Well since it is the weekend and we all need time away from the markets........here is a very PHILOSOPHICAL article about collecting. I know there are a number of collectors on here including myself. I also know that the items that many of us collect....do have investment value......but that is NOT why most people collect. The Digital Death of the Collector https://kylechayka.substack.com/p/essay-the-digital-death-of-collecting (BOLD is my opinion OR what I consider important content)......although I do recommend this ENTIRE article....food for thought. "I am rearranging my music collection — looking at the album covers, hearing snippets of the songs in my head as I see each one and recall the memories attached to it. There are the albums I listen to all the time and then those I only pick up once in a while so as not to dull their effects. The overall list is something only I could have come up with, a compendium of the music that’s important to me personally. Actually, it might be more correct to say that my record collection has been rearranged for me: I opened the Spotify app on my laptop a few weeks ago and found that everything I had saved was in disarray. The albums weren’t where I thought they were. I couldn’t flip through them with my usual clicks, the kind of subconscious muscle memory that builds up when you use a piece of software every day, like your thumb going directly to the Instagram app button on your phone screen. Spotify had updated its interface and suddenly I was lost. I couldn’t put on the jazz record by Yusef Lateef that I play every morning when I start writing and I couldn’t figure out where to find the songs I had saved by pressing the heart-shaped like button. The sudden lack of spatial logic was like a form of aphasia, as if someone had moved around all the furniture in my living room and I was still trying to navigate it as I always had. Spotify’s new “Your Library” tab, which implied everything I was looking for, opened up a window of automatically generated playlists that I didn’t recognize. The next tab over offered podcasts, which I never listened to on the app. Nothing made sense. In the digital era, when everything seems to be a single click away, it’s easy to forget that we have long had physical relationships with the pieces of culture we consume. We store books on bookshelves, mount art on our living-room walls, and keep stacks of vinyl records. When we want to experience something, we seek it out, finding a book by its spine, pulling an album from its case, or opening an app. The way we interact with something — where we store it — also changes the way we consume it, as Spotify’s update made me realize. Where we store something can even outweigh the way we consume it. In 1931, the German cultural critic Walter Benjamin wrote an essay called “Unpacking My Library,” describing these relationships with cultural objects. In the essay, Benjamin narrates removing his book collection from dusty crates, untouched for years. The volumes are splayed loose on the floor, “not yet touched by the mild boredom of order,” all set to be rearranged on shelves once more. For Benjamin, the very possession of these books formed his identity as a reader, writer, and human being — even if he hadn’t read all of them. They sat proudly on his shelves as symbols, representing the knowledge that he still aspired to gain or the cities he had traveled, where he encountered a book in a previously unknown shop. Collecting books was his way of interacting with the world, of building a worldview. Benjamin’s library was a personal monument, the same kind that we all construct of things we like or identify with. Its importance was dependent on permanence — collections are made up of things that we own, that don’t go away unless we decide they should. “Ownership is the most intimate relationship that one can have to objects,” Benjamin wrote. “Not that they have come alive in him; it is he who lives in them.” In other words, we often discover ourselves in what we keep around us. But the progressive relationship, the codependence or co-evolution of collection and person, wouldn’t happen if the order of Benjamin’s shelves and the catalogue of his books kept changing every few months, entirely outside of his control. That’s what Spotify’s interface updates felt like to me: a total disruption of the pieces of art and culture that I identified with. Even if the change in the interface was minor — requiring an extra click to get to my playlists or moving the link to my saved albums — it’s a reminder that I don’t actually own any of what I’m listening to. I’m just paying for access month by month with my subscription fee to the streaming service. My relationship to music is ultimately dictated by the Spotify platform, both what I can listen to and how I listen to it. Unlike Benjamin, I can’t pack up my collection and take it with me. My cultural aspirations are at the mercy of a corporation in Sweden: If Spotify clashes with a particular record label or decides a song format is unsuitable, I won’t be able to access it anymore through the channel I use most often, and I might very well just stop listening to it. We don’t often think about bookshelves on their own, separate from what they contain, but they are great devices. They display books or albums and you can choose from among the displayed options in a relatively neutral way. The collector is the only one who decides how to arrange her possessions, ordering books by author, title, theme, or even (unfortunately) color of the cover — and they stay in the same places they’re put. That’s not true of our digital cultural interfaces, which follow the whims and priorities of the technology companies that own them. They shift constantly and are far from neutral: If Spotify suddenly gives the category of podcasts a prominent new placement, for example, it’s because the company has decided that podcasts are going to make up more of its revenue in the future. The interfaces follow the company’s incentives, pushing its own products first and foremost, or changing familiar patterns to manipulate users into trying a new feature. The same thing has happened with Instagram, lately, too — the changing