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Wally Fairway

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Posts posted by Wally Fairway

  1. I wanted to give an update - old guy who was stabbed is still in the hospital (at least as of Tuesday), dead guy is still dead (like Generalissimo Francisco Franco). I have a family member who works in the hospital, in the ward the guy was in last week, and I'm told that the clerk said stabby guy had to wear a mask in the store (store policy, signs everywhere, Governor directive, etc) and dude starts yelling at the clerk and old guys says that she is just doing her job.....and that was the straw the broke the camels back, and that led to stabby getting shot.

    Moral of the story - don't turn your bad day into someone else's trip to the hospital and to your own gravesite; hopefully others can learn this lesson as the guy in the story did not.

  2. 8 minutes ago, ChiTownDoc said:

    The ones who take it so seriously make it fun. Enjoy!

    I took it over to a thread in DT, I'm sure that will go sideways.

    On another board I used to post on before it went away, I used to post "Rep Friday" threads and give random rep away and people got pissed when I made it Neg Rep fridays - it was hilarious, cost me some internet points for all the return favors I'd get.

  3. Since we got some new post rating emojis - this is as good place to try them out (and nobody really reads the Mods board or Board improvement thread
    Here are the choices now available - so click away and rates some posts in this thread 

    Fuck YouThanks RageConfused Haha Like Hook 'Em

    not sure how internet points are awarded or deducted from each

    • Hook 'Em 5
    • Fuck You 12
  4. 14 hours ago, ChiTownDoc said:

    And agreed with all on the ‘fuck you’ option.   I can’t wait to get hammered and see how much fuck you I can give out before running out.  I mean this is surly.  Do we even run out of fuck you’s?

    That sounds like fun, I'm gonna test it - I hope posters don't take internet points as serious bid'ness

  5. Article yesterday in the local paper, columnist says college football will ultimately be cancelled this fall due to risks

    https://www.lansingstatejournal.com/story/sports/columnists/graham-couch/2020/07/22/college-football-isnt-happening-fall-ultimately-here-is-why/5425783002/

    I'm not sure I'm in complete agreement with the article, but there are valid points made.
    Also Michigan State put team workouts on hold today, after a staff member tested positive for COVID the past weekend, and they are awaiting test results for the entire staff (and I think the team). They had been doing "voluntary" workouts and were scheduled to be moving to 20 hour/week practices soon.

     

    Quote

    Couch: The ethics behind trying to play college football this fall are messy

    Graham Couch
    Lansing State Journal
    If you’d like to know why there is no chance that college football will happen this fall, ask an athletic administrator or college president whether they’d be putting forth all of this effort for soccer or volleyball. Ask them if they’d be trying to figure out how to dance through a pandemic if it wasn’t for the money at stake.
     
     

    They know you can’t put the health and welfare of student-athletes and campus communities at risk for the sake of your budget. Even if the absence of college football threatens to blow up your way of life. 

    They know there is too much they can’t control once the rest of the student body breaks up their bubble. These are smart people who not only fear liability but also by and large care about the athletes whose well-being they’ve promised to look after.

     

    The people in charge of whether college football plays a game in September don’t have the stomach for the worst-case scenario or for plowing through the queasiness that’ll come with unavoidable outbreaks of COVID-19 if it’s aided by their decision to play a sport for the sake of television revenue. Nor should they. Some things can wait for a pandemic to clear. College football is among them. 

     

    Until we put forth a plan to efficiently test every school teacher in the country twice a week, I find it hard to justify doing so for college football teams. 

    Still, the ethics behind trying to play this fall are more complicated than they may seem. This isn’t about greed in this moment. It’s about preservation. It’s about cuts and layoffs and 800 student-athletes who don’t play football. Greed, in many cases, got college athletic departments to this place — without the reserves to get through a lost year. Schools overspend on football coaches and facilities, almost every dime available, for the sake of keeping up competitively.

     
    The fallout from this pandemic might force a healthy reset, once the bleeding stops. At most schools, even among the “haves” in college athletics, like Michigan State, you’ll see an audit of football spending. It can’t be done to excess anymore. 

    But there are other hard truths to face. The idea of a self-sustaining athletic department is really just the idea having a football program that can pay for everything. Other than men’s basketball, almost nothing else anywhere in athletics sustains itself

    At MSU, football generates about $80 million annually, about half of which goes to the rest of MSU athletics. Men’s basketball provides roughly another $10 million beyond its own expenses.

