Alter-ego of Marcos Bueno, CIO of
@AscentAdvisors
. Ex GS, JPM Prop and HF. This is not advice nor recommendations, it's Educational Content and Market Updates
Lots of new followers this week, so here is what I do:
My main focus is running a systematic strategy that is always looking for great stocks. For example, it was on the moves in $SMCI and $VKTX before they exploded upwards (which btw made February a great month).
I send
If I understood the FIRE movement correctly, its about living miserably for the first half of your life, and then also living miserably during the second half.
Congrats to my former doorman, who was working every day to put himself through college with a dream to go into finance.
He started at Guggenheim Partners last week.
Just like a whole generation of investors wanted to short the market all the way up because they saw 2008, there is another generation that will long the market all the way down because they saw 2020.
Cancel rent bro today: "Hahaha you landlord loser!"
Cancel rent bro 2yrs from now: "Can you believe I can't find a decent place to live? Everything is shitty AND expensive. Or they want 12m deposit"
Madoff investors never felt any stress. The numbers were always good, no matter what the market conditions were.
And that should have been the first red flag.
I’m honestly surprised at how many people claim to have 30% / yr compounded for considerable periods of time and they still want to sell you some monthly stuff.
My former boss delivers 15% consistently and he flies around in a $65mil jet. And he has no subs.
Spoiler alert: You will not be able to withdraw $200k/yr for 50yrs on $5mm of savings
And if you want $200k real (ie inflation linked) it is pretty much impossible
What's the amount to retire early, live comfortably, and never have to "work" again?
$5M.
You can withdraw $200K a year for 50 years.
Number is higher if material status things are important to you.
But if you have value freedom then you'll be fine with $5M.
Hear me out: What if higher interest rates reduce mal-investment and thus free up resources that can be used more productively, in turn creating a more prosperous future?
Financial Advisors: "Past performance is not indicative of future performance"
Also Financial Advisors: "You should invest in stocks because historically they have done well"
I can’t believe my luck.
This twitter guy that never gets a trade wrong is writing a newsletter for $100 a month instead of enjoying his (I guess) super yachts and mansions.
No better sign of a good, generous person.
/rant
It is now fashionable to hail Cathie Wood now that her fund is huge. IMO she’s a great marketer and fund raiser but I get why she gets little respect as an investor. Let’s see.
If a million ppl flip a coin a 100 times, someone will get Heads 100 times, and be invited to
It's hard for me to believe that $AAPL the largest most covered most followed stock is +20% in the last month to $3T in market cap. But it happened.
It's truly staggering. I really have no words.
Hundreds of millions of dollars spent on “research” by the sellside and buyside, and still the market can’t figure out subscriber growth (or lack thereof) for a company like $NFLX.
A clown show
Story as old as time. The worst risk managers will populate the top of the return tables [and the bottom] - they’ll be hailed as super stars. Allocators get sucked in, then the market regime changes. The losses become staggering and the manager retires to an oceanfront property.
Should the gvt protect the little people? Definitely. That’s the $250k guarantee (it can be argued that it could be higher, yes).
But should it protect sophisticated business people whose goal is multi-million or multi-billion exits? Absolutely not. Those are grown ups
Hypothesis: Recession in tech-land as past excesses take their toll. The rest of the economy keeps going or even improves as capital and labor get redirected.
Investors and the pundit class miss it and become overly negative because of their overweight focus on tech.
The grain markets are sending a signal to all world farmers to plant as much as they can, even on marginal land that they wouldn't have considered in years past.
It hurts to see so many people on here that genuinely want to do the right thing being taken advantage of by a bunch of grifting failed traders posing as macro and investment savants
$TSLA is a great real time experiment in anchoring.
Watch now how most longs will not sell at huge profit because they’re now anchored at $950. Selling below will feel to them like a loss - so they won’t.
#trading
Inflation is 6-8%.
Softbank got a $5bn loan at 5% and collateralized it with overvalued non-listed equity holdings.
That gives us an idea of where we are in the cycle.
Did you know that honest, competent managers with integrity do not care about short sellers? They even welcome them because they will buy higher.
Only scammers don’t like short sellers.
"Here's the thing about short-selling: I find it curious that we don't look at that more," says
@Chamath
.