interface makes me feel like I’m suddenly operating unfamiliar machinery, piloting an ungainly tractor in a construction site. I can’t perform the same actions I used to, and so I can’t use the app in quite the same way. These changes leave no trace; unlike an outdated television or microwave, once the digital app updates itself the older version ceases to exist, smoothly replaced as if it were never there in the first place (an erasure that lends a peculiar ephemerality to our memories of technology). The biggest change on Instagram circa 2020 was the replacement of the button at the bottom center of the screen. Instead of pressing that convenient spot to publish a new image on your account, it began loading Instagram’s relatively new Reels feature, a video-feed clone of the far more popular TikTok. The priority of the platform was no longer creation, building your own set of images, but consumption, passively watching videos. I have never watched an Instagram Reel video on purpose because I have absolutely no desire to — I associate Instagram much more with photographs from friends’ lives than short, highly edited wannabe TV clips. But I have hit the button by accident many times and recoiled in shock when some dance routine set to loud pop music pops up. To actually post a photo, I now have to move my thumb to the top of the screen, hit a small plus sign, then choose which kind of format I’m trying to upload — Post, Story, Reels, or Live, which are all slightly different flavors of content. It feels like the app itself doesn’t know what it wants me to do, and thus I don’t know what to do with it. Should I still post mundane snapshots, or do I need to learn a meme dance? My personal Instagram archive, a decade-long account of my adult life in images, still exists on the platform, but that album of memories feels defunct, relic of an earlier era of the software. When I look back at it, I don’t feel nostalgic; I feel lost. My lostness comes from the sense that our cultural collections are not wholly our own anymore. In the era of algorithmic feeds, it’s as if the bookshelves have started changing shape on their own in real time, shuffling some material to the front and downplaying the rest like a sleight-of-hand magician trying to make you pick a specific card — even as they let you believe it’s your own choice. And this lack of agency is undermining our connections to the culture that we love. For Benjamin, the importance of collecting stemmed from its endurance and persistence, a longterm commitment that the collector makes to the collection. “A collector’s attitude toward his possessions stems from an owner’s feeling of responsibility toward his property,” he wrote in his library essay. Benjamin would have detested the era of algorithmic platforms not because they’re so all-encompassing and overwhelming — Benjamin had no problem with infinite copies — but because they’re so ephemeral. It’s very difficult to be responsible for what we collect on the internet; we can’t be stewards of the culture we appreciate in the same way. We very literally don’t own it. You can accrue a delicately curated digital library of music only to have it thrown into disarray when the app changes. Or your collections can be lost entirely when it shuts down. Just as each new digital interface erases its earlier versions, the disappearance of particular apps throws the meaning of content gathered on the app to the wind. It’s not like a bunch of eight-track tapes found in the trunk of an old car that can be played again with the proper technology and experienced, essentially, in full once more. Building a collection on the internet is like building a sandcastle on the beach: eventually the tide washes in and it’s as if it never existed in the first place. Such is the feeling I get when I look back at my accounts on platforms like Tumblr, where I once collected 408 pages of anime GIFs, fragments of poems, and evocative video game screenshots for the better part of a decade, or the photo albums I posted on Facebook around 2007, a feature that is more or less gone, at least from its original purpose of publishing actually impromptu photos of your friends. The shifting sands of digital technology have robbed these collections of their meaning; the context in which they originally existed can no longer be experienced and they only appear as nostalgic ruins, the remains of once-inhabited metropolises gone silent. Many of the images I once shared on Tumblr are now broken links. I could have downloaded these collections in their prime and made sure I could always access them, but that couldn’t capture the meaning of their flow and the social exchange that they once represented. What I see when I look at my Tumblr archive that’s still extant online is a glimpse of a slower, more intimate, linear, and coherent digital space than what now exists in the turbo-charged feeds of the algorithm era. It reminds me that things were once different, but also doesn’t give me much hope of recapturing that meditative pace. Algorithmic feeds are by their nature impersonal, though they promise personalized recommendations. The more automated a feed is, the less we users feel the need to gather a collection, to preserve what’s important to us. If we can always rely on Instagram’s Discover page or the TikTok For You feed to show us something that we’re interested in, then we have less impetus to decide for ourselves what to look for, follow, and save. The responsibility of collecting has been removed, but that means we offload it to the black box of the automatic recommendation system. Over the past two decades, the collecting of culture — like maintaining a personal library — has moved from being a necessity to a seemingly indulgent luxury. It goes back to the significance of the bookshelf: When we didn’t have access to automated feeds and streaming platforms, we had to decide for ourselves which culture to keep close by. As a teenager in the 2000s, my on-demand access to music was contained within one of those rubbery CD binders in which you slot albums into transparent cases, like pages in a book. I flipped through them aimlessly when deciding what to play on my portable discman, my