    If you do hockey right, you can break even, though MSU hockey hasn’t in some time. Same with college baseball in the South. Only about two dozen Division I athletic programs in the country are solvent — MSU among them. The rest are subsidized by their universities. Maybe that’s a better model. Perhaps MSU should fund Spartan athletics, with Spartan football paying its profits entirely back into the university. Most years, that would benefit the university. Perhaps football shouldn’t be relied upon to be the financial arm of athletics.

    College football gets shamed for being a big business. But it’s carrying the weight of athletic departments that sponsor a dozen or so sports that have little or no public interest. 

    like that colleges provide all sorts of athletic opportunities. I hate that there are going to be fewer of them after this pandemic. With no college football this year — or even a truncated season in the spring — places like MSU are going to lose sports and people and slash operational expenses to the bone and it’s awful. 

    So I get why we still see stories with college administrators talking about delaying the football season a few weeks or seeing how practice goes, as if those players could be separated from the rest of campus society, as if they might have the stomach to give it whirl. Understandably, no one is eager to embrace a sickening truth. 

    As soon it became clear you couldn’t have stadiums full of fans, this fiscal year required belt-tightening. But some of the gate receipts, seat licenses and sponsorships would have been preserved, along with the television money, which is more than half of MSU’s football revenue. 

    All the creativity in the world can’t save a Big Ten athletic department budget without football.

     

    The Big Ten has done all it can, I think, smartly closing ranks with conference-only schedules that allow for uniformed protocols and for nimbleness in scheduling adjustments. Perhaps if the folks meeting every day for the last few months in an effort to save Big Ten football had instead been the ones in charge our national pandemic response, we’d in position to consider playing college football this fall.

    Instead, they’ll try for the spring. That could be fun for fans — once, at least. Perhaps we’ll see the Big Ten play games in domed hubs like Detroit and Indianapolis and Minneapolis when the weather is still miserable. You might have hoops and football coincide in what would be a college sports sensory overload. We’d all welcome that, once at least.

    But for athletic departments — made up largely of middle-class people and non-revenue-generating athletes — even surviving that long will be traumatic. 

    “If you don’t play football, it is an existential moment for college athletics,” MSU AD Bill Beekman said in April.

    We’re just about there.

    RELATED:  MSU football pauses workouts after staff member tests positive

    RELATED:  MSU coaches, including Mel Tucker and Tom Izzo, take pay cuts for next year

    MORE GRAHAM COUCH:  In Emoni Bates, Tom Izzo finally lands his transcendent talent

    BECOME AN LSJ SUBSCRIBER:  This is one of your 5 free reads over 30 days – or one of unlimited reads if you're an LSJ subscriber. You can become one right now for $39 total for the next year.

    Contact Graham Couch at gcouch@lsj.com. Follow him on Twitter @Graham_Couch.

     

    • Hook 'Em 1
  6. 24 minutes ago, Xian said:

    How long until people start bitching about gentrification and cost of living increases? 

    Don't worry about that - Austin has a superhero coming to protect and restore the old Austin.

    • Haha 2
  7. 2 hours ago, Blotto said:

    May be the tulip bubble of our time. 

    Qtr ending Sept 2018 - revenue $6.8 billion, net income $254 million, cars shipped 83.5 K. Stock price at end of Sept 2018 ~$340 

    Qtr ending June 2020 - revenue $ 6.0 billion, net income of $104 million, cars shipped 92 K. Stock price of ~$1650 and rising. 

    TSLA makes money in quarters when they elect to sell regulatory credits to other auto manufacturers, and generally loses money if they don't recognize that revenue. They have never turned a quarterly profit without the regulatory credits or other accounting shenanigans. While they can continue to eek out economies of scale and presumably some day manufacture cars profitably, automobile manufacturing is a low margin business. Batteries cost money, steel costs money, leather seats cost money. TSLA isn't  going to change that.

    By comparison, in 2019 Toyota had revenues of $250 billion, profits of $20 billion, and their market cap is half of TSLA. Don't know when the insanity ends, but it has to eventually. Or not, who the fuck knows.

    Oh you are preaching to the choir, but momentum is a beast. Just ask the shorts who've been squeezed hard in the last 3 months.

