For career reasons I had to move my family to Florida. Prior to that I was not a beach person, but once there we started going and I became hooked. We would generally go at least once a week over the course of years, and no matter what age our children were (1 year – 11), no one ever got bored, ever asked to leave, ever asked to spend any money…
There is something very primal and universal about being next to the ocean. On a few occasions I’ve stayed at hotels on the ocean and sleeping with the windows open and that continual sound of the crashing waves is a highlight! One of my kids now lives about 1 block from the ocean. I’m envious. If there is reincarnation I want to come back as one of my children!
I am at a point in my life where I have some personal time to focus on moving investments around to attempt to grow them at a higher rate. Most of my stuff will stay fairly stagnant; mutual funds, CDs, bond funds, etc… But there is a percentage I want to play around with to see if I can grow it more aggressively.
When neo posted about $GME I noticed a few folks here wrote about trading. Does anyone have any recommendations on some good, online resources that will help me get started? Daily reference points to check to get a gauge on potential, future movements?
Chag Purim sameach!
We spent the weekend in California. Saw the kids and grandkids. Dinner for 10 in an indoor restaurant setting. Almost like normal. Then drove up to Acton, north of LA, and got a new (to us) basset hound from a shelter. Drove home to Tucson, total driving time, 11 hours. We listen to audio books on these trips. Listened to Rob Lowe’s book about his life. I saw it recommended and am tired of books about politics. Not bad. Then we listened to a volume of Caro’s bio of LBJ (for the tenth time). Nice time. I don’t mind driving and everyone now drives 85 to 90. Gets us there sooner.
There’s a storm a’comin’. Batten down the hatches and trim the sails.
Liz Cheney has the helm, rest easy m’lads! 🙂
Mike+K,
I heard an interview with Lowe. Sounded like he had his act together. I can certainly cut him some slack for doing some dumb things in his youth.
Hi, Rufus. I got going with investing in the last 1-2 years from scratch. Used quite a few articles on TheBalance.com and Investopedia to get up to speed on the basics. Also, TD Ameritrade’s YT channel has a bunch of videos about different investing topics. I got a good amount of use out of their discussions of value vs. income vs. growth investing, for example.
I read a fair amount on SeekingAlpha.com, but a lot of the articles that people contribute there are hit-or-miss. However, one of the more useful authors/contributors on there that I’ve found (there are a few others that I like and several that I ended up tossing onto the reject pile, but don’t want to get too deep into the weeds) is Hoya Capital Real Estate – they put out interesting articles on the real-estate sector and subsectors thereof.
yes! I grew up on Miami Beach and by time I moved away after college, had enoughof beaches to last me lifetime!
Now I live w/ 4 seasons which I love, and still get excited as a little kid when it snows. Don’t think that magic will wear off.
BUT, that pic, at this time, definitely calming!
On Monday, nearly three dozen House Democrats called on Biden* to relinquish his sole authority to launch nuclear weapons. Joe is mentally compromised, and they know it, but won’t publicly admit it.
Joe’s dementia doesn’t seem (to me) to be a “sudden onset” condition. He’s been playing with less than a full deck for some time.
One wonders, shouldn’t his now-recognized lack of mental capacity to handle his Constitutional responsibilities reflect back on the validity of his competence to sign over 40 Executive Orders since taking office?
@Cap’n Rusty: “President” Biden’s incompetence to understand and sign those 40+ executive orders is a feature, not a bug. The junta likes it this way.
@Mike K: Congratulations on your new basset hound! Lucky dogs, both of you.
Thanks Phillip Sells!
@Rufus T. Firefly
So you’re ready to jump off in the deep end!
All those that Philip Sells mentioned are good starting points. One I would add is Motley Fool.com and if you don’t mind spending a few bucks get there pay service.
I worked with a man and updated his website which is no longer (cosmetic stuff) that traded for a living. He was an engineer and sold a successful business for a pretty penny. One of the hardest things he taught me about trading … what stock do you buy?
He created algorithm and down loaded 4,000+ stocks daily from Yahoo for a nominal fee. He then used the algorithm to determine which stocks met his algorithm criteria as what to look further into as a possible acquisition. It usually would spit out 3 or 4 stocks every day. It would also spit out stocks to liquidate. Never used the terms buy or sell for legal reasons.
Then he had a grading system.
1. What is the overal market trending?
2. What are the futures treading?
3. What is the sector that stock is in trending?
4. He’d try to get company 10K to see if there was any insiders buying or selling. (company insider trading is illegal but no doubt it happens)
5. He’d search the net for any news about the stock for institutional trading … the big boys.
6. Finally lets say he was looking at Best Buy. If he could he’d go to a physical location and see how many cars were in the parking lot!
7. And he always had to be excited about the stock.
If the stock graded to his satisfaction … he’d pull the trigger.
He also had a hard rule. If a stock dropped 10% he’d bail and live to fight again another day.
BTW he never would tell me criteria he used for the algorithm BUT he did keep track and 82% of the time it spit a stock out … the stock went positive.
He had 7 years of data doing this. This man did his due diligence before he spent a dime on a stock and was very successful.
Anyway we talked about gambling … the market is the ultimate casino. Some one is betting the stock will go down and some one is betting the stock will go up!
The constant Beating of a Dead(and lying about it) Horse event at Cap Hill, the protest that in part became a riot, appears to be behind Xi Bi Den’s popularity.
During his first week to 10 days, job approval started at 50% and fell; for Trump, it started at 55% and rose.
The Marxist Media lies and constant fascist Dem protection racket has gained (or really gamed) Xi new fans and reversed this, despite the fact that none of his EOs or policies are popular at even 50% levels.
This is very bad. People consenting to the New Tyranny.
Very favorable and somewhat favorable V lib … adds up to 91% for Biden. We knew the libs would love him.
Not so sure it is bad as it looks.
Thanks, Neo!
I used the mountain photo as wallpaper and now I’m going to use the ocean one for a few days. YAY!!
