Engineer

@asmartbear not entirely -- an important overlooked half of Icarus's story was not to fly too low to the sea else the dampness could make the wings too heavy to flap. the story is really about golden mean.

Being humble doesn’t lead to failure; being arrogant can (Icarus). Another insight based on Pascal's Wager: longform.asmartbear.com/pascals-wager/…

@Jmanjiro @ErikSTownsend @MacroVoices seconded

@ErikSTownsend Thank you Eric, your calm, reasoned insights are always appreciated. As is your effort @MacroVoices, all for free, no paywall, helping the average Joe like me try and understand things a little better🙇‍♂️ Thanks!

Sunday afternoon $GC_F Gold musings: The BCOM Index rebalancing (trading period Jan 9-15) will reportedly involve the "mechanical" selling of 2.4mm toz of Gold. That's $10.8 BN notional principal. In less technical terms, that's a shitload of gold they gotta sell this week no matter what! But the BCOM rebalancing was widely advertised (@zerohedge covered it extensively, as did other financial media), and no doubt a whole bunch of traders thought they could get cute by closing their longs ahead of the scheduled event with intent to buy back in lower, on or after the 15th of January. Some were even bold enough to SHORT gold late last week anticipating an opportunity to cover those shorts lower next week. But the events over the weekend have set the stage for a massive upside SQUEEZE. Yes, $10.8BN of mechanical selling is a significant headwind to overcome. But between a huge escalation in the Iranian protests over the weekend (which went almost completely unreported by MSM, but still happened), Trump talking openly about using military force if necessary to take Greenland (for its own good, of course) and then Germany responding with serious talk of putting NATO boots on the ground in Greenland to defend against a U.S. "invasion", and several signals that the Venezuela conflict not only "isn't over yet" but the stage is set for a "Greater Venezuela" conflict involving Cuba and maybe even Columbia... All these factors could easily set the stage for a gap-up open on this evening's 6pm ET futures open into thin Sunday night liquidity. In plain English, that means that everyone who got cute anticipating the mechanical selling of "a shitload of Gold" due to BCOM Index rebalancing might be about to get run over by a convoy buying several "shitloads of gold" in a panic reaction to the weekend's geopolitical escalations. All it would take to trigger stop-loss orders and SQUEEZE any daring shorts out of the market would be a big Sunday gap-open spike. That short squeeze could easily result in a Monday close at a new ATH, and that in turn would trigger more buying by technical traders buying the fresh breakout. The people who closed their longs on expectations of getting back in lower at the end of this coming week would panic-buy back their original positions, accelerating the squeeze. And all it would take is just over a hundred bucks of upside from here to print a new ATH close on Monday. On the other hand, $10.8BN of notional principal really is a shitload of gold, and the BCOM rebalancing is definitely a real thing. But methinks the anticipation of that event putting a lot of traders on the wrong side of the boat is likely to be more than enough to overcome that headwind. The first signal to watch is whether we see a gap-up open on GLOBEX $GC_F at 6pm this evening. The next (and far more important) signal is whether that gap-up (if it occurs) can be sustained through the overnight session and into European and then New York trading on Monday. A gap-up open that's only sustained for an hour or two would suggest that the panic-rush back into the long side of gold I'm describing isn't really happening with enought volume to tip the scales and overcome the BCOM headwind. But an acceleration of upside momentum overnight and into London trading Monday would deliver the opposite signal. Let's see what 6pm brings. cc: @chigrl @zerohedge

@foodtwittest @nntaleb @JamesMarsh79 regime change from USD => gold as reserve currency.

@nntaleb @JamesMarsh79 Can I ask why your usual "I have never seen a shortage not followed by abundance" not apply to the metal trade (not being snarky, I am not expert)?

Friends: for those panicking over gold, look at the yearly not the daily --unless your position is too big. It is still up >10% on the month.

@iclickbuttons of what?

