Ok so are you a quant? Are you a maths & finance guy or are you more of an economics guy?I'd like to have a go at trading the US, but every time I come to thinking about managing the FX and factoring it into system modelling it turns out to be another layer of complexity that I find too difficult to deal with.
Hey skate - here's a couple of posts I made in some other threads. Ignore the pricklyness/don't take them as directed at you or anything as they were a bit of a ragepost at another forum member.
They explain my entire play since I joined this forum so boil the kettle, it's a bit of a read.
Let's go back to before coronavirus for a moment.
Before coronavirus hit, there was already a long and consistent trend of business and work moving away from face to face/bricks and mortar and to distance/online based on purely economic reasons. The ability to order items direct from the manufacturer online, the ability for even a middle-man to sell items from a massive warehouse with rent a tenth of the price per square foot and massive economies of scale to boot, the ability for a business to reduce its necessary office space and therefore rent and fitout costs by 20% if its employees were to stay home/work from home just one day a week (let alone all of them), the ability to talk to someone halfway across the world in seconds virtually for free on a zoom call vs having to fly what could be teams of people for a day straight, pay for all their flights, food, accommodation, lost work, time away from home and so on and so forth were all major competitive advantages and resulted in half the bloody economy undergoing a structural readjustment based on nothing other than economic/cost reduction grounds.
This is the very trend I have been talking about ad nausea since my first comments in this thread.
What coronavirus has done is put that trend on steroids. We haven't seen 5% more people working/ordering stuff from home in the last 6 months, we've seen 10x it. Or whatever. I could post up a whole stack of data here (and believe me, there's no shortage of it out there, heaven knows I've spent long enough poring through it all) but the exact numbers don't actually matter all that much - what matters is knowing that it's a massive increase that isn't going to reverse and that's all we really need to worry about.
So from there, we ask ourselves, why? The answer is twofold, but both answers share the same source. Firstly, there's the lockdowns. Government imposed lockdowns literally required that many people work and buy from home. Secondly, human behaviour. Many both workers and businesses have voluntarily decided to keep everyone working from home because A: people themselves don't want to get the virus and B: getting the virus stops you from working. Even if you didn't actually care about your employees, keeping them uninfected makes sense from a purely business point of view. What is key with these two realities is understanding that even if all government imposed lockdowns were lifted, employees and businesses are VOLUNTARILY avoiding human contact. This means that government imposed lockdowns or not, the end result is still very similiar: Avoidance of human contact, i.e working & ordering from home if at all possible.
And you can prove this to yourself quite easily - if it was only about the lockdowns, why hasn't stay-at-home tech fallen off a cliff once the lockdowns have been lifted? Why hasn't everything else taken off like a gunshot? Why haven't we seen an inversion of what we saw previously?
There is a reason why what I have dubbed "stay at home tech" has outperformed all the major indices massively. There is a reason why basically all markets except stay-at-home-tech have tanked every single time bad virus headlines/data has hit the news and stay-at-home-tech has often actually increased on those days and that reason is that it is the VIRUS which is dictating human & business behaviour and therefore markets.
But the deeper point that people like duc are failing to recognise is that the coronavirus has not diverted a previous trend or created a new one - it has simply accelerated something which was ALREADY OCCURRING ORGANICALLY.
There is a reason why all the airline execs are saying that business travel will never return to previous levels. There is a reason why the airbnb ceo is saying his business will never return to previous levels. There is a reason why so many companies are mothballing entire floors of offices or buildings. There is a reason why office rents are down 25% and outright purchase prices are down 40%. There is a reason why jets are being retired and scrapped en masse. There is a reason why chief exec's of office furniture companies are saying their business will never return and they're attempting to pivot to home office fitouts. There is a reason why sales on ebay & amazon are absolutely stratospheric even when their bricks & mortar competitors have been allowed to reopen, and the reason is exactly the same for all of these things:
THIS WAS ALL GOING TO HAPPEN ANYWAY.
This is NOT a divergence from a previous trend, this IS the previous trend. It's just been put into overdrive and 5 years of change has occurred in about 5 months.
This is not to say that this is going to continue in perpetuity. I have never claimed that things will. Once the virus, and therefore the reason for the ACCELERATION of this phenomenon is gone, plenty of people will return to the office and plenty of money will go back to consumables like food rather than tv streaming services or what have you. But as long as the virus remains, so will this acceleration of this ALREADY OCCURRING trend.