Memories! I’ve lived in Southern California for over 60 years. My brothers and I used to attend class in the morning at UCLA, and sometimes we’d make the short drive to Santa Monica to enjoy the beach, and then return to go to class in the afternoon. Good times! This was in the early 1970s. Two of my brothers had returned from Viet Nam (USMC) in time to watch the first human to land on the Moon, and we were filled with a wild, sweet promise that most of the youth of today couldn’t recognize.
This morning I read in “Math: The Latest Battleground in the War Against Truth” on AmericanThinker.com that “The [Bill and Melinda Gates] [F]oundation is providing more than $140 million to A ‘Pathway to Equitable Math Instruction,’ an organization of 25 educational institutions that contend that math is synonymous with white supremacy and upholds “capitalist, imperialistic and racist” views. Pathway offers a five-part toolkit and videoconferences to make educators “reflect on their own biases” and commit to advance math “equity” by understanding that students of color use math differently than do white students.”
When I was 14, I wrote in an essay that “Mathematics is a dialect in the language of dreams.” I remember the excitement I’d felt a few years later when I’d listed “Mathematics” as my major at UCLA. This morning, I clicked on the link to the Gates Foundation “Pathway” and I actually cried.
Quo Vadis???
Cui Bono???
Jack, on your engineer’s stock buying 7 Rules list. Let me add a couple points.
Another solid rule before the FANG era was that the stock should be simple to understand. For example, this ought to weed out Enron. And weed out Theranos.
Likewise, many software companies? Thus, this is a trickier Decision Rule to practice this last decade.
Another point. The rule about “excited.” I get the enthusiasm that’s needed to hold a position, after lengthy homework. That’s often good.
Yet the psychological trouble is falling in love with a concept and opportunity, while fundamentals erode, or timing opps diverge and wither chosen holding horizons.
This difficulty requires lots of self-honesty about one’s own propensity for confirmation bias.
There are remedies for this trouble. But this is test of discipline and character to deal with – especially after investment failure. Have a backup plan.
TJ
Even if he loved the stock he would dump it in a New York minute if …
He also had a hard rule. If a stock dropped 10% he’d bail and live to fight again another day.
I’ve seen the ocean up close twice only so far that I can recall. Hoek van Holland and Portsmouth, NH. Near misses at Boston Harbor and Kiel. I’ve never felt that sort of pull from it, yet I’m from the Great Lakes area. I suppose my preference runs to fresh water.
Jack. EXCELLENT.
MINTA Marie Moria. Sound lovely, you UCLA n beach good times. Then, the capper “This morning, I clicked on the link to the Gates Foundation “Pathway” and I actually cried.” I had to search….
“The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has donated tens of millions of dollars to a series of organizations behind a push to implement critical social justice ideology in math curricula, Washington Free Beacon reports.
“Pathway, the group leading the push, thanks the Gates Foundation for their financial support of the group. The Gates Foundation has donated over $140 million to a variety of organizations involved in Pathway.”
Oh. My. God.
I was just dissecting Inside Bills Brains, a NetFlix documentary from 2019 and his alt energy push to cure AGW (Anthropogenic Goobal Warming).
Now this insane monstrosity.
Crying times, indeed.
These rich mega billionaires hire top Ivy talented social workers to advise them on how to spend their lucre and get suckered by the latest fad ideology. Stupid is as stupid does.
There used to be a cartoon (‘50s, 60s) that always ended its rant with the tagline “There ought pa be a law” against this.
Well, Sarah Hoyt would say THIS!
Yesterday, I tried to post on the topic that David Solway wrote about at pjmedia, decades of declining IQ scores. “The Decline of Intelligence in the West”
The thing is that Gates knows damn well it’s all horse$@#! and lies.
I’ve met ostensibly well-educated fools who sincerely believe that the Gates Foundation exists because the man wants to give back to humanity. Then again, I’ve met the same sort who insisted that the Clinton Foundation’s main purpose was philanthropic. Jaysus wept!
The late Jerry Pournelle wrote once that the Gates Foundation had done some educational research early on and concluded that the simplest way to improve education in the USA would be to fire the worst 10% of public school teachers. Whoever presented the executive summary of that to His Almighty Spergness damn sure never got an invite to hang out on the super yacht again.
Thanks, jack. I have to run now, but I appreciate what you wrote and will hopefully find time later to comment on it. In the early days of Motley Fool I was a big fan, even bought one or two of their books. I had jumped back on their site last week and had already decided their newsletter is likely worth the cost ($100/year) as part of my research portfolio.
@TJ: “There oughta be a law.”
If memory serves, that strip was They’ll Do It Every Time, by Jimmy Hatlo.
“There Oughta Be a Law!, or TOBAL!, was a single-panel newspaper comic strip…”
MollyG and Oliver T.
Thanks for the memories and LINK,
@Rufus T Firefly. It sounds like you have a background of experience in the Markets to draw from, i.e. you’re not starting from absolute scratch. May I recommend Chuck Carnevale and F.A.S.T. Graphs. I find them easy to use and invaluable for evaluating the health of the subject company and understanding its future prospects. My S.I.L. is a financial professional and was impressed when he looked at it. Chuck has a number of articles on Seeking Alpha and is a regular contributor. And you’ll notice that many of the authors on Seeking Alpha are also using F.A.S.T. Graphs to bolster their investment articles. I’ve been subscribing to the software for 4 years now and it keeps getting better. No complaints, small company, good people, very powerful software. Good Luck.
The madness of Neo-Racism is blaming forever of only one (or a certain few) race(s) for the Under achievements of many others. White privilege and Disparate inequality? Blame white racial supremacism! It is a simplistic formula.
This will fail horribly because it isn’t rooted in reality. The replies we have are too many, however. Too prolix, too taxing. We need a simpler explanation to counter this mad cupidity. But what, for example?
One classic reality based reply is spontaneous social orders, a result or legacy that exists because time proved it so useful, people retained it.
Spontaneous orders are institutions that are the results of human actions and observations, but not of any conscious or planned design. Common law, natural language, parenting, the market for example. Or animal paths that become foot paths and then toll roads, then turn pikes, is another one.