range of choices limited to what I already owned but also deepened because I had a relationship to every disc in the binder. I still have nostalgic memories of that binder; I can feel the texture of the case and the sense of possibility that it held in my mind. Yet that relationship has become increasingly abstract and indirect as the expansion of digital technology in our daily lives has accelerated. From CD binders I moved to audio players like iTunes, where I still maintained a collection of MP3s, scrolling through them to find a particular musician or album. Then came larger online platforms like YouTube and Pandora, where you could look up videos or songs whenever you wanted but also let the platform create a feed for you, a digital radio station curated by algorithm. Finally, in recent years, Spotify became the single international behemoth of mainstream music, an unavoidable iceberg of content. You can save or bookmark albums on Spotify and call up a musician to listen to, but the structure of the service drives you toward passive listening, following its recommendations without having to make decisions. As I’ve used Spotify longer and the interface has changed shape, I’ve found myself becoming a more passive user, saving fewer albums; thinking less about the specifics of the albums or artists I’m hearing; and losing track of my library. What’s worse for me as a collector and cultural consumer is ultimately better for the platform: I’ll keep subscribing to Spotify because it’s the only way I’ll have access to the music. There’s no CD binder I can take with me. In the era of the algorithmic feed, these platforms have become the containers for our cultural artifacts as well as for our cultural experiences. While we have the advantage of freedom of choice, the endless array of options often instills a sense of meaninglessness: I could be listening to anything, so why should any one thing be important to me? The constructive relationship between consumer and culture goes in both directions. When we find something meaningful enough to save, to collect it, the action both etches it a little deeper into our hearts and it also creates a context around the artifact itself, whether song, image, or video — and context not just for ourselves but for other people, the shared context of culture at large. That’s what Benjamin described when he wrote, “The phenomenon of collecting loses its meaning as it loses its personal owner.” Just as collections require permanence, they also need individuals, whose voices and tastes they express. The mass of Spotify isn’t actually a collection; it’s an avalanche. Benjamin thought that the figure of the collector was vanishing even in his own time, the 1930s: Public libraries existed, of course, but those couldn’t compare to the individual, slowly gathering volumes at home. “Only in extinction is the collector comprehended,” he wrote, prematurely mourning the loss of a lifestyle and an identity that he held dear for himself as much as anyone else. Yet even with all its excesses of content, our era of algorithmic feeds might herald the actual death of the collector, because the algorithm itself is the collector, curator, and arbiter of culture. Not only does that represent a loss of agency and control, it’s also a loss of feeling. Benjamin’s library called up in his mind and heart an array of scenes, the places and people that brought the books to him: Memories of the cities in which I found so many things: Riga, Naples, Munich, Danzig, Moscow, Florence, Basel, Paris; memories of Rosenthal’s sumptuous rooms in Munich, of the Danzig Stockturm where the late Hans Rhaue was domiciled, of Siissengut’s musty book cellar in North Berlin; memories of the rooms where these books had been housed, of my student’s den in Munich, of my room in Bern, of the solitude of Iseltwald on the Lake of Brienz, and finally of my boyhood room, the former location of only four or five of the several thousand volumes that are piled up around me. The placelessness and self-erasure of digital platforms and the enforced passivity of the algorithmic feed have removed these experiences. I don’t form the same kind of nostalgic memories using Spotify that I did with the binder of CDs that sat with me on the couch or in my car as a teenager, and in any case, after the stretch of time that nostalgia needs to develop, that version of Spotify’s software will be long gone, inaccessible even if I wanted to recapture it." MY COMMENT As an art and antique collector......as you age......you realize that you are simply a CUSTODIAN of the items that you have for the span of your life. They will continue on after you are gone. You are simply their guardian for a while. Most of the art that I own is between 70 and 140 years old. Each year I celebrate the 100th year anniversary of some painting that I own....for a while. The average age of most of the art that I own is about 90 to 120 years. Baring some disaster like fire, or flood, or other destruction, they will outlive me and continue on as historical items. That is the ONE TRUE purpose of a collector.....to pass those items on to the FUTURE.....to preserve our history and culture. BUT.....over time they slowly disappear as some are lost....it is inevitable. I use technology and live in the DIGITAL WORLD like everyone else. BUT....I try to use technology to my benefit and not let the technology control me for.....its benefit. At least I am seeing a lot of younger people that ARE collecting and coming to appreciate the OLD STUFF. One of my kids and his friends are now into searching for and collecting ACTUAL record albums. I have noticed with my own kids....as they got into their mid 30's......they began to have more cultural awareness and start to collect certain items. So I guess there is some HOPE for the preservation of CULTURE. AND....who knows.....as we see with many many different categories of collectables.......those items often have value and to some degree ARE an investment. Something that will NEVER be achieved with a bunch of worthless digital "STUFF" that exists on a computer......at least until someone else decides to impose their will on the person that THINKS they are the owner.
