The Fed has raised another 75 basis points.

‘You should not fight the fed’ is really all I can say and do so I keep backtracking on stocks and buying one year t-bills now 4.8 percent.

This morning the market is rallying even though the jobs number is still great. The FED is raising rates to slow down the economy so the rising jobs number is really not what the bulls need.

Very little makes sense to me right now so I will share this chart of the S&P which is troubling. I stretched out the rolling moving averages to show just how rare this type of sell-off is and how technically dangerous a position the markets seem to be in.

What I read here is stocks need to stage a very strong rally right about now for these long term moving averages to turn quickly. The last two times these long term moving averages crossed over, a lot of price pain took place.

On a wierder note…Cathie Wood has teamed up with the Titan app (backed by all kinds of big VC money including A16z) to launch her VC Fund to retail investors with 4 percent annual fees. The same Cathie who was a media darling and now down 75 percent in her flagship fund.

I got the ‘pitch’ which I tweeted about as distasteful and a sign that we can’t bottom in tech stocks with this kind of product being sold to the public. Here is the cold (Read more...)

The ‘attention economy‘ has been around now for a few years.  

I really liked this tweet from Amjad Masad that got me thinking about ‘attention’:

We have seen this the most over the years with politicians and fundraising, but now we are starting to see it more with content creators on the web.

I wrote a few weeks ago that Apple killed growth and caused inflation. The inflation I was talking about was customer acquisition which goes to Amjad’s point that it has become much harder to just raise capital and turn it into attention.

The attention/capital equation is something I think about more each day as I invest in early stage companies.

Gooood morning…

I have been having a few laughs on Twitter since Elon became ‘Chief Twit’.

I have been ‘Chief Twit’ at Stocktwits for 14 years so I hear his joy and pain.

I really have no idea if Elon can make this more valuable than the $44 billion he paid, but I am very confident if he makes it about free speech the value will continue to degrade.

He takes over a company whose stock was up just 20 percent over the NINE years since it’s IPO. The management and board are obviously to blame, but the real problem is the business model. The advertising business was a complete fail for Twitter and its shareholders.

There are two areas of Twitter that matter…sports and finance. Both have markets around them – gambling and investing – that would drive enough revenue and margins to create a business for Twitter wirth $50 billion plus.

Not only will I not pay $20-$200 to be verified, I won’t pay Twitter for anything that does not drive value for me in sports and finance. I can guarantee if Elon rips up all the data contracts and or waits until they expire and slows down the stream by 60 seconds, billions in data revenue from Bloomberg, Goldman, the financial industry as a whole and sports media etc would flow in the door. No ads, no user experience interruptions and thousands of employee reductions from the ad business would take care of the margins and efficiency.
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As a reminder, Marketsmith (by Investor’s Business Daily) is now a sponsor of the weekly show. All the charts you have been seeing in the videos and will continue to see are from Marketsmith. They are offering my readers a three week trial for $19.95. Click this link if you would like to try it out.

Happy Monday.

As always, Ivanhoff and I tour the markets to look at what is working. You can watch the video here and I have embedded it below:

I have a hunch the combination of time of year and the fact that financials are rising on ok numbers and most of small amd midcap tech trying to stop going down on bad numbers will help the new leadership – drugs, defense, food, large cap biotech ($amgn and $vrtx) get the S&P back to and over the 200-day moving average.

Here is what Ivanhoff has to say:

Amazon, Meta, Google, and Microsoft missed their estimates and/or gave very weak guidance. They sold off and the main indexes didn’t even blink. The Nasdaq 100 and the S&P 500 still finished the week deep in the green. People wanted a “market of stocks” environment. This is what we are having right now. While some of the mega-caps are struggling, there are plenty of stocks from various sectors that are breaking out after earnings and following through. I don’t know if this is just a short squeeze before another rug pull, but last week certainly provided good opportunities (Read more...)

Happy Sunday and Halloween everyone.

Last night, Ellen and I went to a Halloween party dressed up as Travis Barker and Kourtney Kardashian. We called ourselves the Lindashians…

I am excited for Season 2 of White Lotus tonight.

I spent a lot of time reading and writing on planes this week first at Money 2020 in Vegas and then all the way cross country to Grand Cayman and back. It feels good to catch up a bit.

As for some reads I enjoyed …

Ben Thompson has a deep dive update on the ‘Chips and China‘ and the Biden Chip Ban. I do not own semiconductor stocks (other than owning Apple), but the sector is so important and now the center of our growing ‘war’ with China.

I get invited to ‘family office wealth conferences all the time’ and zi have never attended. This story of fraud by a con man Anthony Ritossa running one of these is a wild read.

Apple has almost too easily mutilated Facebook’s Advertising business because it is big enough to move the needle for Apple. Turner takes a look at ‘Apple’s Sleeping Ad Business‘

As for a Sunday listen…try this trend following podcast with Meb Faber talking with trend following greats Salem Abraham and Jerry Parker.

Nobody asked my opinion and by opinion I mean my opinion on starting, running, advising a community/content moderation/social networking site/app as a business.

And by who I mean Elon Musk, the banks, his bankers, his advisors and his text friends.

I have no doubt Twitter can grow revenues rather easily and earn significant profits, but at what cost to Elon and his real babies (human and corporate). I am not sure how this could be good for Tesla and Space-X employee morale as their leader fights with the global pseudononymous people of planet earth and soon space.

I don’t know much and I definitely don’t know Twitter scale but I do know community and content moderation and human behavior online… even if you call Stocktwits small and subscale.

Anyhow, I could not express my dread better than Nilay Patel did at The Verge in his piece titled ‘Welcome To Hell, Elon‘.

Here is one riff…

The essential truth of every social network is that the product is content moderation, and everyone hates the people who decide how content moderation works. Content moderation is what Twitter makes — it is the thing that defines the user experience. It’s what YouTube makes, it’s what Instagram makes, it’s what TikTok makes. They all try to incentivize good stuff, disincentivize bad stuff, and delete the really bad stuff. Do you know why YouTube videos are all eight to 10 minutes long? Because that’s how long a video has to be to qualify (Read more...)