Ancient slavery was of this kind, too. What do you do with your defeated enemy? Kill them all, is one choice.
But by making him useful labor, and offering the enemy a path or paths out, even to citizenship, as in Rome, for example, then the horrible burden of mass slaughter of the defeated is replaced by hope and civilising a different people for a future mutual benefit is born.
Enemies can become friends. And Christ observed this working out well in his time before turning it into His canonical ethic.
I’ve read many bits of economic historian Gregory Clark. But reading a synthesis of Clark informed by science journalist Nicholas Wade’s insights into anthropology, ethology, history, and genetic science, is seductive.
The central problem of economic history is understanding the industrial Revolution because all of development economics and politics turns on grasping that long and large and epochal event correctly.
And every material solution the Neo-racist fascists want today does, too. Get this wrong — as the history of socialism and communism shows us — then you kill the goose laying golden eggs.
This is a feature, not a bug? If the Woke Neo-Racists are Hell bent on complete Civilizational destruction, instead of building Harrison Bergeron’s world into a utopia, then there is no rational response to nihilism.
But if matters are different, then I recommend Chapter 7, “Recasting Human Nature” (in Wade’s “A Troublesome Inheritance”), because Wade synthesises a fine and finessed and compelling basis for the Industrial Revolution that Clark proposes, ie, a version that explains the IR as a result of human adaptation and recent genetic change.
And that evidence can be seen operating within our lifetimes because it turns on, as it turns out on, cultivating a certain set of middle class virtues. For example, Lee Ku Kwan’s miracle is Singapore, as well as other Asian, Irish or Baltic, economic “Tiger” success stories. And even later coming China. And to further away places like Botswana and Costa Rica as well.
Clark musters evidence that the IR occurred in England because, for several hundreds of years before, upper class virtues filtered downward throughout English society because of their greater fertility. This prepared this island outpost, uniquely, to recombine its resources, just as the key industrial technologies became available, like water power gave way to steam power, and textile mills made clothing much more plentiful and much cheaper.
“As it happens, Clark has documented four [virtuous] behaviors that steadily changed in the English population between 1200 and 1800, as well as a plausible mechanism of change. The four behaviors are those of interpersonal violence, literacy, the propensity to save and the propensity to work.
“Homicide rates for males, for instance, declined from 0.3 per thousand in 1200 to 0.1 in 1600 and to about a tenth of this in 1800.[3] Even from the beginning of this period, the level of personal violence was well below that of modern hunter-gatherer societies. [By stark contrast,] Rates of 15 murders per 1,000 men have been recorded for the Aché people of Paraguay.”
_. _. _
The rich had twice as many heirs at death than those slightly well off.
“The English population was fairly stable in size from 1200 to 1760. In this context, the fact that the rich were having more children than the poor led to the interesting phenomenon of unremitting social descent. Most children of the rich had to sink in the social scale, given that there were too many of them to remain in the upper class.
“Their social descent had the far-reaching genetic consequence that they carried with them inheritance for the same behaviors that had made their parents rich. The values of the upper middle class—nonviolence, literacy, thrift and patience—were thus infused into lower economic classes and throughout society. Generation after generation, they gradually became the values of the society as a whole. This explains the steady decrease in violence and increase in literacy that Clark has documented for the English population. Moreover, the behaviors emerged gradually over several centuries, a time course more typical of an evolutionary change than a cultural change.”
The fact that these social, ethical, and genetic changes preparing the way for a society that benefits from then in England, does not mean that similar mechanisms were not operating elsewhere in the world to prepare other post-agrarian people’s.
“Clark’s thesis departs considerably from the mainstream views of economic historians and political economists, most of whom look to institutions to explain major issues such as world poverty and the Industrial Revolution, even though each has a different favorite, whether intellectual property rights, the rule of law or parliamentary democracy. Clark dismisses this whole category of explanations as insufficient. Many early societies, he says, had all the preconditions for economic growth that any World Bank economist could wish for, yet none did so. ‘Economic historians,’ Clark writes, ‘thus inhabit a strange netherworld. Their days are devoted to proving a vision of progress that all serious empirical studies in the field contradict.’ They are thus ‘trapped in this ever-tightening intellectual death spiral.’ “
Clark corroborates his thesis by producing and international data base of surname survivals. That is, his claim of certain virtues leading to large families implies greater surname persistence through time. And this is what Clark finds. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0c2Ugb4VKH8
So, now. What is the the bumper sticker slogan to counter the Woke theologians? MAGA, perhaps? Make the Middle Class Great Again?
I’m not yet sure. But I believe it’s out there. And we need it.
Thanks, Aggie! I will definitely check it out.
TJ,
If Amazon had an Alexa in every Americans’ home (let’s not give Bezos any ideas) and all “private” conversations were recorded I am certain “whites'” conversations would reveal they are the least racist of all identifiable groups.
I guess it’s like attacking Christians or Jews for religious fervor rather than Muslims. They don’t attack Muslims because Muslims may attack back. Attacking “whites” of racism won’t get pushback.
Rufus — of course, unless the oppressed get 2 votes, a house, equal status vehicles, etc, what difference does it (not being actively racist) does it make? (As a hag once said to Congress.)
To all who gave advice on investing resources, thank you. As I’ve mentioned before, my father is/was an inveterate gambler and I decided to go the white collar route and attempt to be an upstanding citizen (or, at least a standing citizen), so I have mostly avoided gambling, including the market. However, I am fairly well formally educated in a lot of the aspects (two of my degrees have a financial tinge) and am now at a point in life where I want to devote more time to growing a financial legacy to, hopefully, pass on to my kids and grandkids.
I think it was TJ who wrote of an acquaintance (an Engineer) who built his own system of algorithms, and I will almost certainly attempt something similar. I get a kick out of such things and have given it a try in the past (actually, one of my early forays into computer programming for a college class in the mid-80s was an attempt at picking stocks through regression analysis).