That’s a really good observation W… and as a good custodian of your LEGACY you should also consider planning to recruit the next GUARDIAN of those precious pieces. It’s so sad that in the world of collectibles there are so many collections that get lost to sharks and dealers because their original owner forgot about probably the most important part of continuation in guarding them - finding the right person to watch over them to preserve your pedigree… It’s FASCINATING how similar collectibles are to businesses. When you are running a business for many years..decades… you are the custodian of that company… you not only build a “collection” to yourself or family… you build it so OTHERS will benefit from it, and by doing so it’s imperative to find an apprentice who will continue to build and expand that collection/business, or at the very least preserve it. My wife and I find ourselves thinking about that every day that we work. Our business of over 40 years was already passed on to us, WITHOUT EVEN PLANNING IT, by its previous owner who passed away from a terminal illness. We could’ve liquidated, sold and move on with our lives and enjoy the rest of it. We OFTEN think about it. But the business had proven to us that it works throughout many many years, through market & economy collapses, through tragedies and disasters. And yes. Even through DEATHS. Our business is probably looking at us and LAUGHING at how we struggle with making decisions. It keeps on extending its protective arms around us and GUARD US. And through all of these battles- it provides a SAFE HOME for hundreds of musicians and people in the creative field. And so our treasure of all collectibles, our legacy, the previous owners legacy, is our business and it indeed guards us… hopefully for an eternity!
What a nice.....and....smart post Zukodany. Obviously you know what I mean on many levels.....as a collector and as a small business owner. A FAMILY business really is an important legacy. Sounds like the person that picked you and passed the business on to you made a good choice. Hopefully you will have the right person to pass the busines on to when the time comes. YOU are so right about passing on something that is important. We have certain paintings and certain items that certain kids have expressed an interest in. We have decided that we are NOT going to designate who gets what ahead of time. I have seen too many times when that just results in a grab for "stuff" by family members. We only have two kids and will just leave it to them to figure out who gets what when the time comes. I believe they will not have any issues or problems doing so. They already somewhat know what the other one would like to have and I dont think there will be any conflicts. We are very open with our kids as to what things are worth as well as the history and provenance of items that we own. Any things that they decide to keep from our estate......we want them to do so with an appreciation of what the item is and not just based on value. I have some extensive files documenting the history and provenance of our art and other items......at least to the extent that it is known or I was able to research it. I have also left information with our wills on how to dispose of particular items and categories of items in our home. I think this is very important.........since I would prefer to see items go to a proper sale venue and end up going to to someone that appreciates them for what they are and not just end up being sold in a general estate sale, or general auction, etc, etc.
When I lived in Germany not too long after the war......1958-1960.....the people were dumping much of their history and culture for modern furnishings. A lot was lost as items ended up in the trash or junk stores. There is no way to avoid this.....it happens in every culture over time as people just move on to some other style and think the older stuff is just JUNK. As an art collector it was interesting to talk to old collectors over my lifetime and hear their stories of finding paintings in garbage cans, junk piles, basements, etc, etc. Most of those old collectors are gone now. I still hear of examples of this happening once in a while.......but not as often as it used to.......at least now there seems to be more awareness that some item might be worth checking out before throwing it in the trash.
