"Birds born in a cage think flying is an illness." - Alejandro Jodorowsky
"America is not so much a nightmare as a non-dream. The American non-dream is precisely a move to wipe the dream out of existence. The dream is a spontaneous happening and therefore dangerous to a control system set up by the non-dreamers." -- William S. Burroughs
don’t spend much time on reddit. Just a time allocation issue not an editorial.
A week ago at 2AM I hit reddit and on the front page “live right now” was a 24 year old kid walking down the road in a Nigerian village with a gerry jug in his hand.
He was on his way to get “petrol“ from the gas station down the street. He just got a new phone and had some time to kill. He just walked and talked answering questions from chat too. Girls, drugs, rap, Covid.
It was 8AM in Nigeria and folks were headed to work. 3-up on a motorcycle. Roads were dusty and in poor repair.
So the kid was a software developer. Power was out in the village and he needed gas for his generator. He had a certification test that morning. Parenthetically, he claimed 5G was everywhere in Nigeria.
He spoke excellent English. Grammatically correct. Knew all our idioms. Pop culture. Was funny and self effacing. One of the most impactful things I have ever seen on the Internet. Not kidding. Still processing what I watched. I wish I could find it again. Not practiced at navigating reddit.
I have a grand unifying theory regarding remote work. I have offered it before here. It states that remote work is going to accelerate the presence of the foreign work force. If you are working remote, particularly in tech you are experiencing a good news bad news development. There exist worldwide bright educated kids who will work cheap.
I don’t share my negativity with my kids. My tech daughter, the Tony Hseih alumn, hit the lottery. She thinks. She’s coding on some hill in Colorado now. She needs to save every freaking penny cause the gravy train ain’t gonna last for long.
Her father is going to go broke so she better not count on me. #2021_national_shutdown
Covid massively accelerated a shift in the landscape of the intellectual work force that was going to mimic the blue collar changes.
Tell me I’m wrong Sonatine.
Last edited by Sanlmar; 01-12-2021 at 01:06 PM.
im kinda with your daughter here; i dont think remote work is going anywhere, and i dont think anyones coming for coding jobs, and i think by the time someone _does_ come for coding jobs the solution will be AI based, not foreign labor based, and we will have UBI taxing the shit out of it.
regarding our nigerian friend coming for her job, its been my experience that hes probably going to end up on fiverr writing hacky C# for $20 a day which is going to make him more or less a millionaire in a week, relatively speaking. or he will end up working for startups for pennies on the dollar plus equity. its a curious reality; visa shit is a pain in the fucking ass and costs money by way of cycles / paperwork to deal with. larger, more stable, more funded orgs will always prefer locals. not just because of the savings but also because they can be vetted more easily. i remember working with an israeli dba early on in the 90s and he was fucking great at his job and one day he vanished and the boss was like sigh yeah he got called up for military service. i mean they probably spent 3 months of his salary just to get him legally hired and in 6 months he had to bounce. its something you deal with in this line of work but the person who replaced him was local.
re covid... the crazy thing is that covid hasnt changed my work lifestyle at all, its only legitimized it. my friends do what i do now. albeit from apartments. so in typical fashion your daughter has seized the day and positioned herself to make the absolute most of the incumbent normal.
id suggest she take the pepsi challenge and get some solar / battery set up and some form of hotspot eg google fi or some established satellite solution because when the entire team is out because rolling brownouts are suddenly national not regional, they are going to notice her bopping around the work slack getting shit done while everyone else is busy filling their bathtubs with water 'just in case', and thats a Good Look.
"Birds born in a cage think flying is an illness." - Alejandro Jodorowsky
"America is not so much a nightmare as a non-dream. The American non-dream is precisely a move to wipe the dream out of existence. The dream is a spontaneous happening and therefore dangerous to a control system set up by the non-dreamers." -- William S. Burroughs
also not for nothing but i think we might see one of those heart-rises-into-throat moment drop across the board real soon.
"Birds born in a cage think flying is an illness." - Alejandro Jodorowsky
"America is not so much a nightmare as a non-dream. The American non-dream is precisely a move to wipe the dream out of existence. The dream is a spontaneous happening and therefore dangerous to a control system set up by the non-dreamers." -- William S. Burroughs
I hear your words Sonatine. I shall accept them for now.
