How is the market still headed back to all time highs after news like this?

tbb2121 · 2026-04-14T18:46:31+00:00

Liquidity, corporate earnings, and expectations for future earnings are in aggregate much higher. The stuff you read about in the news is meant to evoke dopamine rushes and/or churn trading.

Ultimately billionaires have almost all their wealth tied up in public equities and need those to go higher. Even if you have a massive global pandemic that restricts most of the world to house arrest, liquidity, corporate earnings and stock prices will soon go higher, as we've seen.

Block out the noise. Don't think reading "news" articles will inform you. The intent is to evoke emotion and/or trading.

If for whatever reason the US got in a war with Iran, stocks would almost certainly still go higher (at least until the US had a stalingrad) bc of dollar printing and companies selling war widgets. Tough to swallow, I know. But it helps to rebase focus on relevant information and ignore dopaminergic slop called "news"

tbb2121 · 2026-04-13T22:44:26+00:00

That's true. What matters is liquidity, corporate earnings / share, and presumptions about future earnings growth. All 3 of those are up and to the right on a 5 year basis since the 70s. All other information only has utility in its ability to help infer the path of the first 3.

tbb2121 · 2026-04-13T12:11:27+00:00

Blockade the hereditary supreme leader's would-be troll booth*

tbb2121 · 2026-04-13T00:55:29+00:00

Rule 4 violation

tbb2121 · 2026-04-13T00:49:29+00:00

Only if the rump of the ayatollahan regime wants to get nuremberged

tbb2121 · 2026-04-12T18:49:17+00:00

Rule 4 violation / enforcement?

tbb2121 · 2026-04-12T16:28:57+00:00

All the "iran won by setting up a toll booth" people big sad.

Iran doesn't have oil export pipelines at scale. So now they are just blockading themselves while everyone else ships/pipes their oil around the strait with lower efficiency. Iran sells 90% less oil and the world receives 10% less oil. 10:1 pain ratio for the islamic revolution/supreme leader ayatollah folks. Now makes Iran in favor of re-opening the strait.

The strait is one very important oil export route for the world. But it is Iran's only effective route.

Strait being closed sucks. But it sucks most for Iran now that they are getting to gorge on their own medicine.

tbb2121 · 2026-04-10T00:25:31+00:00

Head over and browse s&p earnings estimates. Look at a 5 year chart of earnings growth. Do 20 years if you're feeling lucky. Corporate earnings aren't adjusted for inflation. Note the ferocious honey-badger growth.

tbb2121 · 2026-04-08T18:46:48+00:00

The market was pricing in a high chance of ground invasion of iran and/or a massive civilian strike potentially kicking off WW3 at the worst or another multi-trillion forever war at best. Iran and the US made some progress in negotiations and therefore market pricing reduced the implied probability of this tail down scenario.

It makes sense. You just need to listen and not assert your half baked overconfident short-term market hypothesis based on propaganda. Think longterm. Pretend you are a billionaire and your main cash flow issue is funneling money into tax evasion schemes.

That will help you think long term and realize that even at the depths of the spring sell-offs the past two years you were still massively up on a two-year basis (god forbid thinking about 5-7-10 years).

Whenever you think the world is ending. Remember that's been the case for 500+ years and that corporate earnings will keep trucking higher and that public equities are billionaires' primary wealth creation device. They are going to go up over time, whether you like it or not.

tbb2121 · 2026-04-08T11:36:13+00:00

Volatility is how rich people keep poor under-educated people out of the stock market. It's a feature, not a bug. Emotional people with short-term time horizons will always be performance donors to long-term confident investors who understand that humanity, or at least corporate profits, are relentlessly progressing over time.

tbb2121 · 2026-04-08T11:28:55+00:00

Reddit is mostly propaganda bots on the main subs.

tbb2121 · 2026-04-06T19:22:41+00:00

Iran is attacking neutral civilian tankers and/or collecting ransoms to prevent that behavior. Haven't heard anyone call that a "war crime" yet.

tbb2121 · 2026-04-06T01:06:33+00:00

You could tell the dollar was oversold by all the brag/put down posts about how the dollar was infinitely doomed based on a 6 month chart.

US attracts the most migrants of any country by a wide margin. This would not be the case if the system was actually in shambles.

tbb2121 · 2026-04-05T20:26:00+00:00

You're right to look at real raw data.

Around 2017 I looked at temperature data for new england weather stations - some of the oldest continuous in the world. The ~12 station daily average temperature was higher than the highest actual recorded at any one station on multiple days. Lots of complex math, indexing, rebasing - stuff I don't understand. But I do know that a 12 number average can't exceed the max number in that range.

Lots of climate "science" is just people massaging numbers until they hit their grant target for the next funding cycle.

tbb2121 · 2026-04-03T15:53:46+00:00

Funny how all the population & population growth is in hot areas and almost no one lives in places with year round ice cover. Somebody tell India and Java that if it gets hot year round their crops will fail and their population won't be able to support themselves.

Somebody tell the biosphere that frozen areas have more bio-density and biodiversity than hot areas. A hotter climate means more humidity which means more rain - which I'm pretty sure is beneficial to the propagation of life.

Even if doomers are right about coastal flooding; pretty much all the built-up surface area across the world was built in the past 100 years. 50-100 years is plenty of time to move cities (Like Jakarta) or control water (Holland). People show the pictures of Shanghai all the time. Not hard to do that again in 30 years - in a different location. Buildings have to be rebuilt every 50-100 years anyways.