HERE is a general little reminder to all of US MALE INVESTORS. Panic sellers during stock market dips are often married men with children https://www.cnbc.com/2021/09/27/pan...ket-dips-are-often-married-men-with-kids.html (BOLD is my opinion OR what I consider important content) "Key Points Panic selling during stock market dips is more likely for men over age 45, or who are married with children, research finds. Those chasing portfolio stability by trading during volatile periods may cause the opposite results. Someone prone to emotional moves may need a system of “checks and balances,” financial experts say. Panic selling is common after stock market dips, and it’s more likely to happen with certain investors, according to research from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. When the market drops, men who are over age 45, or are married with children or have self-described “excellent investment experience” are more prone to sell-offs, the research shows. “These are significant drivers of panic selling,” said co-author Chi Heem Wong, researcher at MIT. And many who leave the stock market don’t return, thereby missing out on recoveries. While the study doesn’t uncover why some investors may be more vulnerable to emotional selling, financial experts say the findings raise further questions about how these factors — gender, age, marriage and family — affect behavior. The research suggests these sellers have emotional overreactions defined by their decisions having the opposite of the intended effect, said Amanda Clayman, a financial therapist in Los Angeles. “Clearly, these are people who are trying to protect themselves,” she said. While most investors are vulnerable to emotional choices, the findings from MIT align with other research showing men may be more prone to acting on their impulses. Women are not as likely to take a huge decisive action like this because they’re not quite sure that their impulse or their feeling is correct. “Women are not as likely to take a huge decisive action like this because they’re not quite sure that their impulse or their feeling is correct,” Clayman said. Men are 35% more likely to trade investments than women, according to a study from Fidelity, and trying to time the market often leads to lower performance. Moreover, those trading to achieve stability during volatile periods often see the opposite results, another study from the University of British Columbia finds. Control bias Some males face pressure from an early age to “figure it out themselves,” which may trigger a control bias, or thinking that can influence results when they can not, said certified financial planner Teresa Bailey, wealth strategist at Waddell & Associates in Nashville, Tennessee. “They sometimes feel that if they know enough about a subject, they should be able to control the outcome,” she said. “Unfortunately, there are far more variables at play when attempting to time the market.” And once these investors get lost, it can be tough to seek guidance if they feel it’s their role to solve the problem on their own, she said. Checks and balances As humans primed with survival instincts, it can be challenging to avoid “fight or flight” responses like hitting the sell button when stocks plummet, Clayman said. However, someone possibly more susceptible to panic selling may want to create a system of checks and balances, such as calling a peer or discussing the decision with a partner, she said, to protect themselves from emotional responses. “We are not very accurate at assessing our actual threat response when we think about it ahead of time,” Clayman said. “Most of us freak out way more than we think.”" MY COMMENT Yes.....us males are not very good at investing when you get down to it. We ALL greatly OVERESTIMATE our ability and control of situations. This is one reason that I post on this site and other sites in the past. By putting my thinking into print.....it forces me to focus my thinking and serves as a CHECK to my human brain. I EXPECT anyone on here to tell me that I am being an IDIOT.......if I am being an IDIOT. I dont have much interaction with other investors in my day to day life. Nothing I am involved in is with investors.......no one I know talks about money or investing in real life. So......the act of typing something on here.....FORCES ME......to think and evaluate what I am doing.
Another day.....same open. YEP.....same open as we have been seeing now for a few weeks. No big deal. It is normal for stocks to take a breather and linger. The MAJORITY of investors are siting and doing nothing. I am including all the 401K and retirement accounts.....as part of that majority. Those types of funds just continuously flow into the markets.....on automatic pilot. I dont get the feeling that there is any real concern about the markets out there.......in retail investor country. In fact I dont get the feeling that anyone is paying attention at all. The open today does not seem to me to have any real power......it is simply the result of people being worn out and not caring. It is just a BLAH open and continuation of the markets and many investors just saying......WHATEVER.
HERE is what is going on this week. Stock market news live updates: Stocks mostly lower ahead of data-heavy week, Nasdaq falls as Treasury yields rise https://finance.yahoo.com/news/stock-market-news-live-updates-october-4-2021-113322666.html (BOLD is my opinion OR what I consider important content) "Stocks mostly fell on Monday, giving back some of Friday's gains as traders awaited new economic and earnings data this week to confirm or assuage concerns over supply chain challenges, inflation and the pace of the labor market's recovery. The S&P 500 edged down by about 0.1%. Last Friday, the first day of October and the fourth quarter, the blue-chip index logged its best start to the month since 2007 with a jump of 1.2%. Still, the index posted a weekly loss of 2.2%, or its worst since February, after an equity rout earlier in the week. The Nasdaq underperformed against the other two major indexes, dropping 0.7% as Treasury yields climbed. The benchmark 10-year yield hovered just below 1.5%. Stocks are struggling to regain footing after a September selloff, given that many of the concerns that sparked last month's drop have persisted. In Congress, lawmakers have yet to come to an agreement on a solution to raise the debt limit and avert a potential government default, or an outcome that could come as soon mid-month and engender "a financial crisis and economic recession," Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen warned last week. Jitters over ongoing supply chain disruptions and fast-rising inflation have also been in focus, especially after Friday's U.S. personal consumption expenditures (PCE) report reflected the fastest annual rise in inflation since 1991. And later this week, traders will receive the Labor Department's monthly jobs report for September, which is expected to show an at least modest acceleration in job growth after a much weaker-than-expected August report. But after a strong string of economic data earlier this year, many pundits are bracing for decelerating growth and potential data disappointments into year-end. "We are going to have to sort of tiptoe our way through some of the negative numbers that we will likely see, but I think the market will look across this valley," Sam Stovall, U.S. equity strategist for CFRA Research, told Yahoo Finance Live on Friday. And though only a handful of companies are reporting quarterly earnings results this week, the prints will help set the tone ahead of the formal start of third-quarter earnings season with the big banks next week. As of Friday, consensus analysts on Wall Street projected earnings growth of just over 27% for the S&P 500 for the third quarter, according to FactSet. That would represent a marked slowdown from the second quarter's 88% pace, but still come in as the third highest year-over-year growth rate since 2010 for the index. "As equity valuations come under scrutiny amid the rapid rise in real rates, investor focus will increasingly assess whether earnings growth can continue to lead the market higher," Goldman Sachs equity strategist David Kostin wrote in a note. He said the four key areas investors should be watching in the reports and management commentary this earnings season are on supply chains, oil, labor costs and growth in China. "We expect upside to consensus estimates but believe the frequency and magnitude of EPS [earnings per share] beats will moderate from 1H 2021," Kostin added. MY COMMENT OK.......same issues as we have been facing for the past SIX MONTHS. Nothing new.......the re-opening continues to be kicked down the road. It is OBVIOUSLY taking much longer for the e economy to normalize. ALTHOUGH.......it has ONLY been a few weeks since we ended the free money for not working. We may be caught up in the current.....government hell loop.....for the rest of the year.....it is all up to the politicians how long they want to keep this "stuff" in the media spotlight.