For me, one of the most fascinating things about the stock market is the game is to predict what others will gauge as the amount they are willing to pay for a stock. It’s not picking the true worth of the stock, or company. It’s not even predicting that company’s future success or failure. It’s gauging human behavior. Although not a stock, Bitcoin is a perfect example of this. Bitcoin is literally nothing tangible. It is the presence or absence of electrons in ROM chips based on an algorithm almost no one knows. Yet, it has real value. Many have made a lot of money buying and selling Bitcoin. That’s the part of the market where I hope to have some success. Most of my money will be tied up in basic things, based on their real, inherent value (I’ve always tied up a lot of my investment dollars in VFINX), but going forward I want to see if I can come up with some programs like TJ (?) described that can predict human behavior based on trends. Even if I never outperform the S&P 500 it will be a fun diversion for me.
TJ,
I am guardedly optimistic we will see more American blacks stand up and call out other blacks for their racism. Just as I’ll fight anyone who criticizes my family (even if I secretly know the criticism may have merit), this is something whites can’t really do. It has to be blacks calling out other blacks. And this has happened and continues to happen.
No! It looks like the backwash pulling back for a 30 footer at Waimea!
Otherwise, great thread.
TJ @ 9:16pm,
I’m not sure I follow the entire theory you explain, but it seems like it’s over thinking things. I think a ton of credit goes to Herr Gutenberg’s invention of movable type. Once information became relatively plentiful and cheap, discovery and invention became a meritocracy. This fostered a lot of political and religious change; eventually leading to the uncoupling of politics and religion. And it fostered a lot of innovation. The speed of information increased dramatically.
I live about forty yards from Lake Michigan. Big windows. No bad day at the lake.
But I am reminded of something I heard decades ago People near water watch the water. Watch it unremittingly.
For a million years, we watched the land behind us as that was the source of any threat. Why watch the water?
Yeah, the raiders’ sails notch the skyline but you still have a couple of hours. And that was only in the last few thousand years.
What is it about the water?
Richard Aubrey:
Think you are correct to discount the Norsemen’s sails on the horizon.
Waves and the sound they make breaking are hypnotic.
Also…
Your ancestors and mine spent hundreds of millennia foraging mussels in the shallows down the bottom of Africa. It was life. We were evolving. Did it long enough to cut a deep groove in our very essence?
Of these two theories I incline more toward Thalatta!
Soapbox. I know of mussel middens, but in cooler climates. See crocodiles.
Hypnotic. Yes. But still, shouldn’t somebody be looking inland? Or have this unease, centered around the shoulders?
Well if you have a tsunami in your peoples oral history, you may want to watch the water. Even less dramatic are “sleeper waves” on the Pacific NW coast that kill people on “beached” logs from time to time. The sea has many ways to kill you IIRC. Great Lakes are a different kettle of fish?
Big lakes (Lake Eire) and lagoons (Venice) can have seiches that will ruin your day, too.
neo. I do. Had a fictional character use him to settle herself when she was stressed. She’d think out every detail as she considered a kind of movie of one or another poem. Down to the tack on the barn wall when doing the Hired Man. Usually worked. Unfortunately, during the story, the other party, a man with whom she was administratively paired, kept showing up. Or he was behind her, eyes on the hills.
I suspect maybe it was because Frost wasn’t an Infantryman. I hate, to this day, open spaces. Went to a CRASE (Citizen Response Active Shooter Environment) presented by a police captain. He was pretty heavy on situational awareness. My wife commented he was like me but on steroids. If she only knew….
om. Yeah, different. Lakes are rising and any family which doesn’t own a quarry is mad at their ancestors. It’s quite a process, not to mention expensive, to get maybe seven tons of boulders per running foot of frontage. Once this is completed, geologists ten thousand years from now are going to wonder just how weird that glacier was. Lined the Mitten with boulders from Wisconsin.
I didn’t read the study, but did it include tartar sauce?
I’ve seen aquatic ancestor theories before. And I am sometimes able to see footage of a herd of zebra trying to cross a river.
Are there any large mammals living in or spending substantial time in or near croc water? Hippos.
There’s a particularly gruesome story out of Burma where a Japanese formation backed up to a river decided to retreat IN the river. Hundreds, apparently, were taken by crocs. Aussie could hear the screams all night.
While crocs like their territories, the presence of the Japanese for some days had no doubt attracted a number of out of towners what with food scraps and what not in the river.
Before guns, dealing with a pesky croc was an operation. Tether a goat under a tree near the river. Get a guy who’s paid up at the club to sit in the tree with a heavy bow and heavy arrows. Might work. But, if it does, somebody’s going to expand his hunting territory into the void.
I dunno. Bashing shells off rocks at low tide with somebody watching might work.
Richard Aubrey,
Where I live the rule is;
‘NEVER turn your back on the water!’
Having said that, watching it is sometimes exciting, sometimes soothing, and it never, never gets old.
Molly
We live on small lake. Wood ducks raising babies, kingfishers hitting the water and many other bird species. The occasional gator. Fish of the dock.
Never gets old.
Molly. When you live on the water, you have a lot of friends. We have two grandkids in the usual meaning and about a dozen seasonal grandkids. Love having them around but on the beach…..where’s my coffee?
Speaking of crocs & near relations
(which are a similar problem in Texas)
For career reasons I had to move my family to Florida. Prior to that I was not a beach person, but once there we started going and I became hooked. We would generally go at least once a week over the course of years, and no matter what age our children were (1 year – 11), no one ever got bored, ever asked to leave, ever asked to spend any money…
There is something very primal and universal about being next to the ocean. On a few occasions I’ve stayed at hotels on the ocean and sleeping with the windows open and that continual sound of the crashing waves is a highlight! One of my kids now lives about 1 block from the ocean. I’m envious. If there is reincarnation I want to come back as one of my children!
I am at a point in my life where I have some personal time to focus on moving investments around to attempt to grow them at a higher rate. Most of my stuff will stay fairly stagnant; mutual funds, CDs, bond funds, etc… But there is a percentage I want to play around with to see if I can grow it more aggressively.
