When it comes to trading and investing markets, I’ll tell you a secret. The most important piece of data you’ll ever hear about it.
As traders we go long and short. But markets, and the instruments that compose them i.e. stocks and ETFs, trade Long 90% of the time. (Meaning Calls) Because institutions, who do 99% of the investing in markets, always go long, i.e. they are always buying. Not selling or shorting. (Puts)
Think about it: young people go to their local institution and say we’d like to invest our small savings. Meaning BUY. Meaning LONG. Meaning Calls. They don’t go in and say we’d like to take our small savings and go short. Hah! So shorting is a precise skill. Because it can only succeed a mere 10% or less of the time in terms of general markets and their activities.
Of course one can become an expert in shorting (Puts) looking for opportunities to only short (puts) markets and stocks and ETFS. And they can do just as well. But this involves precision and daily attention and activity. Because markets traditionally and in general are always going up.
The United States National Debt Hits 33 Trillion Dollars for the first time. This is the highest national debt a country has ever had in human history. A staggering sum never fathomed or contemplated.
Of course this could be perfectly fine if the entity, in this case a country, has a strong economy and GDP — how much revenue it collectively produces per year — that could easily pay the debt off at any time. This is expressed as Debt to GDP. It’s a simple ratio that measures an entity’s debt compared to how much it produces in revenue per year if it were to start paying that debt off now. The smaller the number, the better. The larger the number the more difficult it will be for that entity to pay off this debt.
Traditionally when a country reaches a debt to GDP ratio of 50%, lenders start to take notice and become concerned. Greece and Italy are prime examples because they are consistently in the news for flying much higher than 50% and getting into trouble with the EU and their lenders. Germany being the economic powerhouse of the EU — just as the High Command of the Third Reich planned it once World War II started to turn toward an Allied Powers victory (study this; the information is out there — they meticulously planned out how to create a “Fourth Reich” thinly disguised as a unified Europe controlled by Germany. Of course they never foresaw the behemoth the United States would become post a nuclear world… ) — is always left to pick up the debt payments of Italy and Greece and any other European country who falls behind on their debt payments and agreements.
For some reason Japan is allowed to run a debt to GDP ratio of some 250% and nobody seems to mind. [research].
The United States’ debt to GDP is now 129%. The highest it’s ever been is 134% during the Covid Pandemic Recession. This corresponds with other periods when the federal government ran large budget deficits: the Reagan-Bush years of the 1980s and early 1990s; the G. W. Bush years during his “War On Terror” and the 2008 financial crisis and the subsequent Great Recession; and the pandemic-caused recession of 2020 during the Trump years when federal debt spiked to an all-time high of the aforementioned 134.8% of GDP.
In terms of the current fiscal year, the United States is as always addicted to spending, with no real feasible plan in place to bring down the debt.
“A Treasury Department report last week showed that the deficit — the gap between what the United States spends and what it collects through taxes and other revenue — was $1.5 trillion for the first 11 months of the fiscal year, a 61 percent increase from the same period a year ago.”
A little history, in a snippet of rarely heard Pre-Roman adoption of Christianity history, this, from the Roman writer Celcus, in his voluminous complaints about the growing number of disparate groups of Christians roaming the civilized world.
Interesting starter information about the mythic lost tribes of Israel here for those who are curious about it. This subject is necessary to know about only for a contextual understanding of human conversation and historical reading, or for a study of religious folkloric literary devices. Completely unimportant for any other reasons.
Was there a historical Jesus? Well as it turns out, barely. More has been written about a person who we know less about than anyone else in human history.
As historians will attest, we know approximately 3-5 things about the man commonly known as Jesus historically: he was Jewish, he was the brother of James, he lived and died during the first century CE. From there historians are almost unanimous that he was born in Nazareth, not Bethlehem. And that be was executed for sedition by Roman authorities. After that it’s all myth and legend as told by a very large assortment of so called gospels, some approved by the authorities of the christian church presently ie allowed in “the gospels” and some not. The point being that for all the hype and hoopla, for the entire world to be so adamantly committed to “worshiping” this strange amalgamation of ideologies shoved underneath this lone Jewish man, annexing ancient holidays and adding him into the mix of them — talk about confusing, there are very few facts and very little actually known about him. The rest is made up. And that for some unknown reason doesn’t seem to bother most humans. It is a mind boggling fact of humanity circa 2023 CE.
You can hear the song ”Angry” the first single from the Rolling Stone’s new album in 12 years here.
Chatting with a friend about it… “Fucking a Bob I agreed with everything you felt and said myself. I am sure the Stones tried hard with this one. It’s been 11 years since their last single. The pressure must be enormous. And at 80, they’re taking in something that’s never been done in our rusty rock world. Though one might observe that we are all more than ready for it. Concerns about age, no matter what the reasons are so last century.
The key now is to OWN it. No matter what or who we’re talking about. Don’t try to hide it or mask it or pretend it’s not happening or pretend to be someone or something that you’re not. We’re not in that world anymore. Shit, younger kids feeling lost and left out now are “pretending” to have things to own, just to feel like they’re in the game. Now that’s funny.
I also agree re going on Fallon, hell let’s call it what it is, paying Fallon and better put the Tonight Show Execs to do the grand opening marketing stint on the show was foolish from marketing perspective and extremely uncool from a rock-n-roll perspective. This is the largest collection of short hairs and mainstreams on planet earth and you’re going to choose to try to pimp The Stones?!? To them?!? It screams sold out or worse, never bought in. Definitely not hip or cool. But maybe at 80 that’s where they’re coming from at this point… we don’t know.
We do know they’re old as fuck and still making records. And that’s cool. And sure, the song is just okay and I’d it weren’t the Stones there’s no way in hell we’d be talking about it, let alone even listening to it. So there’s admiration and impressiveness there. For sure. But there’s also recognition that our heroes may never release anything truly good again. And he’ll that’s okay. They gave us enough. And we love them for all of it.
