The perfect last day for a dismal week. I guess we will linger down here for now. I picked up some PLTR.
Yeah, we may just get back to that "bottom" WXYZ was referring to a few posts back. We aren't too far from it today at the moment, unless it moves back up before the close....or falls the other way.
I still think a lot of this drag has to do with all the tariff noise and the constant "on/off" again talks surrounding it. Whether we like it, agree/disagree, or don't like it, it is having some effect on the markets. Of course there are other catalysts out there contributing to this extra noise too.
I have ignored most of the market stuff this week. Been too busy. Of course, today I check in and see a nice little red chart. Not much we can do about it. Maybe we pick up a few shares here and there and wait for it to pass. If it continues to flop and wallow about, or goes even lower, I'll have a little bit along the way.
That's exactly it. There is nothing we can do about it. The same thing that makes the gains feel so good is the same thing that makes us feel helpless when everything is tanking. Times like this I zoom out and look at the big picture. We are seeing higher lows. On the journey onward and upward but with lots of little detours.
Yes, for sure. If we just solely paid attention to all of the noise we would think we were getting walloped badly so far. Of course, everybody's holdings and plans are different. I figure I am down around 3%...maybe a bit more for YTD. Hardly anything to batten down the hatches over yet.
It begins.....Elon Musk is combining some of his companies to move toward his final goal of integrating them all. Elon Musk says xAI has acquired X in deal that values social media site at $33 billion https://www.cnbc.com/2025/03/28/elo...t-values-social-media-site-at-33-billion.html
And....ADVANCE NOTICE......I will be mostly off the board from April 3 to April 14. Personal and family business to take care of. I may get a chance to put up a few posts but perhaps not. No big deal....this is why I am a long term investor.
We are seeing a huge OVERREACTION in the markets right now. That is how the short term is. It is MANIC and DEPRESSIVE. It is Bipolar. Everything is GREAT or everything SUCKS.....nothing in between. These extremes have now gotten more extreme due to the current style of 24/7, sensationalistic, and opinion based, media coverage. At the moment the markets are being driven by sellers, shorts, and traders. The Hedge funds, the AI MICRO-SECOND TRADING PLATFORMS, and others. As a result we remain stuck in a correction. We will see if the March 10 bottom can hold.....if so that will be a very positive indicator. My view is at this point we are simply CHURNING and BOUNCING along the bottom. The single event that is causing this market is the fear and drama that is rampant involving tariffs. It will all come to a head on April 2nd.....next week. I am not saying it will end next week.....we will continue to bounce off the bottom and it will take time.....probably 2-6 months for the market to clarify and "perhaps" erase the losses. In my view the first quarter earnings......are now irrelevant......and will be SQUANDERED. They will be DISRESPECTED and even if very good....which I expect....the market will simply IGNORE them in favor of trying to ramp up all the negative story-lines. It will be FULL ON guidance nit-picking. In reality......the extreme Consumer Confidence polling data is a very strong positive indicator for the markets. The economic data is coming in nicely. Inflation is TOTALLY within the normal range. There is ZERO indication of recession. Companies and business are BOOMING. The business climate is improving. BUT.....none of that matters. We are simply going to have to put in the time in purgatory and SLOG our way along....through the mud and muck. I am LUCKY that I have a big family event coming up soon from April 3 to April 14. It will be the perfect time to be occupied with other happenings and not paying any attention to the markets.
You know....I realized today how absolutely RARE is is today to see any sort of fundamental analysis of a company or stock. I hardly ever see it anymore. Same with Technical analysis. I dont believe in or use Technical analysis....but it is very RARE to see it used or talked about these days. Everything I see about a stock or business now is based on news, or politics, or headlines, or upcoming events, or rumor, or speculation, etc, etc, etc. It is ALL mostly unsupported opinion....mostly by younger writers. Much of what I see every day is simply....GOSSIP. That is about how low we have sunk in the markets and financial media.