When neo posted about $GME I noticed a few folks here wrote about trading. Does anyone have any recommendations on some good, online resources that will help me get started? Daily reference points to check to get a gauge on potential, future movements?
Chag Purim sameach!
We spent the weekend in California. Saw the kids and grandkids. Dinner for 10 in an indoor restaurant setting. Almost like normal. Then drove up to Acton, north of LA, and got a new (to us) basset hound from a shelter. Drove home to Tucson, total driving time, 11 hours. We listen to audio books on these trips. Listened to Rob Lowe’s book about his life. I saw it recommended and am tired of books about politics. Not bad. Then we listened to a volume of Caro’s bio of LBJ (for the tenth time). Nice time. I don’t mind driving and everyone now drives 85 to 90. Gets us there sooner.
There’s a storm a’comin’. Batten down the hatches and trim the sails.
Liz Cheney has the helm, rest easy m’lads! 🙂
Mike+K,
I heard an interview with Lowe. Sounded like he had his act together. I can certainly cut him some slack for doing some dumb things in his youth.
Hi, Rufus. I got going with investing in the last 1-2 years from scratch. Used quite a few articles on TheBalance.com and Investopedia to get up to speed on the basics. Also, TD Ameritrade’s YT channel has a bunch of videos about different investing topics. I got a good amount of use out of their discussions of value vs. income vs. growth investing, for example.
I read a fair amount on SeekingAlpha.com, but a lot of the articles that people contribute there are hit-or-miss. However, one of the more useful authors/contributors on there that I’ve found (there are a few others that I like and several that I ended up tossing onto the reject pile, but don’t want to get too deep into the weeds) is Hoya Capital Real Estate – they put out interesting articles on the real-estate sector and subsectors thereof.
yes! I grew up on Miami Beach and by time I moved away after college, had enoughof beaches to last me lifetime!
Now I live w/ 4 seasons which I love, and still get excited as a little kid when it snows. Don’t think that magic will wear off.
BUT, that pic, at this time, definitely calming!
On Monday, nearly three dozen House Democrats called on Biden* to relinquish his sole authority to launch nuclear weapons. Joe is mentally compromised, and they know it, but won’t publicly admit it.
Joe’s dementia doesn’t seem (to me) to be a “sudden onset” condition. He’s been playing with less than a full deck for some time.
One wonders, shouldn’t his now-recognized lack of mental capacity to handle his Constitutional responsibilities reflect back on the validity of his competence to sign over 40 Executive Orders since taking office?
@Cap’n Rusty: “President” Biden’s incompetence to understand and sign those 40+ executive orders is a feature, not a bug. The junta likes it this way.
@Mike K: Congratulations on your new basset hound! Lucky dogs, both of you.
Thanks Phillip Sells!
@Rufus T. Firefly
So you’re ready to jump off in the deep end!
All those that Philip Sells mentioned are good starting points. One I would add is Motley Fool.com and if you don’t mind spending a few bucks get there pay service.
I worked with a man and updated his website which is no longer (cosmetic stuff) that traded for a living. He was an engineer and sold a successful business for a pretty penny. One of the hardest things he taught me about trading … what stock do you buy?
He created algorithm and down loaded 4,000+ stocks daily from Yahoo for a nominal fee. He then used the algorithm to determine which stocks met his algorithm criteria as what to look further into as a possible acquisition. It usually would spit out 3 or 4 stocks every day. It would also spit out stocks to liquidate. Never used the terms buy or sell for legal reasons.
Then he had a grading system.
1. What is the overal market trending?
2. What are the futures treading?
3. What is the sector that stock is in trending?
4. He’d try to get company 10K to see if there was any insiders buying or selling. (company insider trading is illegal but no doubt it happens)
5. He’d search the net for any news about the stock for institutional trading … the big boys.
6. Finally lets say he was looking at Best Buy. If he could he’d go to a physical location and see how many cars were in the parking lot!
7. And he always had to be excited about the stock.
If the stock graded to his satisfaction … he’d pull the trigger.
He also had a hard rule. If a stock dropped 10% he’d bail and live to fight again another day.
BTW he never would tell me criteria he used for the algorithm BUT he did keep track and 82% of the time it spit a stock out … the stock went positive.
He had 7 years of data doing this. This man did his due diligence before he spent a dime on a stock and was very successful.
Anyway we talked about gambling … the market is the ultimate casino. Some one is betting the stock will go down and some one is betting the stock will go up!
The constant Beating of a Dead(and lying about it) Horse event at Cap Hill, the protest that in part became a riot, appears to be behind Xi Bi Den’s popularity.
During his first week to 10 days, job approval started at 50% and fell; for Trump, it started at 55% and rose.
The Marxist Media lies and constant fascist Dem protection racket has gained (or really gamed) Xi new fans and reversed this, despite the fact that none of his EOs or policies are popular at even 50% levels.
This is very bad. People consenting to the New Tyranny.
Rasmussen at Just The News
https://justthenews.com/politics-policy/polling/bidens-approval-rating-nearly-equal-trumps-same-time-during-trumps-first
TJ …
Very favorable and somewhat favorable V lib … adds up to 91% for Biden. We knew the libs would love him.
Not so sure it is bad as it looks.
Thanks, Neo!
I used the mountain photo as wallpaper and now I’m going to use the ocean one for a few days. YAY!!
Memories! I’ve lived in Southern California for over 60 years. My brothers and I used to attend class in the morning at UCLA, and sometimes we’d make the short drive to Santa Monica to enjoy the beach, and then return to go to class in the afternoon. Good times! This was in the early 1970s. Two of my brothers had returned from Viet Nam (USMC) in time to watch the first human to land on the Moon, and we were filled with a wild, sweet promise that most of the youth of today couldn’t recognize.
This morning I read in “Math: The Latest Battleground in the War Against Truth” on AmericanThinker.com that “The [Bill and Melinda Gates] [F]oundation is providing more than $140 million to A ‘Pathway to Equitable Math Instruction,’ an organization of 25 educational institutions that contend that math is synonymous with white supremacy and upholds “capitalist, imperialistic and racist” views. Pathway offers a five-part toolkit and videoconferences to make educators “reflect on their own biases” and commit to advance math “equity” by understanding that students of color use math differently than do white students.”