@TalebWisdom Wasn’t this Buffett

"The difference between successful people and really successful people is that really successful people say no to almost everything." - Nassim Nicholas Taleb

@thepatwalls this looks like teamblind -- that site is notorious for trolls shitposting about how rich they are. 99.9+% likely this is a shitpost. Please ignore.

If you have "net worth goals", don’t be surprised when you end up here.

@tomaspueyo this is correct. In fact it is backed up by several academic studies of a strong correlation, where more retirement benefits ==> lower birth rate. b/c the main economic incentive for having kids is for them to be your retirement benefit. studies here: docs.google.com/document/d/16T…

Next time a boomer says he deserves his retirement benefits, just like his parents before him: “How many children did YOU have?”

@peterfrankopan @ektrit what old age benefit program in france corresponded with the decline in french fertility rate around 1775? I'm not finding any from the AIs. French revolution?

For this (and more) open.substack.com/pub/peterfrank…

In 1700, France was the powerhouse of Europe: 25 million people, one in five Europeans, and almost 1 in 25 people on Earth were French. Its armies, culture and language shaped the world. 🇫🇷 1/5

@jimcraddock @thechosenberg What’s the good post about how many people to date before settling down? I’d be highly curious to read it

I read a good post about how many people to date before settling down. It was based on statistics. Basically, it says she will never meet the right person because her standards are too high and filters are too low. As a shorter guy, I was always amazed at the short women that thought 6' was a minimum they could adhere too. That rules out over 85% of candidates. The remaining ones will all still have the same problems are will likely have more of the "dumb jock" issues. Chatting with her could not be any fun. She has too many conversations going on to track, or she is too brief to have any fun.

Your modern dating landscape, sir

@ektrit tesla+tsmc are a perfect counterexamples to this. he is correct there is no money in low-margin products however, there is money to be made in high-value-add manufacturing (i.e. high-margin products).

@nnzp1730 @ektrit Factually incorrect. I read the entire Rockefeller bio. The guy played golf avidly in retirement

Retirement is a modern concept. You great grandparents, even if they were Carnegie and Rockefeller, never considered it…..most couldn’t even understand the concept let alone afford it. They relied on family only after they literally could not work.

@mitchellh just watched it. Ace Presentation. Insane he got yet another 4x speedup just from eliminating branches and a clever reorganization of the underlying data layout using eytzinger

This is required material for any software engineer to understand CPU performance optimization. Yes, it's about Instruments, but the patterns and lessons here are invaluable in general. It does highlight why Instruments is imo best in class, though. developer.apple.com/videos/play/ww…

@asmartbear then, we have the answer. It's still maximizing sales at all stages of company. Diff is what ROIC/ROE you allow. At $0: even negative ROIC/ROE is fine. Just make sales. Learn. At more mature stages: start tightening ROIC/ROE. Maybe minimum 20% ROIC/ROE

@asmartbear Was reading "How Asia Works" and it's similar -- the main metric new industrial companies are evaluated were based on EXPORTS. It's primary way to know whether those companies had compelling products! And they are just learning, cannot be efficient. Efficiency comes later!!!!

“If you reward profits alone, it’s the dumbest thing you could do. Employees will just quit advertising and start shrinking the business” --Warren Buffett And yet, this is the classic self-funded goal. How to resolve the apparent paradox?

@asmartbear no I don't think he cherry pick. He look at ALL the money invested, including inventory, any marketing spend on goodwill (brand) build up. for bootstrappers, founders need to account their time-labor as at least equal to opportunity cost from job (if not 4x-8x as you write once)

@SpeedTestDemon Right, indeed it might be ROIC or similar, though I think it's more that he selected specific structural characteristics, trusting that those represent permanent competitive advantage or permanent cashflows.

@asmartbear amazing Buffett quote. Can't believe I didn't commit that to memory. I remember a similar case in barnes & noble where the new CEO who took over from the founder was cutting sales & marketing to grow the business. Founder came back & fired him for it.