strziggy

Technical analysis is nonsense. Moving averages are having fun with excel. It doesn't work. Covered calls or cash secured puts are flipping coins. Pretend if you want there are better ways. #options #optionselling

@RepBaumgartner A true patriot here. not only is this mope “suffering”, he needs you to see it.

I’m fully aware that this job requires tons of travel and crazy hours, but it does indeed bug me that I’m here in DC at 11:30pm voting (for the 4th time!) to fully fund the Homeland budget and missing my kids hoops game tomorrow morning back in Washington because the Senate pulled their BS stunt last night. 🇺🇸

@lacherbauer @ChicagosMayor if it was actually true, they should just double the tax and create even more economic impact

These are just made up numbers. The new tax is expected to bring in $40M annually, if every dime went towards minimum-wage full-time salaries, it would pay for only 1200 jobs. $2.9B in added spending is 6 Lollapaloozas, annually—LOL. This is @ChicagosMayor math.

@PharmD_KS Thanks for the coin flipping word salad

ES coming into a key spot. Rest of day I kind of like this idea. push into 12-16 range that gets bought and bases back above 18 or so for a high of day retest. Or lose 12-16 and offer it and possibly go backward in time to the downside

@BrianCostin “Fled” is a little hyperbolic. Moved out is what happened. p taxes pay for services, high/low is a relative term. if low, services are either low or paid for in a different way. math didn’t take the weekend off.

“high property taxes is what makes Chicago great” is delusional thinking. 900,000 people have fled Chicago from it’s peak. There are many cities with much lower property taxes and much better economic growth.

@gbrew24 He can’t get a raise, he can’t get a promotion, but he would like to keep the current engagement. the moronic part is to broadcast this out. He should tell them Sunday is his day off or call in sick.

I don't understand this strategy. If Iran is collapsing, why continue the war? If Iran has been decimated, why is Hormuz still closed? If they have no ability to coordinate, how were they able to launch an immediate retaliation following the South Pars and Natanz attacks?

@acaseofthegolf1 Eh, not really. With the exception of tiger you just want to watch guys play and compete on that special golf course. Ratings won’t move much if rahm, decham, or cc win or contend, the golf course is the draw.

* For the good of golf, it’s great to see Bryson and Rahm playing well. The fact is we all live on golf twitter and think all golf fans have some emotions attached to Bryson and Rahm because they play on LIV. I’d guess a good portion of people that watch the Masters don’t care, they just want to see the worlds best at their best. Bryson is clearly there, Rahm getting closer it seems. Cam Young playing great, hopefully Scottie, Rory, Brooks, Tommy, Zander etc will be at their best in April. It would be great to see the best battle it out down the stretch (to finish runner-up to CC)

@lacherbauer @retro_futurist_ @PaulSkallas Exactly, well said. Anecdotally, prices in my close in suburb are solidly out performing the city. People aren’t leaving the metro area, just the part that’s poorly managed.

I’m only well familiarized with Chicago | Schaumburg. I don’t view it as an adversarial relationship. People should have the freedom to choose between the home-yard-car lifestyle of Hoffman Estates or the flat-park-transit lifestyle of Avondale, and anything in between. IMO the city’s value proposition is underdeveloped / underperforming due to poor safety, schools, and public policy/governance. Average Chicago schools should be as good as suburban schools, they both spend the same per pupil, but they aren’t. Most suburbs run good tight financial operations, Chicago is a financial disaster. That could all be fixed, coordinated, moderated.

Chicago should be its own city-state separate from Illinois, like Berlin or Hamburg, or like Ile-de-France to capture all of Chicagoland. @PaulSkallas

@aakashgupta this all seems kind of tortured and obvious. what did the buyers pay in Katy when they bought vs the woodlands? is it possible that those homes have appreciated more vis a vis the initial price? do you know?

Let me explain exactly why every new subdivision in America looks like the top photo, because the math is wild. A mature tree increases a home's value by 7 to 19 percent. On a $400,000 house, that's $28,000 to $76,000. A single shade tree produces the cooling equivalent of ten room-size air conditioners running 20 hours a day. One tree on the west side of a house cuts energy bills by 12 percent within 15 years. The bottom photo is worth more, costs less to live in, and sells faster. This has been documented by the University of Washington, Clemson, Michigan State, and the USDA. The data is not in dispute. Removing those trees saves the builder roughly $5,000 per lot. Concrete trucks need twice the dripline radius of every standing tree. Utility trenches need flat ground. A bulldozer flattens 200 lots in an afternoon. Preserving trees adds weeks and thousands per home. So the developer pockets $5,000 in savings and the buyer eats $50,000 in lost value for the next two decades. The person making the decision and the person paying for it have never been in the same room. The Woodlands, Texas is the proof of what happens when they are. George Mitchell bought 28,000 acres of Houston timberland in 1974 and preserved 28% as permanent green space. He forced McDonald's to build behind the tree canopy. That McDonald's became one of the highest-volume locations in Texas. The first office building, designed to reflect the surrounding forest so you couldn't see it from the street, leased completely. The Woodlands median home price today: $615,000. Katy, a comparable Houston suburb that clear-cut: $375,000. Named #1 community to live in America two years running. Fifty years of data. The trees are worth more than removing them saves. Developers clear-cut anyway because they sell the house once and leave. You live in it for 30 years.