Honestly, I will not completely abandon the idea. It will lurk looking for confirmation.
Maybe we get rinsed market wise. Maybe bonds tick up and some fool questions multiples. Maybe that’s a narrative they plant just before trillions wash down upon our fair land. You know where that money ends up.
There is a ski area in Maine called Shawnee Peak. The trails were carved during the Depression by the Roosevelt WPA. The goal was to provide 100 jobs for the locals. I like this story.
People see the letters L O V made out by the trails.
Well, that seemed a more productive use of capital than what we are doing now. It’s the age of free money for the well-heeled.
Druff is gonna scare you with stories of increased taxes. Let’s see. Gonna run the presses and simultaneously remove money from circulation. That isn’t likely for a while.
I can out random anyone. Try me.
there are much, much worse things than high taxes, my bracket has a lot of flex there. as long as they dont start fucking around with lower/middle class income, im ok with it. the one overwhelming concern i do have is that they fuck up their legislation on HFT taxes per transaction and somehow it impacts options traders.
"Birds born in a cage think flying is an illness." - Alejandro Jodorowsky
"America is not so much a nightmare as a non-dream. The American non-dream is precisely a move to wipe the dream out of existence. The dream is a spontaneous happening and therefore dangerous to a control system set up by the non-dreamers." -- William S. Burroughs
cap gains structure is fine as is imo. I would however like to see an independent wealth tax a la warren’s previous proposal.
SHAK up 20% in the last 2 days.
pop quiz how many times in your entire fucking life have you actually eaten Shake Shack?
"Birds born in a cage think flying is an illness." - Alejandro Jodorowsky
"America is not so much a nightmare as a non-dream. The American non-dream is precisely a move to wipe the dream out of existence. The dream is a spontaneous happening and therefore dangerous to a control system set up by the non-dreamers." -- William S. Burroughs
"Birds born in a cage think flying is an illness." - Alejandro Jodorowsky
"America is not so much a nightmare as a non-dream. The American non-dream is precisely a move to wipe the dream out of existence. The dream is a spontaneous happening and therefore dangerous to a control system set up by the non-dreamers." -- William S. Burroughs
Ni Hao, wealthy Chinaman!
"Birds born in a cage think flying is an illness." - Alejandro Jodorowsky
"America is not so much a nightmare as a non-dream. The American non-dream is precisely a move to wipe the dream out of existence. The dream is a spontaneous happening and therefore dangerous to a control system set up by the non-dreamers." -- William S. Burroughs
Jeremy Grantham: “The long, long bull market since 2009 has finally matured into a fully-fledged epic bubble. Featuring extreme overvaluation, explosive price increases, frenzied issuance, and hysterically speculative investor behavior, I believe this event will be recorded as one of the great bubbles of financial history, right along with the South Sea bubble, 1929, and 2000. These great bubbles are where fortunes are made and lost – and where investors truly prove their mettle. For positioning a portfolio to avoid the worst pain of a major bubble breaking is likely the most difficult part. Every career incentive in the industry and every fault of individual human psychology will work toward sucking investors in. But this bubble will burst in due time, no matter how hard the Fed tries to support it, with consequent damaging effects on the economy and on portfolios. Make no mistake – for the majority of investors today, this could very well be the most important event of your investing lives. Speaking as an old student and historian of markets, it is intellectually exciting and terrifying at the same time. It is a privilege to ride through a market like this one more time.” (via The New York Times Sunday Magazine, gmo.com)
Jim Simons just stepped down from Renaissance.
"Birds born in a cage think flying is an illness." - Alejandro Jodorowsky
"America is not so much a nightmare as a non-dream. The American non-dream is precisely a move to wipe the dream out of existence. The dream is a spontaneous happening and therefore dangerous to a control system set up by the non-dreamers." -- William S. Burroughs
Been riding the Peloton train for a while and still bullish long term but now that my gains are long term starting to scale back my position some as this price is nuts and over 5X in a year is mostly dumb luck and well never look a gift horse in the mouth etc.
Tesla cars are cat killers- https://amp.tmz.com/2021/01/15/jamie...mpression=true
pure, just so motherfucking pure...
