Early Retirement Extreme Forums

Put in an order for RDUS.

Also watching utilities, rail, and farmland names. And SEDG.

I just made a napkin calculation and if I'm not mistaken, Microsoft + Google + Amazon + Facebook are worth more (market cap) than all of the German stock market combined.
I'll take Germany, thanks.

I've been building positions in XOM and NKE to hold for about a year or more. Selling covered calls to exit on remaining shares of IBM, GS and WY, which are mostly gone now. On REITS, recently bought VTR and GLPI. Also bought some ENB and a little TLT and GLD.

So rates get hiked (with more coming) and financials go flat/down, REITS/Utilities go through the roof. Eh?

@cmonkey - you're not the only confused person... why does GLD go up when the dollar will be stronger?

Well, short-term movements are all about expectations. As some famous investor (Buffett? Graham?) said, in the short-term the market is just a voting machine. It only becomes a weighing machine long-term.

My guess is that prior to the announcement, people were speculating on three more rate hikes this year (or more than 1/4 point now) and the Fed came in at "less than expectations." A lot of the movement today was simply a reversal of what happened in the past week or so, so there may have been some covering of positions, too -- that old "buy/sell on the rumor, sell/buy on the news" thing.

It also tells us that if for some reason there are not two more rate hikes this year, you can expect the same kind of action around the time of the next announcement.

The most notable thing is that the yield curve just flattened, especially on the front end: https://www.treasury.gov/resource-cente ... data=yield

I thought the gist of the perceived good news today was that the Fed went ahead with the rate hike despite the recent weak economic data.

@GTOO -- Trump is actively pushing for a weaker dollar to improve US trade prospects. That will inflate gold.

Dragline wrote:My guess is that prior to the announcement, people were speculating on three more rate hikes this year (or more than 1/4 point now) and the Fed came in at "less than expectations." A lot of the movement today was simply a reversal of what happened in the past week or so, so there may have been some covering of positions, too -- that old "buy/sell on the rumor, sell/buy on the news" thing

I pondered this on the bus home today and came to that conclusion as well. The market wanted more 'hawkishness', three 25 basis point moves isn't as much yield as the REITs. I think I saw something about some expectations of 4 hikes, but then went they with 3 for now.

I'm not proud of what I'm about to say...

I bought APH - Canadian weed stock - near all time highs today. As far as I'm concerned, I put some money down at the casino and it is spent and gone. This buy is legitimately a bet on weed stocks getting a big bump for 4/20 and the legislation supposed to come out next week.

My exit range is -100% to +20%.

Seems my trailing stop loss for TSLA got triggered near the end of April 5 (damn..), leaving me w/ a short term gain of 58%. You know what they say.. sell the winners and let the losers ride.

haha, they also say "a bird in the hand ..."

Bought XLE, NKE and TLT today and sold covered calls on half of those positions. Sold covered calls to exit MCD.

In my non-trading fund (the bulk of the money), I've been buying short and long term treasuries, and adding to gold. I'm inching closer to a golden butterfly. I'm having trouble convincing myself to buy into the stock part of the allocation right now, although I have bought several REITs. Apparently my golden butterfly is going to have REIT antennae.

Stop-loss triggered on APH this morning for a tiny $250 profit. That was fun?

Edit: I know I said I would ride to -100% but I wasn't at my desk all week so I decided to hedge. Good thing, otherwise I would have been down already 20% on that bet. I can't stomach these trades, lesson learned.

haha, they also say "a bird in the hand ..."

I never liked that saying

On the topic of TSLA and From another thread:

jacob wrote: ↑

Thu Feb 23, 2017 4:37 pm

There's no Tesla Truck.

Well Tesla will be showing their alleged self-driving (drivers are ~25% of fleet operating cost) full-electric (fuel is ~40% of fleet operating cost) semi this year. Pick-ups and vans are not far off. The later two, I think will be the real cash cow for Tesla. I'm not sure about the semis.. it makes a lot more sense to me to make these things hybrids? "Industry experts" are saying the truck will only be able to travel 200-300 miles before needing a charge or swap but I anticipate some iPhone-level industry surprise coming (could be something like it actually being a hybrid, some financing/leasing innovation, re-fuelling spots offering super cheap electricity, some crazy electricity storage scheme (you may be able to deliver electricity from cheap areas to expensive areas as a by-product?), getting 1000+ miles on the battery, Trump giving Musk a large subsidy, Tesla trailers featuring auxiliary battery, Tesla being a monopoly of quality large batteries, etc).

I'm still waiting to hear what the self-driving and autonomous delivery vehicles will do about hijackings...

@GTOO, many of the features necessary for theft deterrence will surely come standard on self-driving cars
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bait_car)
E.g. remote start/kill switch, GPS navigation, cameras, etc.

So, a thief gets in it and drives off. After 2 minutes, the car pulls over to the side of the road, shuts down and locks all the doors until the police arrive.

I suppose it could be possible to override that, or hack it, but that would take some sophistication.

George the original one wrote: ↑

Fri Apr 14, 2017 9:09 pm

I'm still waiting to hear what the self-driving and autonomous delivery vehicles will do about hijackings...

I can see a lot of people hacking hitch-hiking on self-driving vehicles. You could go all kinds of places on them. We'll be hopping SDVs like people used to hop freights.

Some algos scooped up the dollar bills I scattered in front of my steamroller. Mostly deep OTM options. Not an investment, just uninformed speculation based on a hunch that we are "due" for volatility. <0.1% of NW at stake. Gives me a reason to follow the market. In some alternate universe I will become a multi-millionaire. That's good enough for me. #EREgambler

cmonkey wrote: ↑

Sat Jan 14, 2017 4:57 pm

Sold CAT.

Curious how others have gotten past the kicking of one's own ass for past decisions.