Speaking above about market reactions and sentiment associated with it. I was reading through an article the other day that sort of took a historical trip down memory lane. It covered some of the trying times in the market and had some charts and photo clips from some of the prominent magazines, newspapers, and other media forms from those times. They all had the same common theme, portraying the emotions at that particular time. Much like what we see today. Of course today we have instant access and can check and read anything whenever we want. Our access is unlimited at any given time. We can review financial stories and buy, sell, and trade with a simple click of a button. It is amazing to see how that access has changed over time. Looking back, there have been numerous times where "something" or "someone" has proclaimed the famous "Death of Equites" as the old Business Week cover did back in 1979. There were even more dismal and trying times before that. Some really nasty times. A bit more recent was the 2008 GFC. Most notably, was the TIME magazine cover which used a photo on the cover from the Great Depression showing some men gathered at a free soup kitchen....titled the "New Hard Times." A rough stretch for sure. There were and have been other notable times. The stock market survived them all. Sure, that does not dismiss the nastiness or real emotions associated with any of those times. If and when you are in the thick of it, it is hard for it not to matter to you personally or even consider your savings and wealth. The markets endurance is unmatched. It has had a history of just about everything thrown at it. We always seem to think "this is different." I am sure throughout history, they thought so too. We have no way of knowing the future. We can suspect, ponder, guess, and profess many things about it. Some of it may be right and likely most of it will never be what we thought. I think the market will find its own way through whatever comes its way. There will be times when we may doubt it, only to be proven wrong by it's resilience once again. We can all pick certain times in the history of the market and make our own case if you were an investor during this time or that time period. Unfortunately, we are here only for a limited time and invest we must to provide the particular retirement you may want to secure. It is important to think about and plan your journey through it....that really is about all you can control.
Well said SMOKIE. A very good observation as we are about to enter one of the most potentially volatile weeks we have seen in a long time.
It is called a CORRECTION. Nothing more, nothing less. The gnashing to teeth and semi-panic....by the Wall Street crowd....as usual is epic. In the REAL world....people are going to work, living their lives and doing ok. It WILL all pass as usual.....it is all a function of time.
LOL.....I consider myself lucky. I will MISS most of today.....I have a rehearsal at 11:00. I will also MISS the drama and turmoil of the correction from APRIL 3 to APRIL 14. BUMMER for everyone else that will be experiencing the markets......I will not. LOL.
In spite of all the DRAMA......I am now down for 2025 by about 9%. Not even correction range yet. When you consider the day to day commentary and fear-mongering......it seems like it should be a lot more. Basically I have lost somewhere between about 3-6 months of prior gains. When you put it that way and IGNORE all the BS.....it is really not significant. "Good things come to he who waits"......that is the mantra of the markets....assuming that you own the greatest companies in the world. It will be GREAT to just IGNORE it all over the next 2.5 weeks. I am counting on you guys to keep the markets and the thread alive.
The PERFECT little article for me today. Reader Mailbag: March 2025 On hot stocks, Treasury markets and more. https://www.fisherinvestments.com/en-us/insights/market-commentary/reader-mailbag-march-2025 (BOLD is my opinion OR what I consider important content) "Spring has sprung! And so has March’s mailbag. Off we go. Setting aside the current market turbulence, how do we separate noise from facts when thinking about political developments and markets? Intentionally and carefully. And this doesn’t just apply to politics—it applies to how we approach all news, the fruits of which you can see in our articles and the “What We’re Reading” section. The first step is understanding how modern journalism works and what the business model is, which we say without passing judgment. Journalism has largely moved away from ad-based to subscription-based. This creates the incentive to play to the subscriber base to keep those dollars flowing, which generally results in coverage that is more biased, with more opinion bleeding into news articles. The old days where you had the opinion page and the news desk and a hard firewall between the two are gone (and probably never quite existed as modern society tends to envision nostalgically). Now, opinion regularly bleeds into reporting. Sometimes it comes as context, sometimes as quotes from chosen experts, sometimes people call it “news analysis.” The analysis always has a bias from training, experience and education. It is opinion-based. So when we read coverage, we go slowly and carefully to sift opinion from fact. It is difficult to do, because most statements of opinion don’t come with the necessary