EARNINGS....well this should provide some distraction for investors from the current......VACUUM.......that is allowing the media and traders to focus on the same old NEGATIVE topics that has been used to fear monger the markets for the past 6-12 months. The BIG BANKS will kick things off as usual.....in a week or two. I have no illusions about earnings. Good or bad the spin will focus on the negative as usual. Report bad data.....and down you go. Report good data......and down you go.....as the pundits focus on obscure forward looking statements or other micro-data.......INSTEAD of the BIG PICTURE earnings data which will probably be NICELY positive. As usual.....most earnings WILL BEAT the estimates......and.....will be money in the bank for future gains.
The SILLINESS continues with the Ten Year Treasury yield. The yield is around 1.5%. NOT real shocking in REALITY when you consider that it is STILL on the low end of the past 100 years. In my 45+ years of investing I have NEVER seen such an OBSESSIVE focus on the ten year yield by the financial media. The LEMMINGS are running.
Exactly. It’s very tricky with valuable assets and collectibles… or just general inheritance… funny… when you inherit a business or real estate it’s not as easy to “flip”as say, a stock portfolio and so sometimes that ends up lasting longer.. or even till the next person inherits it from the one who inherited it. I’m sure you’re familiar with the Frazetta estate story.. was kinda sad, Frank didn’t leave a proper will and the family ended up in court fighting over his art, resulting in Frank jr even STEALING some of those precious pieces. A shame. We plan on expanding our business.. it’s now or never… building up in a few locations and expanding… It’s days like these in the market that I appreciate having income producing properties. Regardless of what happens in the market in the past 20 years of me working the biz and initially owning it, we’ve never ever had a loss of income or a “correction”.. sure there have been headaches and drops in income, but each and every year we would make a good salary and of course the properties value overall increased…. That’s basically why I actually consider my investments as very diversified… it’s stocks which are heavily concentrated around tech, but also real estate and some collectibles And speaking of which… DAMN… this looks like the market is determined in spiraling down for a little while… I’m down 6.25 from ATH which is getting closer and closer to correction levels… let’s see where this beast goes
I DO agree with this little article.......we need to just grow up.....and....deal with it. Supply chain bottlenecks will persist unless one of two things happens, expert explains https://finance.yahoo.com/news/supply-chain-bottlenecks-why-132224137.html (BOLD is my opinion OR what I consider important content) "Although businesses may be struggling with unexpected cargo delays, supply chain bottlenecks may not be resolved in the near term. "I don't see a line of sight where this ends anytime soon," Weston LaBar, head of strategy at Cargomatic, a freight load-matching company, told Yahoo Finance Live (video above). Some experts even expect the supply chain problems to hit the holiday shopping season. Container ships have been delayed for days at major ports on the West Coast, and trucking routes have been at maximum capacity as a labor shortage plagues the industry. "One of the big impacts of COVID was the impact of e-commerce and the need for more drivers in the industry, the need for more infrastructure in the form of local delivery centers, to be able to get products to homes, and this continues to impact the supply chain," LaBar explained. And looking at forecasts through 2022, "I don't think you're going to see much of a dip in or reprieve in these bottlenecks," LaBar added, "until you see either consumer spending habits change or a massive investment in both our infrastructure and our workforce." Stephen Lamar, president and CEO of the American Apparel & Footwear Association, told Yahoo Finance Live on Friday that the current situation "is a crisis of epic proportion, and it's really just been getting worse." Due to massive delays at the Los Angeles and Long Beach ports, shipping costs have rapidly risen north, as seen in the chart below by HSBC. HSBC note from September 30. Lamar warned that not only are those hikes likely to be passed on to consumers, but they could also affect the country's economic recovery. "Unfortunately, when you look at these high freight costs, when you look at the delays, customers are gonna find empty shelves, they're gonna find higher prices," Lamar said. "And ultimately one of the things we're afraid of is that that's going to mean job losses. Because if companies can't get their goods in, if they can't sell their goods, that