  8. Speculation is that TSLA will be added to the S&P 500, now that it is profitable for 4 consecutive quarters (I think that is some entry criteria), and if that happens my quick back of the envelope calculations are:
    S&P 500 market cap - $25.6 trillion
    TSLA market cap - $310 billion (about 1.2% of the S&P 500)

    A quick search of S&P 500 funds (mutual funds & ETF's) ony adding up the top 20 funds (but really Vanguard and SPY are over $800 billion) is at least $1.2 trillion - and not that TSLA hasn't had off the c/hart stock performance, but this would mean about $12 billion in shares would have to be purchased just to get to mirror the index. So about 5% of the stock, which would certainly drive it up even more. 
    Disclaimer
    Past performance is no guarantee of future returns, wash your hands, wear your mask, OU still sux

  9. 16 hours ago, Bevo&Pevo said:

    Will it buff?

     

     

     

    Here is a good read for you - The Great Halifax Explosion; about 2 vessels in Halifax harbour in December 1917, they manage to collide. One of them is a munitions ship, and the resulting explosion was the largest ever until Hiroshima.
    A Newly Discovered Diary Tells the Harrowing Story of the Deadly ...

  10. Marketwatch has an article, using a tweet from Will Hershey, pointing out BRK.A/BRK.B have lost $90 billion in market cap this year (only big banks have lost more).
    Which, as they point out in the article, is amazing since the biggest stock holding that Buffett has is AAPL, so the rest of his investments and controlled entities have lost even more.

    https://www.marketwatch.com/story/buffetts-berkshire-hathaway-has-lost-more-market-value-in-2020-than-all-but-4-publicly-traded-us-companies-2020-07-20?mod=home-page

    MW-IK805_chart__20200720131202_NS.jpg?uuid=2117850c-caac-11ea-983a-9c8e992d421e

    Is this the death knells of the investing/marketing wizard of Omaha, or is this just the sleeping bear waiting for the market correction to put all his capital back to work?

  11. 51 minutes ago, Trey3216 said:

    IBIO up 22% pre-market to 7.80.  Looks like it may take the ALT path 

    ALT looks to be back to the daily profit taking in the pre-market/at the open, lets see if it pushes through that and past $35 today.

    • Like 2
  12. I've read a couple of pieces that S&P will soon announce that TSLA will be added to the S&P 500. If that is true, I presume a lot of funds will have to buy shares in proportion to the market cap of TSLA vs. the total S&P 500 market. 
    This could be yet another push to the TSLA stock price, it has more rocket fuel than it's cousin Space-X

    I'm gonna bet all my #stonk money and buy 1 TSLA call

     

    • Like 2
  13. ALT is a bit jumpy this morning - falling to $25.16 shortly after close, as someone wanted to get out, and now back around $33

    #stonks doing #stonk things - not sure if it's pump and dump, or dump and pump. All I do know is that the options I'm still holding are now in the 10-bagger category

    Thanks - @Harrison Stafford

  14. I've seen better threads that were accidentally created - this is not the content for which Surly is regarded, or does it provide an accurate portrayal of the highly regarded posters here.

  15. 1 hour ago, ztejas said:

    Well yeah global warming is ensuring that. Not sure about multiple 10,000 year ones but it wouldn't surprise me. 

    Speaking from experience, and by that I mean living in Houston for years (and I'm not saying there isn't a climate change component) and urban sprawl, huge expanses of concrete and decades old flood plain maps also have a huge impact on why there is so much economic impact on large urban areas.

    • Like 3
  16. 3 minutes ago, Telegraph_it said:

    The best road trip I have been on was Austin to Vegas with stopover in Sunshine for Spring baseball during spring break my junior year. On the way into Vegas we stopped at Hoover Dam and did the tour. Just amazing. 

    Took my college age kids there last year as a stopover going from Zion-Vegas-Phoenix; neither really wanted to go, but Dad dragged them along. The engineering student was fascinated and thought it was great, the liberal arts major thought it was horrible how all that land was taken from the Native Americans (said the same thing about the national parks)...smdh

    • Like 2
    • Haha 1
  17. Warning to those holding SPY puts -direct brrrrrrrr fucking of your our puts
    The Fed is going to buy stocks. 

    https://www.forbes.com/sites/kevincoldiron/2020/07/18/the-fed-is-going-to-buy-stocks/#625dff11eb49

    Quote

    The Fed is going to buy stocks.  I don’t know precisely when (sorry day traders), but it will happen, and probably soon.  

