Been a hot minute since I posted some quality loss porn, so feast your eyes my speculative HL account got absolutely shredded last month another 5% Friday.

Trump + Elon tweets + short sellers = lethal combo

Should have kept more of that PLTR cash before going balls deep in new ventures. Ironically in Jan I was actually up on total value 🔥

Pls bring the bull back :(

Hit the jackpot bidding against Tesla. Should I buy gold tomorrow?

Well, let’s say you had a few billion bucks kicking around. Billions. But, it’s not enough. It’s never enough.

And let’s say you were in a position to manipulate world events such that you could force massive shocks to the economy. Shocks that history, and a couple dozen Nobel prize winning economists, all made clear would tank the market.

So let’s say you quietly liquidated a significant amount of assets to take a cash position. If the market tanked, your cash is solid but at the bottom of the market you can get back in and buy at massive discounts. But of course, how would you know where bottom is?

One possibility would be if you had the power to reverse the actions that caused all the market turmoil so things stabilize. For example, if you could end a trade war initiated by tariffs based on a “formula” that was just false.

So you start a trade war that tanks the market, just like everyone said it would. You watch it go it way down, and then when it’s really bad and you’re ready to jump back in to take advantage of it, you suddenly “make deals” with other countries to resolve the alleged “unfairness”, and then you lift the tariffs

The market stabilizes, you declare victory, and jump back in at bottom to buy at discounts and make billions more.

Not that it could happen in real life. Really just a stones throw from a completely unhinged conspiracy theory. It could never happen in real life…..

Say thank you.

A lot of people are confused about why the current Republican administration would be willing to crash the economy for these dumb tariffs. I've seen Redditors proposing various ideas for what they think is The Plan, trying to get all of this to make sense. They think surely it must make sense somehow because he has people like Musk around him who they think are smart.

Then I've also seen other people saying there is no plan. He just likes feeling powerful, he likes that tariffs are something he can do unilaterally (in truth he actually still needs Congress' consent, but the Republican Congress spread their cheeks for his dick long ago), and that's the extent of it. No plan, just a narcissist and whatever impulses or crazy ideas he wakes up with that morning.

If you look at the current facts and the Republican party's history and ideology, I actually do think there's a plan. It's just not one anybody's currently talking about, not publicly anyway, but it is a plan that has the benefit of making sense given everything we know.

The first thing to understand is this is not happening in a vacuum. As the administration is raising taxes on everyone, particularly the poor and middle class who spend a disproportionate amount of their income on now-tariffed products as compared to the wealthy, they have also been talking in the background about eliminating federal income taxes for people and corporations. Just Google 'eliminating income taxes' and you'll see many recent articles about figures in the administration talking about this. So they effectively want to get rid of income taxes and various other federal taxes and replace that tax revenue with tariff revenue instead.

But here's the thing about tariff revenue - it tends to naturally go down over time. As many have noted, tariffs incentivize domestic production of previously imported goods, which reduces import volume over time and thereby reduces tariff revenue. Another way is that tariffs incentivize smuggling, misclassification of goods, and other forms of evasion that erode the revenue base, especially when combined with reduced government oversight due to layoffs and downsizing. There are more reasons than this but you get the idea. Tariffs by their nature encourage their own dwindling returns.

So we'd be replacing a reliable revenue source that grows over time, income taxes, which even if you leave at the same rate nonetheless grows in dollars with inflation and economic growth, with one that instead dwindles over time and could even all-but disappear eventually.

Which brings us to Republican party ideology and a tactic they pioneered many decades ago known as 'starve the beast'. Google it. In the case of this analogy, the government is the beast. This strategy dates back to the Reagan era. The basic idea is, Americans don't easily give up their government. Eliminating what they call entitlements, your Social Security, your Medicare, that would be politically unpopular, right? But what you can do is, every time you're in office, you lower taxes. And then again. And again. And again. And you never, ever, vote to raise them back up.

So the idea goes, eventually, the government, starved of money, will simply have to downsize, right? Eventually we just won't be able to afford programs like Social Security and Medicare, and the Republicans will take no blame, they'll just say we have no choice but to tighten our belt now. From their perspective, they can finally get the citizens off the government's teat, and they'll probably manage to blame the Democrats for the whole situation to begin with using their right wing media machine. It's a good plan.

But here's the thing. It's been 45 years since they started this plan, and instead of tightening the belt, we've just decided to go further and further into debt instead. The day they pined for, that they long envisioned, has just never come. It probably would eventually come if they kept up this strategy, but it's taking much, much longer than they ever expected, and in the meantime we just keep going deeper into debt.

So now, Trump and his cohorts have found a new strategy. Get us off steady revenue, shift over to a source that's basically disappearing ink, they'll finally collapse the entire federal government and we'll live in the pure corporate oligarchy conservatives have long been trying to move us into. That's the plan. If they have to crash the economy to initiate it, so be it.

That one-liner says everything we all already expected. He’s not walking anything back (at least not anytime soon), and escalation is the stance. Over the weekend, I’m watching for formal retaliation headlines from Asia (China already responded), the EU, India, and other countries. Any of them firing back moves 1 step closer to a long-term recession. I’m also tracking SOXL and SOXQ (and their inverse LEFTs) closely, semis are now the eye of the storm. Yield curve shifts and Treasury volatility could signal institutional positioning. And Jerome Powell speaking today did not help calm nerves at all. That likely means that he's letting this volatility run its course. Monday will most likely open up as it did today and yesterday.

Stocks go down?

Source: https://x.com/weakinstrument/status/1908251973356576895?t=qaWTOtBfWJTpHTP-FZ2S3A&s=19

His love for Russia and Putin, his desire to end free markets and trade and his goal of raising taxes higher than anyone in our lifetime. Long live the Republic of America!!!

Do you think jobs will come back to the US ( now ROA). It took decades of gutting trades, unions, electrical infrastructure… we are not capable. They don’t have a clue of how much retraining and hard infrastructure that needs to be built. If they did they would have phased in the tariffs over 5 to 7 years.

lol lambo yea right

Everyone was super bullish on the market when the S&P500 was at $600, but after it's at $500 it's somehow the end of the world. 🤯😂😂😂

FREE PLAY BUMP THIS LATER:

I'm not saying it doesn't drop further. But there is starting to be a great and insane chance of at least a small relief rally the next few weeks and months.

It would be historically unprecedented for a market to crash this much and not bounce at least a little bit for a while.

Even something like 50% of the drop would mean spy back to about 550s? Maybe 540s Even if it goes to the 470s, a sharp bounce back above where we are now isn't unlikely.

I have been the most bearish person ever and have posted predicting this crash to prove it but I'm hair trigger ready to drop 5% of the port on weekly calls this upcoming week. I am not bullish on an economic recovery but there will be a bounce.

Be ready to buy a couple yolo weekly spy calls after the market settles a bit and just diamond hands them , this is a true regard play tho don't bet more than 2-5% the port.

Bet dat.

I was regularly trying to get all my extra cash each month into the market, shit started looking funky when the treasury issues were coming up so I just decided to redirect excess funds into collectibles investments and I'm pretty pleased with the results so far.

Still keeping 401k contributions maxed, I stupidly maxed out my Roth at the beginning of the year and took a hit on that already with the market.

I don't plan to keep buying too many collectibles from here, but at least these have held or even appreciated in the last two months.