While there were plenty of fireworks in the market today, mostly launched by the reddit/WSB/robinhood daytrading crowd who successfully sparked a historic short squeeze and ramped the most shorted stocks on Monday to the point that they brought a respected hedge fund, Melvin Capital (run by a former SAC portfolio manager) to the verge of collapse and only a $2.75 billion bailout from Ken Griffin and Steve Cohen avoided the biggest hedge fund margin call since LTCM, a more sinister risk-off undertone emerged early on following overnight reports that the Biden stimulus was facing major headwinds of opposition, on Monday Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said the next round of Covid-19 relief was unlikely before mid-March, futher cementing the reality that Joe Biden’s nearly $2 trillion stimulus proposal to pass in Congress.
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/be...n-bill-passing
and the story on melvin capital...
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/fi...-point72-after
if you like market shit:
this is gonna be one helluva daytime drama to watch over the next week or so...if ZH is right and it's retail causing these hedge funds so much pain that is just so goddamn beautiful, it's causing me to tear up...we all know the hedgies will win in the end, but retail traders blowing up a few before they get blown up themselves is just so fucking great...
Last Friday, in the aftermath of the Gamespot's historic eruption which sent the stock from $40 to the mid-70s (before it doubled again on Monday rising as high as $158), we had a feeling which way the wind was blowing laid out all the Russell 3000 stock that had the highest Short Interest (Short Interest was 50%> of float).
Also on Friday, we put together an equal weighted basket of the companies listed above which on Monday... well... exploded, in light with our expectations that WallStreetBets/Robinhood traders would go down the list and systematically ramp up each and every one of these most shorted names, sending them in the stratosphere. That's exactly what happened.
And yet, while the market reaction was just as we expected, one thing we did not anticipate was the "fracture point" which as we now know was Gabe Plotkin's Melvin Capital, which effectively blew up today and suffered a multi-billion margin call on its shorts (as reported earlier), and only a $2.75 billion bailout from Citadel and Point72 (both prior investors in the fund) avoided a far greater disaster (had the $12 billion Melvin Capital been forced to start liquidating its longs to pay its margin calls, all bets would have been off).
What is most remarkable, however, is that a quick look at Melvin's put positions - which had attracted the ire of WallStreetBets investors who were long just the names that Plotkin was short - shows that most of them were amazingly the same as the most shorted names shown above! One wonder how many idea dinners Plotkin went to to pitch his positions, and how many other hedge funds had been caught in the conflagration. Incidentally the reason why the WallStreetBets vendetta was targeted at Plotkin is because unlike traditional shorts, it had to disclose its puts in its quarterly 13F. Ironically, had Melvin merely kept its bearish bets in the form of regular shorts - which hedge funds have no obligation to report - all of this could have been avoided.
And so, without further ado, here are Melvin Capital's puts. see link for table
Why do we care? Because as S3 Partners founder Bob Sloan told Bloomberg in a TV interview today, GameStop could rise even further after surging 95% over the past week: “Get prepared for another round of short squeeze. You’re going to see GameStop go way higher.”
The reason: while the negative hit from Plotkin's shorts and/or puts may have been neutralized, especially with the help of the nearly $3 billion in excess funding from Steve Cohen and Ken Griffin, earlier today we learned that as the hobbled hedge fund cralwed through the finish line, suffering massive P&L losses, countless other hedge funds took its place shorting Gamestop et al. In fact, GME's short interest as a % of float declined from 142% two weeks ago to... 139% today.
Bottom line: brace for even more fireworks as WallStreetbets reignites the squeeze, only this time it won't be Melvin but some other hedge fund that will be crushed under the collective weight of a few thousand Robinhood bulls. Which, incidentally, would be great news for Ken Griffin. Not only does he know which stocks will be ramped by Robinhood before anyone else - after all Citadel is the biggest buyer of RH orderflow - but once the short hedge fund on the other side blows up, Griffen can just pull another Melvin, and swoop in with another "bailout loan-for-revenue" scheme, and forcibly take an equity stake in another distressed hedge fund... and another... and another, and so on, all with the help of a few thousand euphoria Gen-Zers.
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/he...-put-positions
Who is jumping on GME or other Melvin related companies at market open?
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