No links today …just me screaming ‘hyperinflation’ because everyone else seems to be.

Global Macro economist Jack Dorsey (who also co-founded Twitter, and Square) says hyperinflation is upon us.

I said:

Jack has good data, but so does every armchair fintwit and Stocktwits quarterback that can read a price chart. And there are price charts for EVERYTHING in 2021.

You can pay as much as you want for Yoga pants, hotel rooms or a sandwich but technology keeps doing it’s thing as well and McDonald’s is not horrible.

Arguing about hyperinflation is a waste of time.

If prices go up enough to the point they are politicized enough, you should be prepared.

Jack says buy Bitcoin. I did. It might dull the pain. You might also want to buy a bullet proof vest and a gun. I have not.

I say learn to invest which is pretty dumb of course because you need to have money.

I just do not know how to solve for giving everyone money other than giving everyone money which is why I make fun of macro economists and politicians and people with nose rings and silly beards.

Our portfolio company Koyfin is my favorite product for keeping up with market prices and fundamentals and now news.

I have purchased the new Apple desktops for the sole purpose of getting the most out of Koyfin.

Here are the details on the updated news feature launches and how to set it up.

I am not a news person but it is great to have the option for when I am tracking key market events.

Another cool screen I now use is tracking stocks making new highs.

The market scatter plot is incredible for helping me see what is working.

Try this feature/screen here and have a great weekend.

Thanks God it’s Friday. I pushed it hard this week.

If you don’t believe me ask Don Nitti who now works with me on all things Social Leverage:

Yesterday afternoon I stopped by Ritholtz Wealth offices to do a video/podcast with Josh and Michael Batnick two of my favorite people with a very popular YouTube channel. You can listen here. It should go live today on YouTube. My friend Alex Tarhini was in town visiting from London so it was nice to see him as well:

After the podcast, Josh and team had organized a 60th surprise birthday party for Barry and we feasted and laughed a lot:

My view of the Hudson River this morning for breakfast and writing does not suck:

This weekend I plan to walk the streets of SOHO to get a feel for the trends in fashion and culture. The collaboration economy as it relates to fashion is in full force. Don took me by the Kith SOHO store this week and though I had heard of the brand I never really understood the strategy. It was fun. I spent some money too. As has been happening all week, I was approached by a podcast ‘fan’ who heard me talking to Don and one of the salespersons about of course …a ‘Larry David’ limited run shirt. Sy Gray has helped his sister build ‘The Honey Pot‘:

Lats but not least, Friday had some entertaining speculation.

I was walking with Don after our first morning meeting and he was yelling out stock tickers of interest and of all things, the Trump SPAC started to trend. It was $18 when Don laughed and mentioned it to me, already up $8. He started making calls and explained to me that by the time the stock opened today it would trade north of $50 because of the news cycle and the lunacy of ‘The Meme Economy’ which is so near and dear to my heart. For fun, I bought 200 shares on Robinhood and by the close had sold most of it in the 40’s. Sure enough the stock is trading in the 80’s this morning and I will sell my last few shares…

Speculation is entertainment indeed! I have some Kith spending money.

Sadly, the actual SPAC itself is just a bad joke in a long line of bad financial jokes that are part of the ‘speculation is entertainment’ markets environment of 2021. Matt Levine’s take was the funniest, the truthiest and the best.

Charlie Bilello is back to talk markets, markets, markets. Charlie’s a veteran of the show. I like to catch up on the markets once a quarter, but I could talk about the markets all day, every day. And we love having Charlie on because he’s always prepared. We discuss zero percent rates and why the Fed is buying mortgages, the stealth bear market, and the delta wave impact on micro trends. So, come fly the friendly investing skies with Charlie and I.

You can listen to the podcast here on Spotify or Apple and now all the episodes are on my YouTube channel as well.

For more details on today’s conversation read on below…

Guest: Charlie Bilello

Profile: Founder and CEO of Compound Capital Advisors

Where to Find Him: Twitter

What’s Charlie Panicked About?: Figuring out the settings on his new microphone.