"It's about creating sentiment shift and volatility, then profiting from that. I would love for folks to figure out whether that should be allowed or not."
#DeliveringAlpha
This week I made number of very large transfers of money. They had multiple fail-safe and anti-fraud mechanisms. They were also immediate, free, and reversible had an error been committed.
This tech is going to disrupt the clumsy crypto ecosystem fast
Yes, a lot of smart people believe and are involved in crypto. Reminds me of the smartest people I’ve ever met dedicating their lives to String Theory.
Run a hedge fund with $20bn from his $65mm Gulfstream.
And the wildest thing is that few outside his niche would recognize his name, amd even fewer would notice him if they crossed him on a sidewalk.
Unpopular opinion: Bond yields normalizing after the aberration of the last decade is ultimately healthy.
Yes, it hurts now - like when you get back to working out - but the weed of malinvestment is going to have a harder time going forward.
I don’t understand China’s covid policies. It really doesn’t makes sense at this point. Especially for a government that has been ‘brutally pragmatic’ in the past.
I’m pretty sure that there is some other goal that we don’t know and things would make more sense if we knew.
Rule of thumb:
Smart, trustworthy people speak succinctly and in a way the is easy to understand. They can take something complex and distill its core into a few words. There is nothing to hide
Less smart people and grifters use big words, make things sound complicated and try
“Raising $750 million at $137 billion valuation”
A business may need $750mm of equity, or it may have a $137bn valuation. But not both.
Always the same - to avoid taking a small loss, people will end up taking a big loss.
If you're under 25 you should 𝗉̶𝗋̶𝗈̶𝖻̶𝖺̶𝖻̶𝗅̶𝗒̶ definitely ignore this advice. Same if you are above 25. Or exactly 25.
And you should probably ignore everything else this person says since he obviously does not care one bit about what is best for you.
$BTC and $ARKK unchanged from 4.5yrs ago.
So much money made at the expense of the believers. They bought the story wholesale from the promoters. And incredibly, they are still believing.
This video is incredible. We already knew that His Royal Snakeoilness Raoul was ‘slippery’ but this is a whole new level of dangerous. Had never seen it until now.
Kind of bizarre to think Elon Musk is a "fraud" at this point. An increasing number of Musk projects are proving themselves to be very real and very transformative.
Some people bought $BBBY hoping to sell higher to some greater fool. Alas, they were the fool.
From what I can see, it’s just people being victims of their own greed and being angry that someone did to them what they hoped to do to someone else.
“Bwahh, if startups blow up and VCs lose money nobody will take venture risk”
Dude, that’s the risk. Literally.
And, btw, good risk managers don’t hold millions of cash in an uninsured checking account.
Apparently there is a large-ish HF (above $30bn aum) doing Rates RV trades with 30x leverage and (basically) not a losing month in the last 5yrs or so.
I never speak to any of my 19 CEOs. One of the reasons I'm invested in their stocks is because they are better at their jobs than I could ever be. And they don't need the distraction.
It's good to have plans and goals for the future. It keeps you motivated and gives you meaning.
But don't forget about the present.
Why am I saying that? Because my mother would have turned 75 today. But an illness took her aged 46. I think about that every single day.
So many people don’t know what a bear market is that when it comes it’s going to be a real carnage.
No, Q4’18 and Mar’20 were not bear markets. Ppl still got rewarded for buying the dip.
Most people have seen this chart. A good rule of thumb is the following:
Whenever someone points to an area of the chart and says “we are here”, then we are anywhere but “here”
$MSFT low print to high print 14% in 24 hours. It could benefit from a little more coverage, so the market understands the company and the business better
We are in some of the stupidest markets ever. A lot to make and also a lot to lose.
But most will lose a lot - the greedy in particular. That’s how it’s always been and that’s not changing.
"You take a chart and draw some lines. If it looks like a resistance, you say that it's time to get short. If it's support, you say it's going to break down and that it's time to get short. And just like that, you're a Macro Insider"
Sounding intellectual on the twitter 101:
Write threads with pompous buzzwords and strings of ideas that sound profound [but aren’t]. Do not worry if they’re disconnected, banal, or even wrong - barely anyone will notice.