qualifiers. Opinions often get stated as fact. So we are on the lookout for theories, hypotheses and viewpoints that are stated in declarative sentences. We put those in one bucket. Then in the other, we put the actual statements of fact. And then, as much as possible, we go to the primary source material, be it the economic data release, legislation, Executive Order, research report or whatever else the article is covering. We square the facts presented in the article with the facts presented in the source material. We check for inaccuracies and also omissions. We decide for ourselves whether the statements of opinion match all the facts. And for good measure, wherever possible, we scale the data relative to GDP or whatever figure is relevant. The goal, as always, is simple. News coverage represents sentiment (it both reflects and amplifies people’s feelings). Parsing out the facts—and the differences between those facts and opinions—helps us assess the gap between sentiment and reality, which is what markets ultimately move on. And then we delight in sharing our findings with you. Hard work? Absolutely. Fun? For us, yah. (Although maybe we are sickos.) What do you think is the next, new hot stock to take off? No idea. Sorry! But that isn’t really what we do or how we think about investing. We totally understand the appeal of finding the next <<insert recently high-flying stock here>>. When we came of age, it was all about “the next Dell.” The one hot thing that, if only you had gotten in on the ground floor, would enable you to lounge on a yacht off Monaco for the rest of your life. This isn’t a replicable real-life strategy, though. High-flying stocks are outliers. The thing about outliers is that they could just as easily be outliers to the downside. And the one can switch to the other pretty quickly once the core thesis to own gets priced in, or the market changes, or management changes, or or or. We have also observed that there can be a lot of fallow years before the hot stock finally gets hot. Investing isn’t a get-rich-quick game. It isn’t speculating. It is about the long march of compound growth and market-like returns helping you achieve your long-term goals. Hot stocks and heat chasing are distractions that risk veering you from this endeavor into something that could prove counterproductive. A lot of it is trying to find a needle in a haystack that may pay off years from now, too far out to accurately assess supply and demand and industry winners. We think it is much wiser to build a diversified portfolio around probabilities than to take a concentrated position based on possibilities. Hence, we look for stocks that demonstrate traits of the category we are after. That allows you to blend a portfolio around those categories and others that behave differently. We know this isn’t the glamorous answer you wanted, but we think it is the right one. Is high international ownership of US Treasury bonds a problem? Not in our opinion. We often see statements, usually about China, saying foreign ownership of Treasury bonds means “they own us,” as if the US is an indentured servant forced to do their bidding … or else. This isn’t how bonds work. US Treasury bonds don’t have a call feature, so bond owners can’t demand immediate repayment. Their choices, always, are to sell or hold to maturity. For every seller, there is a buyer. If any international entity were to try to dump Treasurys en masse, a couple things would probably happen. One, the sudden supply influx would knock prices temporarily, giving buyers a fantastic discount and forcing sellers to accept a much lower price. That doesn’t affect the US government and its funding at all, presuming it isn’t issuing bonds at the time, but it does hurt the seller. Two, the selling country’s currency would probably skyrocket, wreaking havoc for businesses there and creating some societal discontent. China has actually sold down its holdings in recent years, but very gradually, probably for these reasons. And as it has sold, others have bought. The world loves US Treasury bonds. Loves ‘em! They are the world’s deepest, most liquid fixed income securities, important to investors globally. Not just governments seeking to invest foreign exchange reserves, but also pension funds and other large institutions. Lastly, for all the focus on overseas owners, most Treasurys belong to domestic investors and the Fed" MY COMMENT The basics of successful investing above....as well as....where we are in the world of modern media.
The markets are doing EXACTLY what you would expect so far today. They are caught up in a little whirlpool of media and factual uncertainty. Much of it imaginary and speculative. BUT....that is how it is over the short term. We are in the process of testing the prior short term market lows and there is a good chance we will breach them this week. Longer term.....there will be NO recession....we will see the tax cuts become permanent.....oil exploration will BOOM.....government spending will be cut by over a TRILLION dollars.....regulation and bureaucracy will be substantially cut.....the FED will end up doing 2-3 rate cuts this year.....earnings will be just fine.......the primary, dominant, top companies in the world will STILL be the dominant top companies in the world a year from now. SOUNDS PRETTY GOOD TO ME......so I am.....OUT OF HERE.....till after the close today. ENJOY.....LOL
