’s a disaster, economy is softening, the government is bonkers, so hey, let’s have some new record closes.
This actually scares the shit out of me, because I’m so close to retiring that one of those big corrections with 5-7 years to get back here will really screw with my plans.
I will say, upthread I noted that I’d moved a chunk into a European index fund after being out of international for a long time and that has done very well, and that looks very sustainable.
Do you mind sharing the name of that fund? I’m considering doing the same, so I’d appreciate any tips!
Of course not. It’s VGK. Europe didn’t have the same insane returns over the past five years, so that’s why it feels more sustainable to me. When Europe started allocating more for defense and infrastructure spending it really started to do well. I moved maybe 5% there, wish I had done more. As I deploy new money I’m focusing there and US small and mid caps because they too haven’t had the ride the S&P 500 has. Started this around liberation day and can’t complain.
That said, I’m still probably 60% in the 500 so a little nervous.
I’d recommend IPKW for a European fund (not index, but managed by a simple ruleset like an index).
Thanks, both of you!
A mixed bag for me in US stocks over the last couple of months. RocketLab’s jumped up enough again to make me consider some profit-taking. And I have a few biotech stocks that are also doing well for sensible reasons (e.g. positive clinical trials). Balance that against United Health which has plummeted: a worsening medical cost ratio is eroding margins.
I recently rebalanced slightly more toward Australian stocks as a precaution for this very reason (shutdown/US debt) and I’m not seeing any reason to regret the strategy.
Just wondering peoples’ thoughts on something:
I read something recently comparing the current “bubble*” with the Mag 7 to the Nifty Fifty bubble of the early 70s. The Nifty Fifty were so-called because their dominance meant they could “never fail” (notably, Sears, Xerox, Polaroid, and a few other has-beens are on that list)
In short, people piled into these, driving their PEs to an average across the 50 of 42 with some around 90. Those 50 had a market cap equal to about 50% of the S&P 500. When the pop came, it was devastating and took 8 years to fully recover.
I was approximately a fetus when this happened, so it wasn’t an event I was aware of.
*I suppose it isn’t technically a bubble until it pops.
There was a bit of bad timing with the N50. Namely a bunch of them were about to be kneecapped by technological or social change at a time when the share price was soaring and although “shareholder value” wasn’t quite the watchword yet, management was certainly in a self-congratulatory mode over the share price runup their business genius (yeah right) had engineered. And hence maybe they weren’t watching the revenue numbers quite so much as they should have.
So take a look at the current Mag 7 and ask yourself if some or all of them are likely to have their revenue kneecapped soon by [something(s)]. I’m thinking a serious war involving serious amounts of US involvement. Maybe what amounts to Civil War II starting in this country as the current government goes openly violently authoritarian and some appreciable fraction of the public rebels. Somebody else comes up with an AI that really works and for a lot less energy & hardware cost. The public tires of staring at their phones all day. No, strike that one; not plausible. 
Some big AGW-driven event that actually truly chastens everyone, a bit like everyone went all hushed and somber after 9/11 and thereby launched a needless recession. etc.
That particular bubble is new to me, but it certainly sounds similar to the whole FANG/index tracking craze of recent times.
It’s always nice to grow your money and joining a craze at the right time - and then exiting at the right time - is certain to be the fastest way to do that. But I’m, personally, happy with buying something solid and sticking with it, making any reasonable return better than real estate price growth. (Doing even better than that is, of course, even better.)