@FrankCalabrese Sell cars

Raja Krishnamoorthi is 52 years old. Relatively young for politics. What does he do next?

@ChicagoContrar1 Um not really. Doesnt mean im pro/con. maybe 80% of tax bill is local school dist/ municipality. She has nothing to do with that.

For those who have yet to cast a ballot for Cook County Board president, glance at your property tax bill before you visit the polls. Boss Toni is responsible for it. Removing Preckwinkle from power would be essentially identical to the downfall of a tyrant.

@simon_ree This isn’t true. We have had two 20%+ drawdowns in the last 4yrs and you act like this is different when we are down 5-6 %. are you even awake?

The dip that didn't get bought BTFD is a conditioned reflex built on 6 years of central bank backstops and V-shaped recoveries Today, the bid simply wasn't there, with $SPX $NDX $SMH all closing at the lows Regime change or sentiment overshoot? Who wants to own a lot of long risk over the weekend?

@LukeGromen @nnzp1730 Exactly right. It’s hard to make the dispiriting existence of many us citizens worse. Why should they care

@nnzp1730 Serious question: Why is it a threat to our values? The values displayed in the Epstein files? The values displayed w/the funding of, creation of, & reaction to COVID? The values of offshoring jobs to China? The values of socialism for the rich & capitalism for the poor?

Every western person should read this to understand what we are up against…..I can verify its veracity……the supplier ecosystem from top to bottom is extraordinary…..it was built by the west over decades and is unparalleled in the west……while we are navel gazing and fighting ideological wars internally, the CCP is focused and aligned on what they want. What do we have to fight it? We have creativity, which the Chinese lack. We are undisciplined but creative…..but we are very distracted. This is an existential threat to “the west” and our morals and values, which are not shared (nor respected) by the CCP.

@handre well said

Cash for Clunkers perfectly exemplifies the broken window fallacy in action. The government spent $3 billion to destroy 690,000 perfectly functional vehicles, claiming this would "stimulate" the economy by forcing people to buy new cars. What they actually did was obliterate billions of dollars worth of working capital that could have served lower-income families for years to come. The program artificially inflated new car sales by cannibalizing future demand and destroying the used car market. Those "clunkers" weren't junk—they were reliable transportation that mechanics could have maintained, parts suppliers could have serviced, and budget-conscious buyers could have afforded. Instead, bureaucrats decided to crush them into scrap metal to create the illusion of economic activity. This wasn't stimulus—it was capital destruction on a massive scale. Real economic growth comes from saving, investment, and the accumulation of productive assets, not from government programs that literally destroy wealth to generate temporary sales spikes. The program made cars more expensive for everyone while making transportation less accessible for those who needed it most. Every crushed engine block represented resources that could have continued serving society productively. True prosperity emerges when we preserve and efficiently allocate capital, not when we celebrate its destruction as economic policy.

@JStein_WaPo They could just give everyone a raise

SCOOP: Trump aides are struggling to spend an extra $500 billion on the military, delaying budget Trump agreed to Hegseth’s bid for *~50%~* military spending boost Vought & others objected internally It’s so much $ they can’t figure out how to spend it

@MikeNellis this is ridiculous. nobody stole anything. all tariffs are remitted to the US govt. its a tax.

Look at the smug look on Trump’s Treasury Secretary’s face as he says the American people are never getting their money back from these illegal tariffs. They stole your money. They’re laughing about it. And they think there will be no consequences. That should tell you everything.

@JasonEBurack what? I was simply addressing the question of how refunds, if they happen, would be “paid” for. what answer are you responding to?

@StrzalkaJoe Good to know you are a permanent deflationista and have no clue what is really happening with the intentional asset price inflation

So if the tax receipts from the tariffs stop & many corporations & small businesses start class action lawsuits for clawbacks of lost tariff funds, will the US Treasury & Fed just create more currency to cover these unexpected expenses? What is the probability?

@TheMaineWonk uh, if the creditors get the money don't the farmers owe less money? isn't that the same thing as the farmers getting the money and paying money they owe to the creditors? wtf kind of statement is this?

TRUMP: “We just took care the farmers with $12 billion of tariff money.” REALITY: Farmers haven’t received 1 penny and they won’t. The money (if it ever arrives) will go to their creditors not the farmers.

@ohiain Gee iain if a “lot” had a number what would it be? How exactly do you “see” them?