But once a vaccine is found, things are NOT going to return to their pre-virus levels because those levels WERE GOING TO CHANGE ANYWAY.
I'll bet you any sum of money you like, absolutely anything, that zoom, amazon, ebay et al will NOT return to their pre-virus levels. Any sum you like.
Anyone who thinks that this is some kind of aberration and/or will simply be reversed once a vaccine is found, or that a single day of bounce in the rest of the market in response to, say, better-than-expected employment data disproves my assertion, is utterly, utterly clueless.
Consumer discretionary, flat for a month:
Consumer staples, flat for almost three months, down 6% in the last month:
Energy, flat for 2.5 months and down 15% over the past month:
Healthcare, flat for almost 3 months:
Industrials, done SFA since the end of april and down 10% over the last month:
Materials, flat for just over a month:
Utilities, flat for three months and down 10% over the last month:
Real estate, flat for three months and down 7% in the last month:
Even communications is flat for the last month after its run up until start of june:
Meanwhile, tech has done almost nothing but climb since the march slump and is up over 50% in that time, 20% in the last three months, with 8% of it being just in the last month:
And my "stay at home tech" like zoom:
Ebay:
Amazon:
Are up 100-150% since their march lows and 20% over just the last month.
I said a month ago when I joined that the U.S would see a 2nd wave/2nd slump. Since then, consumer discretionary is flat, consumer staples is down 5%, energy is down 15%, healthcare is flat, industrials is down 10%, materials is flat, utilities is down 12%, real estate is down 7%, and communications is flat.
Meanwhile, tech is up 3% and my stay-at-home tech is up 20%.
And wouldn't you know it, it was basically bang on a month ago that the run we saw (in some sectors) up until the 8th of june reversed at the exact same time that the virus cases started spiking:
So are you still going to sit here & claim I'm wrong and that this is all just one giant coincidence? That the virus data has nothing to do with anything when *nothing* except tech has gained since the reopenings, and most of the indices have actually fallen? All of which flipped trajectory at the exact same moment (like, to the day) that the virus case trajectory also flipped?
You still want to sit here & claim it's all a giant coincidence and that there's no trend here?
I then followed this post up with my personal holdings:
It's not gambling frog, I've been a bit more sophisticated than just eyeballing them. You might have noticed that here's a few names conspicuously missing. I do not hold apple, facebook, google, or slack for example.
Here's everything:
Iirc I've had one red day in the last month. One. Even today was green whilst the djia dropped 1.5%.
I've been more than open about what I hold/buy & why - if people want to ignore me then that's fine, but as far as I know, my returns have been miles above everyone else's.
It is not a coincidence that this all flipped trajectory at the exact same moment the virus case numbers did. I've been calling a 2nd slump/2nd wave since I joined this forum and have received little more than dismissal and ridicule for it. Yet, every other sector is between flat and down 15% over the last month vs my portfolio being up 20% and I have no intention to sell as I firmly believe that it is the virus which is dictating ALL of this (and I've explained why) and the virus is not going away.
I'm a geopolitics/governance and macro economics/developmental economics guy by training (I have degrees pouring out of my ears by this point), so I see some things miles before the numbers guys' models tell them what's going on, same as their models tell them things that I don't know. Both sides always know something the other doesn't.
It's taken me WEEKS (and actually months if you count all the stuff I was working on/figuring out prior to the virus) of poring through data, reports, presentations, applying my own understanding, and even a bit of number crunching for me to get to this point. I have not just bought this stuff on a whim. I could go into why I have chosen these particular stocks one by one if you like and would reciprocate in kind with your reasons why you hold them, same as I/we could go into why I haven't chosen other stocks like apple or facebook which one would assume would be included in a portfolio like this if you didn't know any better.
I also have holdings here in AU but aside from kogan (the reason for ownership should be obvious for) they're travel/aviation, iron ore miners, and gold miners, so a very different kettle of fish. Same type of thinking applies though.
Let me know if you're interested
It was just a post but I quoted it above - you just need to hit the expand button and it'll, well, expand. Quoted in post 3685.
That's probably the way to go..I was/am setting conditional orders... trouble is that they can go thru, or be exploited in penny stocks to shake you out
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