The market is influenced by many aspects. Political climate is an influence. No doubt that politics has complete influence over parts of the market. Defense spending, healthcare spending, education spending, crime bills...... Certain segments will see a decrease, where other segments will see an increase. You "can". But it's an individual choice. I did make choices based on politics. I will continue to do so in the future. I feel that certain holdings will do better, so I shift my funds in that direction. If a certain party in power favors social programs and opposes defense spending, that's 4 years of defense contracts.
Perhaps I should mention two things. 1) Politics are interesting to me because I happen to have a pretty big wad of money laying around. If I was fully invested, I would be in a Thai brothel, right now. As it is, with a couple of nickels, I find myself trying to predict potential bargains. I have no plans to sell anything before any potential crash, though. 2) All indicators that I respect point to a fourth quarter recession: Election. Q3 results. Unemployment. However, we can't be sure of a market pull back because the market is driven by lunatics, these days. I do not hold conviction on what will happen, short term.
The market used to be more reliable. Trends, indicators, what investors believed to make sense. There are now people in the market making unbelievable moves. Against the grain. Creating volatility. Buying into companies which make no sense.
They are not that expensive. You could go at least three times a week. The plane ticket to Thailand cost more than the GoGo Girl.
I have been really impressed with Yahoo Fiance, lately. They avoid the short sellers and circus trying to manipulate the market and host some pretty sensible analysts. This is the first mention I've seen of massive market stimulus coming from the fed. Perhaps most interesting is how eerily similar the narrative of Mr. Marenzi is to our very own Mr. T0rM3nTeD. I continue to maintain that we have better information on Stockaholics.net than the general media. There are a couple of sources that have a perspective which does not exist here, though. ARK, for one.
every day, the news proves you are right. don't give advice on what to buy or how to vote how you vote effects what you buy
I've been thinking about the drama around Nikola and it's effect on long term investors, like a few of us. The events surrounding Nikola have shone a light into the objectivity level of various media outlets. CNBC has done a lot of coverage, much of it obfuscation and back peddling. Meanwhile, Yahoo Finance has covered it extremely little. My reality is, there probably isn't a lot to say about it beyond the allegations, what has been proven, and what has been disproven. Yahoo has been trying to inform us of what's going on while CNBC is trying to change our opinion. The biggest problem with long term investing is entertaining yourself. You have to find a way to be sufficiently engaged as to be sharp every few years when you need to do something. For me, the drama around Nikola helps keep me interested in my own portfolio. These events have also been very as to who is ignorant and rejecting information which conflicts with their view. On StockTwits, the bulls have been saying the bears are anti-EV. Meanwhile, we still have a large group of people who don't understand the technology, the industry, manufacturing, or even history who seem to think you can get some batteries and a motor and you've got an EV. This has been disproven dozens of times by now and yet some people still declare it as fact. A discussion on another site about Audi getting half the range of a Tesla with the same battery pack size yielded a response that Audi should just double the size of the pack. The response came from someone who seems to think anyone who can't see that is a moron. There is much to be learned, for those who pay attention. My strategy is to put most of my effort into remaining as objective as possible while keeping watch for areas in which I am not as objective as I would like to be. There are legions of folks who explain exactly what is going to happen, are dead wrong, and immediately focusing on explaining exactly what is going to happen with the next event. Many of them are analysts. Shame on us for giving CNBC our attention. Shame on me for bothering with them at all, even to illustrate their partisan motives.
Next topic. I've been thinking about our portfolio performance and realizing I should not be so smug. We have done tremendously well this year but most of our core holdings are more or less flat from the beginning of the year. Three of our positions have gone up this year. Only two are significantly down but one is at about 1/3 of it's value a year ago. Fortunately, that's a novelty position. The story of our 2020 performance is Tesla. Tesla has dragged our portfolio well into the green. Without it, we would still be receiving strong distributions but we would have been near flat. I was reading one of my posts from 2017 when I called it a "rounding error". At this point, it is a core holding.
I've now heard two different sources indicate a COVID-19 vaccine could be ready by November of this year.
Let's hope so, but most importantly, that it wasn't rushed and corners weren't cut to get it out by then...
Cramer entertained me by calling Pelosi, Crazy Nancy to her face. Trevor Milton entertained me with his angry rant. The Foot posts his videos. Every vaccine proposed for early use just began phase 3 trial in the last few months. That takes 2 years to collect 2 years of data. Short term, nobody died. 1 person got sick, be it is not certain if it's vaccine related. What we don't know is if any volunteers will contract Covid , become ill, or die in the next 2 years.
I think "got sick" is a bit of an understatement. The person suffered spinal cord damage and was in ICU for a time.
the whole, "paused the clinical trial" , and resuming, almost sounds like something was actually stopped. From what it read like, test subjects were already treated with either the vaccine or a placebo. Now they are being monitored. So the only thing happening is that scientists and doctors are keeping an eye on them. What did they pause?