    The first half of the Fed’s dual mandate is to promote maximum employment - that means avoiding and mitigating recessions.  Supporting the S&P 500 is central to this effort, not because a fall in the market signals a recession is coming, but because it is the recession. This isn’t what we’re taught in Economics 101 and frankly it isn’t how most economists understand the market, so the idea requires a little backstory.

    The Rise of Carry

    The S&P 500 drives the economy through its central role in the global carry trade. Carry traders earn a yield spread, or an up-front premium payment, as compensation for the risk that the asset they’ve purchased will depreciate or the event they’ve insured against will occur.  These transactions, and a wide variety others like them, are “short volatility”.  They do well when the world stays the same but can crash suddenly when things change.

    Carry trades always increase both leverage and liquidity.  The growth in leverage makes the world more fragile, but increased liquidity temporarily hides this fragility. Debt financed stock buybacks are an important example.  Their growth reinforces the leveraging up of corporate balance sheets (increased fragility) and at the same time provides a critical source of equity buying (increased liquidity) for those investors who wish to raise cash.  We shouldn’t underestimate this dynamic - for over a decade now the only sector that has consistently purchased US equities has been non-financial corporations.  

    The price of this liquidity provision is proxied by the stock market’s volatility - the VIX.  When it skyrockets in a crash - as it did in March - carry trades lose money, carry traders withdraw from their positions and liquidity evaporates.  In a leveraged and liquidity dependent world, a fall in the US stocks and a rise in the VIX, has immediate negative consequences for the economy, forcing the Fed to act.

    In 2008, and again in 2020, the Fed was able to support the S&P 500 indirectly by lowering rates, purchasing government debt and making loans to buy risky bonds.  With each intervention they’ve crept closer to buying stocks.  This is no accident.  When the Fed intervenes to support markets, it suppresses volatility and truncates losses for carry trades.  This in turn encourages them to grow in size and scope, thus almost automatically guaranteeing that the next round of support will need to be larger.  The most recent round stopped just short of buying equities, the next round will take Fed over the threshold.

    The Fed Is Trapped

    Don’t agree with me?  Ok, let’s try a thought experiment.  What would happen if the Fed explicitly ruled out buying stocks?  

    It seems fair to suppose that this would cause an immediate market sell-off.  But, that might well be temporary.  Longer-term, though, there would be important consequences.  The Fed is already buying both investment-grade and junk-rated corporate bonds.  Drawing a line in the sand with equities would only encourage a further shift toward debt financing.  Why use equity when debt is cheaper and, with Fed support, easier to roll-over and thus competitive with equity in terms of duration as well?  Unfortunately, more corporate leverage would boost equity market volatility, increasing the probability of large fall in equity prices and deep recession.

    It’s not hard to see the trap. Given Fed actions to date, ruling out future equity purchases would accelerate a structural dynamic that risks more frequent and deeper recessions, the exact outcomes the Fed is mandated to avoid.  

    There’s more.  The ongoing shift of retirement assets to saver-controlled DC plans makes such a line in the sand even harder to hold politically.  Wait, you helped bail out banks in 2008, you bought junk bonds in 2020, but now you won’t step in to support the 401K’s of individual savers?  Less than a decade ago Texas Governor Rick Perry infamously suggested Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke would be in for some “ugly” treatment if he kept “printing money”.  I suspect the tables have now turned so dramatically that future Fed chairs will be in for rough treatment if they do not print money.

    The Unthinkable Keeps Happening

    If that seems a bit extreme, think about how dramatically Fed behavior has changed in a relatively short time.  When Long-Term Capital Management failed in 1998, the Fed feared its bankruptcy could threaten the financial system.  Yet despite this fear, its concern about excessive interference in private markets was still great enough that it went out of its way to avoid any appearance of direct intervention.  Twenty-two years later the Fed is now using a loophole in its charter to run an SPV that finances the purchase of corporate debt, including junk bonds. That is a long road to have traveled and there is no evidence to suggest the road ends here.  

    Andrew Mellon, as US Treasury Secretary is supposed to have advised Herbert Hoover to “liquidate everything” in order to purge the system of its rottenness following the 1929 stock market crash and subsequent depression.  I am not advocating this strategy, nor am I trying to argue that recessions are somehow good.  What I am saying is that the Fed’s actions over the past two decades, however well-intentioned, have had very important unintended consequences.  If we are going to address those consequences - slow growth, rising debt and excessive reliance on carry trades for liquidity - we first have to realize how and why they’ve evolved.  

    In the meantime, get ready for the Fed to buy stocks.

     

    • Like 1
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