means they don't have the revenue to keep workers on payroll." Oxford Economics According to LaBar, a unique cause for the labor shortage in the trucking industry, one that his company works closely with, is due to the specialized needs some products require. "When you have a need for a hazmat driver because you have hazardous materials or you have a need for a driver to have special permits or qualifications, like going in and out of sea ports, or going in and out of rail ramps," LaBar explained, "that obviously creates a bigger constraint because we have a massive truck driver shortage." Getting the right type of truck drivers for specialized commodities and products is "where we've seen the biggest delays," he stressed. Lamar called on the White House to provide additional support during this period, such as suspending the tariffs imposed by the Trump administration and concentrating efforts to address the bottlenecks." MY COMMENT JUST another big impact of closing the economy and thinking that we could just snap our fingers and it would all magically come back. The law of unintended and unanticipated consequences. We are simply going to have to go through he process of re-opening month by month, bit by bit. It is going to take time.....there will be NO shortcut or magic bullet. I notice that local grocery stores here are for the most part fully stocked with products....but the shelves have empty space. There are products on the shelf but not at the normal volume. I continue to say we are 12-24 months from being back to normal in the economy. On the TRUCKING ISSUE.....there is a HUGE shortage of trucks and drivers. BUT.....it is stimulating SMALL private investors. Just this weekend I was talking to a relative. He and his wife have started a small trucking company and just bought their first Semi-Truck. They see the opportunity to take advantage of the current demand for trucking. Their big issue like every trucking company will be finding drivers. They intend to lease their truck and driver to one of the big national companies. So.....the AMERICAN SPIRIT is still alive and well. As usual....the issues we are seeing are STIMULATING people to go out and start small businesses and try to take advantage of he situation to improve themselves.
I hear you ZUKODANY. The NASDAQ.....tech heavy....is down about 5%. NOT a disaster......in fact....not even a correction. YOUR income from your business gives you freedom with your stocks. You are not depending on that money for living. I understand what you are saying about business having been a small business owner for many years. I feel bad for people that are going to be DEPENDENT on their stocks and funds for their income in retirement. It will be very difficult to deal with the day to day issues in the markets when that is your ONLY form of income. I feel very thankful that we have DIVORCED our income from the action of the stock markets through our income annuities. It is nice to have those SIX deposits show up in my Schwab bank account each month regardless of what is going on in the markets. BUT....everyone needs to keep in mind that the STUFF we are seeing now in the markets is JUST short term DRAMA. The short term is really irrelevant....it is the LONG TERM that counts. I would rather see us go through a rough patch in the markets right now.....and....get it out of the way. If we have to have a slow and lingering down time for a few months now....at least we still have the potential to end the year with a nice rally....once we get most of this short term DRAMA out of the way. We are SLOWLY chipping away at the year to date gains.....the SP500 is now at 14.33% year to date. BUT...that is STILL over the long term average. AND....still well above my PERSONAL annual goal of averaging 10% or more long term.....so...it is what it is short term. Not particularly worried or even slightly concerned. I continue to be fully invested for the long term as usual.
I’m all in favor of a drop right now… this really does remind me of the first quarter of this year where talks about inflation were all the rage… of course none of that ever happened and it’s a little disappointing that the coming correction, IF it will occur, will be based on nothing, where the REAL problems - jobs, spending, massive evictions - are STILL brewing in the back burner. If all this market has to dish is a back and fourth drops/increase over rates and inflation fears we will be just fine… sad to say - buy the dip, rinse and repeat… but if REALITY ever comes knocking on wall streets doors…. Boy oh boy… watch out!
YUP !!! Down 2% so far today , Down 6.7% month to month , or from ATH, take your pick, my ATH was September 4th. As far as small businesses starts , I love the fact that the great american dream is alive and kicking, new business starts are at an ATH !!!!