The Takeaway:

We can see inflation isn’t proving to be nearly as transitory as we were promised. Looking back, if we knew nothing else, what’s going on in the housing market – with house prices up 20 percent – the highest rate of increase we’ve ever seen in a one-year period, and every single major metro area up double digits; along with unemployment at 5.2 percent, job openings exceeding the number of unemployed by a few million – you’d expect interest rates to go up.  None of this makes any sense given what’s going on other than the Fed needs to keep rates low because of the debt markets. They’re afraid of what might happen if they normalize. Meanwhile, many stocks have had great run-ups, but some have come off, and a drawdown is a drawdown. There’s a stealth bear market, a change in the market environment where investors’ kept moving higher and higher up on the risk spectrum. But people need to realize just because you take more and more risk doesn’t mean you’re necessarily going to be rewarded for it. By the end of June, we were feeling pretty good with COVID in terms of cases, hospitalizations, and deaths in the US. We were at all pandemic lows. Then came the delta wave impact. First in the UK and Israel. It was maybe three times more contagious. We saw a bit of a pullback, even commodities came down briefly; anything related to the reopening trend took a hit. And it all happened so quickly. But remember, there’s a million ways to get to 10 percent a year. Sometimes you can get there by risking 1 percent of your 100 percent three days a year if you wait patiently enough. Other times you have to invest 110 percent of capital and leave it invested to get that 10 percent, but there’s more than one way to do it.

Previously on…

In May, Charlie came by to talk research, portfolio management, product development, content creation, investor relationships and more for Episode 152 of Panic with Friends. And we had him on way back in March of 2020 for Episode 2, just as COVID started to heat up.

 

I had one of those long Manhattan work days yesterday.

It was great. The weather was perfect. I made all my meetings.

I had dinner with some portfolio companies and even Rachel joined.

After 11 I got in a taxi with Rachel and dropped her off first before being dropped off at the hotel.

This magical Manhattan work day should have been wrapped with a bow at that point.

NOT.

I left my backpack in the taxi. My laptop and notebook and other goodies were gone.

I buzzed Don and Gary because … why not stress them out ….

Don helped me track the taxi company and leave a text per their directions.

But it really comes down to whether the taxi driver sees the bag and decides to return it.

I changed some passwords and went to bed.

As I was nodding off I got a call from a blocked phone number.

My taxi driver had driven my bag to a police station and turned it in.

The only question left is … what is the appropriate gift and gesture for the cab driver?

I am back in New York for the next two weeks and I only know New York in one speed…overbook and squeeze everything in.

I have a secret weapon this time…my daughter Rachel – who is now living here and willing to teach the old man a few tricks.

For my schedule to work this week I needed to learn the subway system and I have fought that for 40 years.

Once I get down underground in New York I see to slip into a trance and walk into walls and bump into turnstiles that won’t accept my card or payment. It generally ends with people calling me an asshat and I sprint for breath at street level.

On Sunday night, Rachel made it so my iPhone would magically make Subway life easy and she was correct.

Now I’m zipping uptown and downtown and making friends with all the ‘natives’.

Thanks Rachel…

Yesterday on one of my trips uptown from meetings downtown I stopped in on my friend Jim O’Shaughnessy to catch up on life, prostates and investing. We never made it to life or investing part of the conversation and three cranberry juices later I was off…not before Jim snuck this picture of me promising that it would never appear on the internet. Ya right…

Thanks goodness Jim is married to a professional photographer and has learned a few good tricks and filters.

I love New York.

As a reminder, Marketsmith (by Investor’s Business Daily) is now a sponsor of the weekly show. All the charts you have been seeing in the videos and will continue to see are from Marketsmith. They are offering my readers a three week trial for $19.95. Click this link if you would like to try it out.

Happy Monday.

I will get right to it this week with our Momentum Monday video session. A bunch of new ideas were discussed and we kept it short. You can watch/listen right here on YouTube and I have embedded it on the blog below:

Here are Ivanhoff’s notes…

The latest earnings season has just begun. So far, it is passing with flying colors. Most financials rallied in the two weeks preceding their earnings reflecting rising interest rates and expectations. This time around, we did not see the usual “buy the rumor, sell the news” event. In fact, most financials continued higher post their reports. Add to that the high-volume breakouts in aluminum producer Alcoa and transportation company J.B. Hunt, and it seems the market is forming a new narrative – earnings growth is catching up with high valuations and some stocks might actually be not as expensive as previously thought.

In the meantime, crypto is on fire and becoming more mainstream with every passing week. Bitcoin passed 60k in anticipation of the launch of its first ETF. Ethereum is approaching a potential breakout near 4k. No one really knows how to value them and therefore they can be worth anything – this is a good quality to have when there’s plenty of liquidity and risk appetite going around and a terrible weakness when everyone suddenly decides to run for the exits. As a result, most crypto-related stocks are rising to the occasion – MARA, RIOT, COIN, HUT, BTBT, BLOK, MSTR.

In other words, market breadth is improving as more and more industries are starting to break out. Most tech stocks report earnings in the next 3 weeks or so. If they don’t disappoint, I won’t be surprised if we see new all-time highs in the indexes.