When I was 14, I wrote in an essay that “Mathematics is a dialect in the language of dreams.” I remember the excitement I’d felt a few years later when I’d listed “Mathematics” as my major at UCLA. This morning, I clicked on the link to the Gates Foundation “Pathway” and I actually cried.
Quo Vadis???
Cui Bono???
Jack, on your engineer’s stock buying 7 Rules list. Let me add a couple points.
Another solid rule before the FANG era was that the stock should be simple to understand. For example, this ought to weed out Enron. And weed out Theranos.
But would this rule prevent investing in WeWork, for instance? A hot stock of 2019?
https://www.forbes.com/sites/williampesek/2019/11/13/why-wework-was-top-tick-of-global-economic-bubble/?sh=1251a6f52235
Likewise, many software companies? Thus, this is a trickier Decision Rule to practice this last decade.
Another point. The rule about “excited.” I get the enthusiasm that’s needed to hold a position, after lengthy homework. That’s often good.
Yet the psychological trouble is falling in love with a concept and opportunity, while fundamentals erode, or timing opps diverge and wither chosen holding horizons.
This difficulty requires lots of self-honesty about one’s own propensity for confirmation bias.
There are remedies for this trouble. But this is test of discipline and character to deal with – especially after investment failure. Have a backup plan.
TJ
Even if he loved the stock he would dump it in a New York minute if …
I’ve seen the ocean up close twice only so far that I can recall. Hoek van Holland and Portsmouth, NH. Near misses at Boston Harbor and Kiel. I’ve never felt that sort of pull from it, yet I’m from the Great Lakes area. I suppose my preference runs to fresh water.
Jack. EXCELLENT.
MINTA Marie Moria. Sound lovely, you UCLA n beach good times. Then, the capper “This morning, I clicked on the link to the Gates Foundation “Pathway” and I actually cried.” I had to search….
“The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has donated tens of millions of dollars to a series of organizations behind a push to implement critical social justice ideology in math curricula, Washington Free Beacon reports.
“Pathway, the group leading the push, thanks the Gates Foundation for their financial support of the group. The Gates Foundation has donated over $140 million to a variety of organizations involved in Pathway.”
https://thepostmillennial.com/bill-and-melinda-gates-foundation-pushing-curriculum-which-teaches-that-math-is-racist
Oh. My. God.
I was just dissecting Inside Bills Brains, a NetFlix documentary from 2019 and his alt energy push to cure AGW (Anthropogenic Goobal Warming).
Now this insane monstrosity.
Crying times, indeed.
These rich mega billionaires hire top Ivy talented social workers to advise them on how to spend their lucre and get suckered by the latest fad ideology. Stupid is as stupid does.
There used to be a cartoon (‘50s, 60s) that always ended its rant with the tagline “There ought pa be a law” against this.
Well, Sarah Hoyt would say THIS!
Yesterday, I tried to post on the topic that David Solway wrote about at pjmedia, decades of declining IQ scores. “The Decline of Intelligence in the West”
https://pjmedia.com/columns/david-solway-2/2021/02/10/the-decline-of-intelligence-in-the-west-n1424731
Glenn K. Beaton fingers educational dumbing down like THIS.
“People are getting stupider, it’s a scientific fact”
https://theaspenbeat.com/2021/02/18/people-are-getting-stupider-its-a-scientific-fact/
THIS.
@Minta Marie Morze:
The thing is that Gates knows damn well it’s all horse$@#! and lies.
I’ve met ostensibly well-educated fools who sincerely believe that the Gates Foundation exists because the man wants to give back to humanity. Then again, I’ve met the same sort who insisted that the Clinton Foundation’s main purpose was philanthropic. Jaysus wept!
The late Jerry Pournelle wrote once that the Gates Foundation had done some educational research early on and concluded that the simplest way to improve education in the USA would be to fire the worst 10% of public school teachers. Whoever presented the executive summary of that to His Almighty Spergness damn sure never got an invite to hang out on the super yacht again.
Thanks, jack. I have to run now, but I appreciate what you wrote and will hopefully find time later to comment on it. In the early days of Motley Fool I was a big fan, even bought one or two of their books. I had jumped back on their site last week and had already decided their newsletter is likely worth the cost ($100/year) as part of my research portfolio.
@TJ: “There oughta be a law.”
If memory serves, that strip was They’ll Do It Every Time, by Jimmy Hatlo.
“There Oughta Be a Law!, or TOBAL!, was a single-panel newspaper comic strip…”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There_Oughta_Be_a_Law!
Just in case anyone has an Ear Worm in need of overwriting.
Cantonese:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EPWO2yZba68
Arranged for String Quartet:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XBkm7snVDlw
Sterile Boring One Party Dictatorship Singapore Version:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LjKfzC6-lp4
The UrText:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iJyYrrDKYZE
MollyG and Oliver T.
Thanks for the memories and LINK,
@Rufus T Firefly. It sounds like you have a background of experience in the Markets to draw from, i.e. you’re not starting from absolute scratch. May I recommend Chuck Carnevale and F.A.S.T. Graphs. I find them easy to use and invaluable for evaluating the health of the subject company and understanding its future prospects. My S.I.L. is a financial professional and was impressed when he looked at it. Chuck has a number of articles on Seeking Alpha and is a regular contributor. And you’ll notice that many of the authors on Seeking Alpha are also using F.A.S.T. Graphs to bolster their investment articles. I’ve been subscribing to the software for 4 years now and it keeps getting better. No complaints, small company, good people, very powerful software. Good Luck.
The madness of Neo-Racism is blaming forever of only one (or a certain few) race(s) for the Under achievements of many others. White privilege and Disparate inequality? Blame white racial supremacism! It is a simplistic formula.
This will fail horribly because it isn’t rooted in reality. The replies we have are too many, however. Too prolix, too taxing. We need a simpler explanation to counter this mad cupidity. But what, for example?
