John F. Carter

This is a journal recap of my trading last year. Although I didn't trade $GME, I did trade plenty of $TSLA, $AMZN, and $SPX for a 1270%, $18.2M gain. Here's the blog: simplerjohn.medium.com/2020-a-recap-o…

@ryancohen Board members after reading: “We need to address this. Let’s hire a consultant to update our mission statement to include having an owners mentality and announce the updated version at the next town hall meeting.”

The Hollow Men American capitalism is rotting from the head down. We have replaced the "Owner-Operator"—the risk-taker-with a new, parasitic class of corporate bureaucrat: The Risk-Free Insider. By "Insider," I am not referring to a specific title. I am referring to the entire administrative state that has captured the modern corporation. This includes the Directors who exist solely to collect fees, the Executives who exist solely to collect bonuses, and the Managers who exist solely to hire consultants. These are the hollow men of the boardroom. They are masters of PowerPoint. They wear the right suits. They say the right buzzwords about "governance" and "ESG." But they are mercenaries fighting a war with someone else’s ammunition. In a functioning economy, authority is tied to liability. If you make a bad decision, you lose your own money. That fear of loss is the only thing that keeps a business honest. It forces you to cut waste, obsess over the customer, and stay late to fix what is broken. Today, we have severed that link. We have rigged the game so that heads, the Insider wins; tails, the shareholder loses. If the stock goes up, the Insider collects a massive performance bonus. If the stock crashes due to their own incompetence, they are fired with a "Golden Parachute" worth tens of millions. They are gambling with the house’s money, and they never leave the table poorer than they arrived. This looting starts in the boardroom. We have normalized a "Country Club" culture where directors are selected based on social profiling rather than their ability to build a business. The modern board member is often a professional tourist—paid an average of $350,000 a year. Let’s be brutally honest about what that number represents. The average director is paid nearly five times the GDP per capita of the United States. They earn more for attending four quarterly lunches than the vast majority of Americans earn in five years of hard labor. And for what? Most of these directors are "over-boarded," sitting on three or four boards simultaneously. They treat directorships as a gig economy for the elite. They fly in, rubber-stamp a compensation package they didn't read, and fly out. They collect checks from companies they do not understand, do not use, and certainly do not love. They are not there to ask hard questions. They are there to be collegial. They are there to protect the other Insiders. And what happens when these boards hire executives who also have no personal capital at risk? We get the Delegation Economy. When a Risk-Free Insider faces a crisis—bloated expenses, a broken supply chain, or a stale product—they do not roll up their sleeves. They hire a consultant. They pay a strategy firm millions of shareholder dollars to produce a 100-page deck telling them what they already know. This is not management. It is intellectual money laundering. They use shareholder capital to buy an insurance policy for their own careers. If the plan fails, they can blame the consultants. They delegate the work because they are terrified of the responsibility. They would rather preside over a slow, comfortable decline than risk a bold mistake. While American Insiders are busy optimizing their severance packages, our global competitors are optimizing their products. They are not slowed down by bureaucracy. They are not waiting for a slide deck. They are outworking us. If we continue to fill our C-suites with administrators instead of operators, we will lose our edge. We will see iconic American franchises hollowed out by fees, managed for the benefit of the Insiders, while the true owners—the shareholders—are left holding the bag. The time for polite governance is over. If we want to save the American economy from mediocrity, we must demand a return to the "Owner’s Mentality." We need leaders who treat shareholder capital with the same reverence they treat their own savings. The era of the Risk-Free Insider must end.

Everything happening in the markets right now is exactly how it has always dealt with too much leverage. Like a horse swatting flies off with its tail. $SPX #BitcoinCrash An opportunity for the unleveraged to buy the dip.

@elonmusk Money buys a lot of paperwork. Hang in there, at the end of the day, we are all just meat puppets made of stardust.

Whoever said “money can’t buy happiness” really knew what they were talking about 😔

@Zillaionaire 🤣

@johnfcarter As foretold in the prophecy

And here comes the liquidation event . . .

@SuSSheth When were you a member? A PE firm bought us in 2022 and I ended up buying it back in 2025 to get back to our core work of trade scans, posted trades. It was a little hectic there for a while but that all is cleaned up and calmed down.

@johnfcarter You hardly posted any of your trades the time I was with simpler. The key reason I joined simpler. When I wrote to support I got a stock response back hiding behind terms and conditions. Is this the kind of company you want to run? No integrity.

This is a journal recap of my trading last year. Although I didn't trade $GME, I did trade plenty of $TSLA, $AMZN, and $SPX for a 1270%, $18.2M gain. Here's the blog: simplerjohn.medium.com/2020-a-recap-o…

Markets today $SPX

@SPrint7807 You win have a great day

@johnfcarter You slid in a bias within your story about what "Venezuelans" prefer. You're also trying to slide in an insult here. You had no personal stories to share amid the horrors of the past 2-3 years. So was that fear or a business decision? Let me guess, you just had nothing, right? 😉

In the summer of 2024, I met a couple from #Venezuela at a youth program in Boston. They flew in for the event and our kids hung out together. They owned a small business in Caracas and were talking about the elections in their home country. They voted for the opponent, Edmundo Gonzalez, who stood in for Maria Machado after she was barred from running . . . and so did everyone they knew, to the point where it was obvious Gonzalez won. (It's believed he had at least 67% of the vote). They worried that Maduro would ignore the result and keep power. "He'll get support from the countries he does business with, like Cuba and Brazil, and he and his group run the country like it's their own business." Which, of course, is precisely what happened. Hopefully, this is a new dawn for the people of Venezuela. #venezuelalibre

@SPrint7807 Just sharing an experience - all politics is a clown show aimed at manipulating those who are easily offended.

@johnfcarter You should avoid the political space John. It is bad for business and you've been silent on so much more horror in other news.

@Heart_of_Simba Debit drag overall is deflationary - we'd need a spike of liquidity like we saw with lockdowns to see inflation spike again.

@johnfcarter Hey John! Any idea what this means for inflation? Do you think it roars back or we see deflation? I know your major cycle top is sometime in the next 12-18 months and your housing top is 2027/28, curious to know what you think rates will do over the next 5-10 yrs? Thanks!

The system is screaming, "MOAR Liqudiity Needed Now!" After all, there's $10 Trillion in debt rolling over the next 12 months. The action in #gold and #silver says it's coming.

@StockStationX Agreed, cycle wise it will be up on deck - and then that's when the liquidity flood gets stronger to try to right set everything

@johnfcarter True. I suspect we see stocks rise further until the summer of 2026. After that is where we might see a “crash”. We shall see..

@Dugan667 More liquidity is 100% bullish for assets

@johnfcarter And yet. We will be bullish until we are forced not to be. Unless you want your A$$ handed to you.

@StockStationX So far, whenever global liquidity sees new highs, stocks and crypto aren't far behind.

@johnfcarter So 2026 bullish?

@FadeTheXX With gold and silver front running this so hard, it makes me think the liquidity that is going to have to be added over the next few years to keep things running smoothly is going to dwarf anything we've seen so far.

@johnfcarter whats the end game....weird that #gold/#silver only reacted in price in 2025 as opposed to anytime in the previous decade

@evernotehelps The lag with the continuous syncing has me looking for an alternative - sadly as I've been using evernote pro for 10+ years.

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Grok imagine laying out a new vision for our place in Wimberley . . . .

Facts 🤣