As always, here is the Stocktwits momentum 25 lists (free).

Here is Charlie’s 7 chart Sunday.

Here is Nikita’s SPAC report.

Have a great week.

Disclaimer: All information provided is for educational purposes only and does not constitute investment, legal or tax advice, or an offer to buy or sell any security. For full disclosures, click here. 

What a time to be alive and have some capital and a network.

If you do not have capital you should be building domain experience and a network because I don’t see the capital flows slowing down or the printing ending anytime soon.

My friend JC has a good post up titled ‘What Bubble’. The gist:

You see, stocks have been correcting for most of 2021. If you’re still waiting for a correction, it must be because you’re looking at your charts with your eyes closed. The average nasdaq stock fell 30% this year. Half the nasdaq stocks fell 20% this year. Over 20% of nasdaq stocks got cut in half this year. If you’re waiting for a correction, where have you been?

This chart from JC that further hammers home the ‘what bubble’ thesis is great:

Investors and traders around the world have incredible tools to go with the $11 trillion in fresh printed money to make speculation their entertainment for decades.

The froth in SPAC’s quickly turned into a bear market and the fast money and the ‘youts’ have long moved to crypto and NFT’s.

What makes this money flow stop is the trillion dollar question. I stopped looking for the answers to these ‘macro’ questions after 2005 when I started my blog and became a much better investor.

Other great reads and listens on this weeks theme include:

Trillions: The Rise of Passive: How The Asset Management Industry Got Disrupted. It is a great read about passive investing and the stock market.

My friend Brian sent me this post titled ‘Those Deals Don’t Exist Anymore:What to do in a world awash in capital‘ and it was an excellent read. I love this riff:

The great tidal wave of cash has made the market efficient. All the easy stuff is gone. Those deals don’t exist anymore. The wave of cash finally breaks, though, when it comes to the hardest thing: creating assets. The market is still not efficient in the creation of assets. Even with Tiger’s blanket investing strategy, there is still an insatiable need for more assets. Everyone wants them but very few people want to do or are capable of doing the hard work to make them. As the champion bodybuilder Ronnie Coleman said: “Everybody wants to be a bodybuilder but nobody wants to lift no heavy-ass weights.” Get your weight belt out of the closet and get some chalk on your hands because we are going to go deadlift 500lbs.

This inefficiency in the creation of assets has created the greatest asset speculation of the last 30 years… in Crypto and NFT’s. This latest boom in the sector is much different than 2017 and for those willing to truly focus and do the hard work the gains have been staggering.

I’ll wrap this weeks longer than usual post with India’s start up ecosystem and stock markets. Talk about a nation creating assets that is now awash in capital!! India is on fire with new investment, especially in the venture space. I follow my friend Shiv (who did some work for me and Social Leverage when he lived in San Diego and attended college) and have invested alongside him in a few Indian startups. My over simplified bullish theme for now on India is that we share a common technology enemy…China. India has gone so far as to kick TikTok out of India. If you want an easy way to follow the fast growing venture scene, follow Shiv at his 1947 tech site and on Twitter.

Have a great Sunday.

PS – One great listen on all things investing is Patrick’s podcast this week with Sam Hinkie.

Gary and I were getting a pitch yesterday from a fantastic, grizzled entrepreneur and he had a slide that read ‘Speculation is Entertainment‘.

I could not help but stop and say ‘OMG…you nailed this moment in time’.

Before COVID we lived in a world of ‘Netflix and Chill‘.

With $11 trillion printed since COVID, we should not be surprised that speculation is a new form of entertainment.

Young people collecting NFT’s with fractional ownership and DAO’s, while spending their weekends talking and trading crypto is ok with me.

Before you know it they will know how to invest and that’s a good thing seeing there is a portion of that $11 trillion that will need to be invested and speculated on well to pay for all the wasted trillions.

In Rome, all the free time led to Gladiators, so take it easy on the ‘youts’ please.

Long week for me. I went Phoenix, Las Vegas, San Diego, Phoenix and now New York.

I will be spending the rest of the month in New York working. I’m looking forward to seeing Rachel and catching up with portfolio companies and LP’s. I have not been in the city since June.

Onwards…

I am reading on Bloomberg that the SEC is set to allow Bitcoin Futures ETF’s.

My inbox was lit for people calling for Bitcoin $100,000

Not to be a party pooper, but I am the oldest blogger in America and the last crypto peak/top occurred when they launched BTC futures (late 2017).

I have no idea what happens but at least China still hates it.

If you are considering selling, Fred Wilson is asking how the hell do you track crypto for taxes?

This thread on Twitter has some answers.