I see a lot of newer traders obsessing over entry tactics as if they're the holy grail of trading success. and I completely understand why, because when I was starting out, entries felt like the most tangible thing I could control and perfect. I would see someone post an ORH breakout that worked beautifully, or a VWAP reclaim that led to a massive winner, and I thought to myself: "If I can just master that specific entry, I'll be profitable." so I spent months backtesting opening range breakouts, studying pivot reclaims, trailing moving averages, and perfecting my execution down to the second. ...but what I wish someone had told me when I was going through that phase is that if I had focused on tracking where the money was actually going (aka): which sectors institutional buying was rotating to which themes had institutional sponsorship which names were showing relative strength I would have progressed exponentially faster than I did, trying to perfect my entry timing. What I learned is that if you're already looking in the right place, if you're trading the leading names in the hottest themes with the wind at your back, it rarely matters if you enter in the morning, midday, or afternoon. I can't tell you how many times I've seen the ugliest chart you can imagine work beautifully in a strong market with a hot theme behind it. While the perfect textbook setup in a weak environment or a dead sector goes absolutely nowhere and chops you up for weeks. I always ask myself: Would I rather have the cleanest entry on a stock that nobody cares about in a sector that's bleeding, or would you rather have a sloppy entry on a leading name in a theme that's ripping with volume and institutional buying? The answer is obvious when you put it like that, but so many traders, including my younger self, get it backwards because we're conditioned to think that precision is the same thing as edge. Early in my journey, I fell into this exact trap where I was trying to copy entries exactly as I saw them online (buy the ORH, stop at LOD, trail with the 9 EMA) and sometimes it worked, and when it did I thought I'd finally cracked the code and figured out the secret. ...but more often than not, the trades failed, and I couldn't explain why. because the problem wasn't the tactic itself but rather that I didn't understand when and why that tactic should be used in the first place. I was copying outcomes without copying the thinking that led to those outcomes, and that's a recipe for frustration and inconsistency because you're essentially flying blind and hoping that if you just execute the mechanics perfectly, the results will follow. What most people miss is that entry tactics are simply tools, not strategies, and an ORB works best in a strong environment with expanding breadth and real momentum carrying names higher, while a VWAP reclaim is powerful when it aligns with higher timeframe structure and real institutional participation behind the move, etc. Recently, for example, undercuts and reclaim entries on the daily off moving averages have been working incredibly well in this environment. ...where back in September through November, buying ORB breakouts was far more effective than buying undercuts because the market was in a different phase with different characteristics. The work that rarely gets shown and that nobody wants to talk about happens before the entry, and it's understanding the environment: Is the market trending or choppy? Are we in expansion or contraction? Are leaders behaving well or distributing? Is volatility supportive of momentum trades or mean reversion? These are the questions that dictate which entry tactic even makes sense, because the same ORB that works great in a trending tape will destroy you in a range-bound one, and if you don't understand that context, you'll keep blaming your execution when the real issue is that you're using the wrong tool for the wrong job. Here's what I would tell my younger self if I could go back: Focus on entry tactics second. First, focus on finding relative strength, identifying sector rotations, and trading the names that have the wind at their back first. because if you're in the right place at the right time, the entry becomes almost irrelevant. I also would ask myself: Would you rather be the trader who has perfect entries but is constantly fighting against weak sectors and dying themes, or would you rather be the trader who has average entries but is trading the leading names in the sectors where all the money is flowing? I know which one I'd rather be, because I've been both, and I can tell you from experience that trading with the money is infinitely easier than trying to pick pennies off the floor in sectors that nobody cares about. There's also a psychological layer that gets ignored when people fixate on entries, which is that conviction doesn't come from memorizing a rule or copying someone else's tactic... it comes from earning trust in a process through repetition, through studying hundreds of charts, taking trades, reviewing them honestly, and refining what works for your specific tendencies and edge. Until you do that work, you won't know when to press, when to pass, or when to cut quickly, and you'll hesitate and override your rules at the worst possible moments. and this isn't because you're undisciplined but because you lack the conviction that only comes from screen time and personalizing your system. So if you're a beginner or intermediate trader and you're still obsessing over whether you should buy the ORH or wait for the VWAP reclaim, I'd encourage you to zoom out and ask yourself a bigger question: am I even looking in the right place? because if you're trading the right themes, the right sectors, and the right names with relative strength, the entry becomes a detail, not the deciding factor. and that shift in perspective is what helped me go from spinning my wheels perfecting mechanics, to someone who can actually pull money out of the markets consistently.

@nextbigtrade this is all complicated gibberish. there are no such things as “environments”. it is all numbers on a screen.

A good golfer who golfs all the time, even in bad weather would have a higher handicap than the same level golfer who only plays in pristine environments. The same goes for trading a skilled trader who trades too much in hostile environments won’t have as positive of an equity curve as one who is more selective on environments to trade.