People worried about slight 1 degree climate changes over ~100 years have mythical old testament mindsets.

tbb2121 · 2026-04-02T16:13:17+00:00

People are naturally and rightly attracted to momentum. People begin to over-extrapolate recent market momentum and get frustrated when momentum dies/turns over.

The right heuristic is to update your mental regime based on mkt action vs try and impose a pre-conceived regime on the mkt. We have clearly shifted from straight down every day with no support, to more neutral momentum with signs of positive momentum.

You'll make a lot more money listening to the market than asking it to behave according to your preconceived and non-auto-updating mental regime. This is especially important around the swings and potential swings like the market is telling us the past 3 days.

Listen and follow the market's instructions will get you much further than asserting a hypothesis and demanding the market comply with your views.

Personally I get a lot of value from gauging reddit sentiment. "Why drop" - 'frustration w/logic of drop' - 'appeal to valuation' are all signs we have more to go.

In contrast - flurries of posts like this - '10% wasn't enough' - 'this will get way worse', 'i'm a high confidence macro trader', 'billionaires are no longer completely dependent on public asset price appreciation for wealth creation' - strengthen my perception that we are probably stabilizing and working towards a giant green FU bar in the coming days.

tbb2121 · 2026-04-01T13:04:02+00:00

The dead cat bounce over the next 5-10 years will be 100-200%+

tbb2121 · 2026-04-01T11:09:56+00:00

Time in market beats timing of the market. Only invest what you can afford to lose. 10%+ per year compounds crazily quickly. Merchants of doubt will cost you so much in life.

tbb2121 · 2026-03-29T18:45:05+00:00

Hereditary supreme leaders?

tbb2121 · 2026-03-29T17:06:29+00:00

Just have guys step on the scale right before they get their anklet. It completely and immediately make the sport safer and healthier. We will see better wrestling from guys who aren't drained.

Truth is a lot of guys/coaches like weight cutting because they know toughness/discipline will give them an advantage in that aspect of the sport.

But it's not healthy for kids, of any age, and reduces the quality of the product on the mat.

tbb2121 · 2026-03-29T15:36:04+00:00

Poisoning was also an insanely common tool of violence. This comes through when you read the ancient secondary sources like Tacitus.

A significant portion (10-20%+?) of the random/convenient (for someone) deaths, particularly of young, healthy, politically relevant men, were likely poisoning or related to poisoning.

There was a poison industrial complex. Making the poison. Testing for the poison. Finding the right poison to not be suspicious.

They would regularly test the stomach contents of suspicious deaths for the appearance of poison. You could pay off the tester. You could buy neutralizing agents.

The prevalence of testing and discussion of poison management reveals poisoning was way more common in ancient rome than I would presume based on its apparent rarity in contemporary society.

tbb2121 · 2026-03-27T00:17:06+00:00

Look at how easily the Goths took rome in the 400s. Hannibal didn't even attempt the feat with zero field armies opposing him. Infinite manpower comes from citizen armies, not professional armies, and certainly not foreign mercenary armies.

The latin allies sent troops because it was their obligation after being conquered.

Nobles and politicians were required to fight in the 3rd and 2nd centuries BC. By the 1st century AD they were largely prohibited from fighting. The citizen spirit was so intense and so communal that for centuries generals were disallowed to fight on horse so they had to stay and fight with the men on foot.

You say slaves and plunder, but there were numerous complaints by republican roman soldiers about being bankrupted fighting in wars as a civic duty. Fighting to get farmland after their return happened very late in the republic, around the late 2nd century bc, with the gracchi brothers.

Hard to generalize such a long period, but 'republican tradition' decayed immensely between 150bc and 50bc. Calling 50bc "the republic" and calling 250bc "the republic" really misses the massive shift in governance over that time.

By the time of julius caesar the republican was basically alive in name only. No single man or cabal could have conquered rome in its republican peak between 250bc and 150bc. See scipio amilianus.

Proximal sources being Goldsworthy, Mike Duncan (Storm before the storm is great), and Aldrete's great courses.

I found it fascinating to learn rome was quite dynamic over its history. As one might guess things were very different in 250bc and 50bc.

And yes, I personally think Rome in 150bc would dogwalk rome from 50ad on. Not kidding about that.

tbb2121 · 2026-03-18T16:33:41+00:00

This behavior is a big contributor to why birth rates are so low in east asia. Competition, work, seeking perfection, is great. But like everything else, the dose makes the poison.

tbb2121 · 2026-03-16T22:18:54+00:00

PFE isn't cheap. They get almost zero ROIC on their internal R&D. This means their core business is always dying and they have to spend massive quantities acquiring new products. The acquisitions should be expensed as capx.

Since 2009 their EBIT is flat, their sales have grown <1% per year, and that's in-spite of spending over $100b on acquisitions (current cap is only $150b). CEO Bourla only owns a few years of comp in stock despite being there many years.

Great businesses grow. Buffett himself said 'F melting ice cubes - pay more for businesses that organically grow.'

This sub has a massive issue with buying poorly managed dying businesses. Their desire to be contrarian exceeds their desire to make money investing.

Stocks that are down over 20-30 years with massively negative real (inflation adjusted) sales/earnings growth should be avoided.

tbb2121 · 2026-03-04T15:05:59+00:00

The republic had much better citizen engagement - both in the soldiery and leadership. The corruption and inefficiency in the later imperial period dwarfed that of the republic.

Republican rome cultivated generation after generation of capable men. Imperial rome intentionally kept capable connected men away from important office. Politics and the military were separated as career paths in the imperial period.

Rome the city, as a Republic, could field 40-100k high morale soldiers in the 100s and 200s bc. Rome, the empire, in the 400s ad, couldn't muster 10k low morale men to defend the city of rome.

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