One classic reality based reply is spontaneous social orders, a result or legacy that exists because time proved it so useful, people retained it.
Spontaneous orders are institutions that are the results of human actions and observations, but not of any conscious or planned design. Common law, natural language, parenting, the market for example. Or animal paths that become foot paths and then toll roads, then turn pikes, is another one.
Ancient slavery was of this kind, too. What do you do with your defeated enemy? Kill them all, is one choice.
But by making him useful labor, and offering the enemy a path or paths out, even to citizenship, as in Rome, for example, then the horrible burden of mass slaughter of the defeated is replaced by hope and civilising a different people for a future mutual benefit is born.
Enemies can become friends. And Christ observed this working out well in his time before turning it into His canonical ethic.
I’ve read many bits of economic historian Gregory Clark. But reading a synthesis of Clark informed by science journalist Nicholas Wade’s insights into anthropology, ethology, history, and genetic science, is seductive.
The central problem of economic history is understanding the industrial Revolution because all of development economics and politics turns on grasping that long and large and epochal event correctly.
And every material solution the Neo-racist fascists want today does, too. Get this wrong — as the history of socialism and communism shows us — then you kill the goose laying golden eggs.
This is a feature, not a bug? If the Woke Neo-Racists are Hell bent on complete Civilizational destruction, instead of building Harrison Bergeron’s world into a utopia, then there is no rational response to nihilism.
But if matters are different, then I recommend Chapter 7, “Recasting Human Nature” (in Wade’s “A Troublesome Inheritance”), because Wade synthesises a fine and finessed and compelling basis for the Industrial Revolution that Clark proposes, ie, a version that explains the IR as a result of human adaptation and recent genetic change.
And that evidence can be seen operating within our lifetimes because it turns on, as it turns out on, cultivating a certain set of middle class virtues. For example, Lee Ku Kwan’s miracle is Singapore, as well as other Asian, Irish or Baltic, economic “Tiger” success stories. And even later coming China. And to further away places like Botswana and Costa Rica as well.
Clark musters evidence that the IR occurred in England because, for several hundreds of years before, upper class virtues filtered downward throughout English society because of their greater fertility. This prepared this island outpost, uniquely, to recombine its resources, just as the key industrial technologies became available, like water power gave way to steam power, and textile mills made clothing much more plentiful and much cheaper.
“As it happens, Clark has documented four [virtuous] behaviors that steadily changed in the English population between 1200 and 1800, as well as a plausible mechanism of change. The four behaviors are those of interpersonal violence, literacy, the propensity to save and the propensity to work.
“Homicide rates for males, for instance, declined from 0.3 per thousand in 1200 to 0.1 in 1600 and to about a tenth of this in 1800.[3] Even from the beginning of this period, the level of personal violence was well below that of modern hunter-gatherer societies. [By stark contrast,] Rates of 15 murders per 1,000 men have been recorded for the Aché people of Paraguay.”
_. _. _
The rich had twice as many heirs at death than those slightly well off.
“The English population was fairly stable in size from 1200 to 1760. In this context, the fact that the rich were having more children than the poor led to the interesting phenomenon of unremitting social descent. Most children of the rich had to sink in the social scale, given that there were too many of them to remain in the upper class.
“Their social descent had the far-reaching genetic consequence that they carried with them inheritance for the same behaviors that had made their parents rich. The values of the upper middle class—nonviolence, literacy, thrift and patience—were thus infused into lower economic classes and throughout society. Generation after generation, they gradually became the values of the society as a whole. This explains the steady decrease in violence and increase in literacy that Clark has documented for the English population. Moreover, the behaviors emerged gradually over several centuries, a time course more typical of an evolutionary change than a cultural change.”
The fact that these social, ethical, and genetic changes preparing the way for a society that benefits from then in England, does not mean that similar mechanisms were not operating elsewhere in the world to prepare other post-agrarian people’s.
“Clark’s thesis departs considerably from the mainstream views of economic historians and political economists, most of whom look to institutions to explain major issues such as world poverty and the Industrial Revolution, even though each has a different favorite, whether intellectual property rights, the rule of law or parliamentary democracy. Clark dismisses this whole category of explanations as insufficient. Many early societies, he says, had all the preconditions for economic growth that any World Bank economist could wish for, yet none did so. ‘Economic historians,’ Clark writes, ‘thus inhabit a strange netherworld. Their days are devoted to proving a vision of progress that all serious empirical studies in the field contradict.’ They are thus ‘trapped in this ever-tightening intellectual death spiral.’ “
Clark corroborates his thesis by producing and international data base of surname survivals. That is, his claim of certain virtues leading to large families implies greater surname persistence through time. And this is what Clark finds.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0c2Ugb4VKH8
So, now. What is the the bumper sticker slogan to counter the Woke theologians? MAGA, perhaps? Make the Middle Class Great Again?
I’m not yet sure. But I believe it’s out there. And we need it.
Thanks, Aggie! I will definitely check it out.
TJ,
If Amazon had an Alexa in every Americans’ home (let’s not give Bezos any ideas) and all “private” conversations were recorded I am certain “whites'” conversations would reveal they are the least racist of all identifiable groups.
I guess it’s like attacking Christians or Jews for religious fervor rather than Muslims. They don’t attack Muslims because Muslims may attack back. Attacking “whites” of racism won’t get pushback.
Rufus — of course, unless the oppressed get 2 votes, a house, equal status vehicles, etc, what difference does it (not being actively racist) does it make? (As a hag once said to Congress.)
To all who gave advice on investing resources, thank you. As I’ve mentioned before, my father is/was an inveterate gambler and I decided to go the white collar route and attempt to be an upstanding citizen (or, at least a standing citizen), so I have mostly avoided gambling, including the market. However, I am fairly well formally educated in a lot of the aspects (two of my degrees have a financial tinge) and am now at a point in life where I want to devote more time to growing a financial legacy to, hopefully, pass on to my kids and grandkids.