You are right as usual....this little attempt at a correction is really not based on much REALITY. BUT....that is often the way it works with corrections....they are all emotion and DRAMA and often not much reality involved. That is why they tend to only last 2-6 months. I did a crude calculation of my current.....DROP from this little bit of market WEAKNESS. I am down by about 5.98% as a result. When I look at that in DOLLAR TERMS....that is some REAL MONEY. BUT....in percentage terms.....not too bad considering. It FEELS like we should be down by more than that......but a lot of that FEELING is all the negativity, confusion, turmoil, drama, government incompetence, etc, etc, etc...that is WEARING PEOPLE DOWN....right now. PEOPLE are sick and tired of all the HARANGUING about Covid and society right now. Our "leaders".......on all sides and on all levels......need to simply.......SHUT UP......and let us normalize for a while. They are NOT helping people with their constant HECTORING. They need to TRUST the American people.
For the year......we STILL have a nice gain. BUT....today...a lost cause. About the best we can hope for today is a bit of a pull back from the loss levels as we close out the day over the next 45 minutes. Not holding my breath.
REAL or not this is what is driving the markets. Tech Selloff Batters U.S. Indexes; Nasdaq Falls 2%: Markets Wrap https://finance.yahoo.com/news/asian-stocks-set-gains-dollar-214914213.html (BOLD is my opinion OR what I consider important content) (Bloomberg) -- "U.S. stocks declined as a selloff in technology stocks resumed on the threat of persistently high inflation. The S&P 500 fell more than 1% -- dipping below its 100-day moving average -- while the Nasdaq 100 slid more than 2%. The losses were led by high-growth technology companies -- including Amazon.com Inc. and Facebook Inc. -- while vaccine makers were also lower on Merck & Co.’s announcement about an effective Covid-19 drug. Energy stocks, meanwhile, were higher along with oil prices. “There’s a wall of worry that markets are trying to climb at the moment,” said Deutsche Bank strategist Jim Reid in a note. “We have an energy crisis, supply chain issues, higher inflation, signs of weaker growth, and lots of talk about stagflation.” Global markets have taken a risk-off turn amid a growing list of worries, just as investors have been bracing for the Federal Reserve to begin tapering stimulus as early as next month. Higher inflation and Treasury yields make the premium investors pay for high-growth stocks less attractive. The risk to earnings may also be higher for some tech companies. “Technology stocks are most likely getting hit the hardest because higher interest rates means higher discount rates for future earnings,” said Brian Price, head of investment management for Commonwealth Financial Network. “I would expect this dynamic to continue as long as inflation expectations remain at the higher end.” Fears of a spreading energy crunch were also seen adding to concerns about inflation with European power and gas prices surging before the onset of winter. The power contract for November in Germany hit a record while natural-gas futures extended a rally on Monday. Meanwhile, crude oil in New York surged to the highest since 2014 as OPEC+ agreed to an output hike for November. The post-pandemic recovery appears to be stumbling,” said Fiona Cincotta, senior financial markets analyst at City Index. “Supply shortages and a worsening energy crunch mean prices are rising and elevated inflation may not be as transitory as the Fed initially thought.” The yield on the U.S. 10-year Treasury note pared back gains after rising as high as 1.5%. The dollar slid for a third day. And equities in Europe, Japan and Hong Kong fell. Markets in mainland Chinese are closed through Thursday for the Golden Week holidays." MY COMMENT As if everything else was not bad.......now.....it is an energy crisis. If only we were energy independent.......oh right......we used to be. The MORE we try to micro-manage EVERYTHING the worse it is going to be. It is about time for what we are seeing.......a crisis in the re-opening. This is how a HUGE economic event like the re-opening works......with spurts and at times BIG pull backs. NOTHING is just straight up. I am going to PERSONALLY call the current drop a CORRECTION......even though we are NOT YET at a 10% drop. It has been going on for a month now and looks like it will continue for a while from here. It is good to get this over with....I am tired of all the news articles saying that we have not had a correction for a year. SO.....lets have one now and get it over with and out of our system.
Yup, I agree.. I also hope that this time, the markets will cough out all the bad seeds it had accumulated in the past few months… and there have been ALOT of them! Will there be a 10+ drop? Looks like it now… is it gonna be a major drop, or lead to a bear market? I simply don’t see that happening… heck, people got WAAAYYY too much money in their pockets and lots of it went to the stock market in the past 12-18 months.. There’s an analyst I listen to regularly, josh brown, funny Brooklyn guy, who actually thinks that the stock market itself will cause the next collapse… the very fact that it’s LOADED with money and does not reflect anything that has to do with the economy itself. That’s hysterical… imagine if that were to happen!
WELL.....looks like the DOW and the SP500 made back some of their losses during the last 45 minutes today. the NASDAQ....not so much. I was in the RED today......no surprise there. I did have a SINGLE green holding......NIKE. I also got beat by the SP500 by 0.68% due to my tech heavy portfolio.
