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Let me share a personal experience and hope you and I can both learn something from it.
I’m not sure precisely when it began, but this premium post from March 7th is a good place to start. In the post, I make it abundantly clear that the real estate fund IYR is one of my favorite analogs of all time (using such words as “crazy about this analog” and “just ga-ga”). I’m certain this wasn’t my first post about it, but it is at least one where I put a stake very firmly in the ground that I am bonkers about the IYR short.
I am moving a fat wad of profits from my brokerage account into my checking account. This is an incredibly hard act for me, because to my eyes, the market is going to get blasted to smithereens, and the last thing I want to do is what I just did – – which is to trim back enough positions to extract a mountain of cash away. In doing so, I have reduced my account by 1/7th, since it reached a threshold that I demanded of myself to take profits. I have NO use for the money, but by God, I’m shielding it.
Why am I doing this? As I’ve explained, the reason is that I’ve become utterly weary of making and losing the same wad of profits in this crazy market. I am therefore FORCING myself to gut 1/7th of my account on a ONE WAY TRIP to my checking account and preserve those profits forever. I wish I had trained myself to do this, oh, I dunno, about thirty years ago, but better late than never.
The fundamental change here, and I hope it is profound, is to transform my trading goal from ACCRUING a huge account to instead having a PROFIT-GENERATOR from which I habitually extract cash. I guess I’m just a slow learner. Anyway, the deed is done, and I’m slightly proud of myself for going through with it.
I tried. I honestly tried. Most of you believe me. Some of you don’t. But the power of Bear Force One, as tracked by our own Event Markers feature, is no longer in dispute, even by the most skeptical scientists and metaphysicists.
Since it is agonizingly evident that not a single interesting thing is going to happen to equities until that traitorous twit Jerome Hayden Powell does his little pack of lies on Friday morning at Jackson Hole, I’ll just share an insight about the meme stocks I had this morning.
There was a time only a few years ago when today’s meme stocks were actually traded as normal equities. Yes, all stocks were affected by the grotesque distortions that Fed had foisted upon the capital markets, but until the vomit-inducing Covid bailouts of March 2020, stocks still had some semblance of reality and could be considered a little bit anchored to the moorings of true facts.
AMC, for example, touted itself as the largest owner of cinemas in the world. That’s all well and good, but judging from the performance for the stock over its many years as a public entity, it pretty much sucked out loud as a business. I guess it takes a lot of overpriced popcorn to turn a profit in that industry, but it’s quite clear that the AMC theatre chain was a rotten, rotten business.
Wow. I have something exceptionally cool to share with you. Something so cool, it might even compel some of my thriftier readers to get a crowbar out, crack their wallet open, and become a Gold or Platinum member. Even in the midst of my zany travel schedule, I wanted to write up this post and tell you about what I managed to figure out on a delightfully rainy Sunday morning.
Specifically, it has to do with taking this chart……….
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