I think it was TJ who wrote of an acquaintance (an Engineer) who built his own system of algorithms, and I will almost certainly attempt something similar. I get a kick out of such things and have given it a try in the past (actually, one of my early forays into computer programming for a college class in the mid-80s was an attempt at picking stocks through regression analysis).
For me, one of the most fascinating things about the stock market is the game is to predict what others will gauge as the amount they are willing to pay for a stock. It’s not picking the true worth of the stock, or company. It’s not even predicting that company’s future success or failure. It’s gauging human behavior. Although not a stock, Bitcoin is a perfect example of this. Bitcoin is literally nothing tangible. It is the presence or absence of electrons in ROM chips based on an algorithm almost no one knows. Yet, it has real value. Many have made a lot of money buying and selling Bitcoin. That’s the part of the market where I hope to have some success. Most of my money will be tied up in basic things, based on their real, inherent value (I’ve always tied up a lot of my investment dollars in VFINX), but going forward I want to see if I can come up with some programs like TJ (?) described that can predict human behavior based on trends. Even if I never outperform the S&P 500 it will be a fun diversion for me.
TJ,
I am guardedly optimistic we will see more American blacks stand up and call out other blacks for their racism. Just as I’ll fight anyone who criticizes my family (even if I secretly know the criticism may have merit), this is something whites can’t really do. It has to be blacks calling out other blacks. And this has happened and continues to happen.
No! It looks like the backwash pulling back for a 30 footer at Waimea!
Otherwise, great thread.
TJ @ 9:16pm,
I’m not sure I follow the entire theory you explain, but it seems like it’s over thinking things. I think a ton of credit goes to Herr Gutenberg’s invention of movable type. Once information became relatively plentiful and cheap, discovery and invention became a meritocracy. This fostered a lot of political and religious change; eventually leading to the uncoupling of politics and religion. And it fostered a lot of innovation. The speed of information increased dramatically.
I live about forty yards from Lake Michigan. Big windows. No bad day at the lake.
But I am reminded of something I heard decades ago People near water watch the water. Watch it unremittingly.
For a million years, we watched the land behind us as that was the source of any threat. Why watch the water?
Yeah, the raiders’ sails notch the skyline but you still have a couple of hours. And that was only in the last few thousand years.
What is it about the water?
Richard Aubrey:
Think you are correct to discount the Norsemen’s sails on the horizon.
Waves and the sound they make breaking are hypnotic.
Also…
Your ancestors and mine spent hundreds of millennia foraging mussels in the shallows down the bottom of Africa. It was life. We were evolving. Did it long enough to cut a deep groove in our very essence?
Of these two theories I incline more toward Thalatta!
Soapbox. I know of mussel middens, but in cooler climates. See crocodiles.
Hypnotic. Yes. But still, shouldn’t somebody be looking inland? Or have this unease, centered around the shoulders?
Richard Aubrey:
Have you been reading Robert Frost lately?
Well if you have a tsunami in your peoples oral history, you may want to watch the water. Even less dramatic are “sleeper waves” on the Pacific NW coast that kill people on “beached” logs from time to time. The sea has many ways to kill you IIRC. Great Lakes are a different kettle of fish?
Big lakes (Lake Eire) and lagoons (Venice) can have seiches that will ruin your day, too.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seiche#Engineering_for_seiche_protection
neo. I do. Had a fictional character use him to settle herself when she was stressed. She’d think out every detail as she considered a kind of movie of one or another poem. Down to the tack on the barn wall when doing the Hired Man. Usually worked. Unfortunately, during the story, the other party, a man with whom she was administratively paired, kept showing up. Or he was behind her, eyes on the hills.
I suspect maybe it was because Frost wasn’t an Infantryman. I hate, to this day, open spaces. Went to a CRASE (Citizen Response Active Shooter Environment) presented by a police captain. He was pretty heavy on situational awareness. My wife commented he was like me but on steroids. If she only knew….
om. Yeah, different. Lakes are rising and any family which doesn’t own a quarry is mad at their ancestors. It’s quite a process, not to mention expensive, to get maybe seven tons of boulders per running foot of frontage. Once this is completed, geologists ten thousand years from now are going to wonder just how weird that glacier was. Lined the Mitten with boulders from Wisconsin.
@Richard Aubrey:
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/lives-the-brain/201001/was-seafood-brain-food-in-human-evolution
http://aquatic-human-ancestor.org/anatomy/brain.html
Possible. Not proven.
I didn’t read the study, but did it include tartar sauce?
I’ve seen aquatic ancestor theories before. And I am sometimes able to see footage of a herd of zebra trying to cross a river.
Are there any large mammals living in or spending substantial time in or near croc water? Hippos.
There’s a particularly gruesome story out of Burma where a Japanese formation backed up to a river decided to retreat IN the river. Hundreds, apparently, were taken by crocs. Aussie could hear the screams all night.
While crocs like their territories, the presence of the Japanese for some days had no doubt attracted a number of out of towners what with food scraps and what not in the river.
Before guns, dealing with a pesky croc was an operation. Tether a goat under a tree near the river. Get a guy who’s paid up at the club to sit in the tree with a heavy bow and heavy arrows. Might work. But, if it does, somebody’s going to expand his hunting territory into the void.
I dunno. Bashing shells off rocks at low tide with somebody watching might work.
Richard Aubrey,
Where I live the rule is;
‘NEVER turn your back on the water!’
Having said that, watching it is sometimes exciting, sometimes soothing, and it never, never gets old.
Molly
We live on small lake. Wood ducks raising babies, kingfishers hitting the water and many other bird species. The occasional gator. Fish of the dock.
Never gets old.
Molly. When you live on the water, you have a lot of friends. We have two grandkids in the usual meaning and about a dozen seasonal grandkids. Love having them around but on the beach…..where’s my coffee?
Speaking of crocs & near relations
(which are a similar problem in Texas)
The Ultimate Weather Predictor
https://i2.wp.com/www.powerlineblog.com/ed-assets/2021/02/12642844_804758396334641_3319507551997504211_n.jpg?w=960&ssl=1