January 2025 DDD

qldfrog said:

Do you maybe understand that inflation is actually part of the US solution ?
It might take a genius with high iq to understand that
In all respect

Click to expand...

it is part of THEIR solution since they are addicted to ( over-) spending and empire-building

other solutions are available and they MIGHT be easier on the general population ( not the megalomaniac bureaucrats )

i not only understand but also understand the motivation for choosing that solution

To spell it concisely:
US debt is unsustainable and can never be reimbursed as is:
Blame whoever, this is 2025 situation
You can try to kick the ball as Biden did for a few more years but it is getting worse and worse
2 ways out:
1)Default
Default in the US now is blood in street and 1929 style depression: not only economy and share markets wiped out in the us and o/s but american kids starving mass unemployment, economy burnt to the ground and end of petrodollars/ US power
2) insulate via tariff
Inflation moves to super inflation, world economy collapsing but US can be isolated
Inflation horrendous but jobs available for Americans especially if you push just the 7 millions illegal immigrants arrived since Biden.
Not great but no starving if you work and work there will be, save billions from external aid a la Ukraine, Afghanistan etc
Try to rebirth the US tech advantage and be able to match at least China

I genuinely believe that option 2..the Trump one, is the best for both America and Americans , not the swamp filling pockets on Ukrainian help but the Americans in the street.

It is not ideal, will still be a painful period 10y plus and not only Europe but probably Australia Canada Japan are screwed as collateral damages.
I might be wrong, and the leftist clique plus the swamp from all sides still own weapons ..even literally ...
10y and we will see.
Stay safe, protect your assets and family

qldfrog said:

To spell it concisely:
US debt is unsustainable and can never be reimbursed as is:
Blame whoever, this is 2025 situation
You can try to kick the ball as Biden did for a few more years but it is getting worse and worse
2 ways out:
1)Default
Default in the US now is blood in street and 1929 style depression: not only economy and share markets wiped out in the us and o/s but american kids starving mass unemployment, economy burnt to the ground and end of petrodollars/ US power
2) insulate via tariff
Inflation moves to super inflation, world economy collapsing but US can be isolated
Inflation horrendous but jobs available for Americans especially if you push just the 7 millions illegal immigrants arrived since Biden.
Not great but no starving if you work and work there will be, save billions from external aid a la Ukraine, Afghanistan etc
Try to rebirth the US tech advantage and be able to match at least China

I genuinely believe that option 2..the Trump one, is the best for both America and Americans , not the swamp filling pockets on Ukrainian help but the Americans in the street.

It is not ideal, will still be a painful period 10y plus and not only Europe but probably Australia Canada Japan are screwed as collateral damages.
I might be wrong, and the leftist clique plus the swamp from all sides still own weapons ..even literally ...
10y and we will see.
Stay safe, protect your assets and family

Click to expand...

option 3.
is a MAJOR war ( maybe even nuclear or biological since several elite are rumored to own very deep bunkers )

blame the economic failure on the war , and wait for the ( radioactive ?? ) dust to settle , and come back with more BS economic policies because all the books/data got destroyed .. rinse and repeat

this is NOT my choice , but i have heard THAT idea floated in three different ( affluent ) sources

and it might even be called 'The Great Reset ' ( destroy [nearly ] everything )



you can only hope Trump can do enough to delay the inevitable , until somebody ( in EVERY nation ) has the guts to slash spending and live within their means .

PS i do NOT think Trump will be 100% successful , but at least he is throwing ideas out into a better direction

** and the leftist clique plus the swamp from all sides still own weapons **

of course they still own weapons and useful idiots to use them

remember RULES FOR THEE BUT NOT for ME , is THEIR mantra

the Biden pardon fest is a clear signal they broke so many laws they can't remember which ones the DIDN'T break ( let alone which crimes have been discovered )

am still waiting to see if Putin gives back the OTHER Hunter Biden laptop the Russians have , maybe the Hague will receive that one , if the court hasn't been abandoned by then

divs4ever said:

option 3.
is a MAJOR war ( maybe even nuclear or biological since several elite are rumored to own very deep bunkers )

blame the economic failure on the war , and wait for the ( radioactive ?? ) dust to settle , and come back with more BS economic policies because all the books/data got destroyed .. rinse and repeat

this is NOT my choice , but i have heard THAT idea floated in three different ( affluent ) sources

and it might even be called 'The Great Reset ' ( destroy [nearly ] everything )



you can only hope Trump can do enough to delay the inevitable , until somebody ( in EVERY nation ) has the guts to slash spending and live within their means .

PS i do NOT think Trump will be 100% successful , but at least he is throwing ideas out into a better direction

** and the leftist clique plus the swamp from all sides still own weapons **

of course they still own weapons and useful idiots to use them

remember RULES FOR THEE BUT NOT for ME , is THEIR mantra

the Biden pardon fest is a clear signal they broke so many laws they can't remember which ones the DIDN'T break ( let alone which crimes have been discovered )

am still waiting to see if Putin gives back the OTHER Hunter Biden laptop the Russians have , maybe the Hague will receive that one , if the court hasn't been abandoned by then

Click to expand...

You are right.
Planned war has always been the US "democrats" ultimate aim, and why i am so happy with Trump election.
I have not forgotten Hillary moves against Russia just before Trump 1
Trump will be less tempted to throw wars around imho

Oil News:


Trump on Rates and the Fed:

In case you were placing bets on how long into his second term it would take for Trump to start weighing in on interest rate policy, we learned the answer yesterday: 71 hours.

Why it matters: Trump telling the Fed what he thinks it should do is nothing new. But the details of the president's message yesterday about interest rates, inflation, and oil prices are worth parsing.

• They shed light on how his administration views energy markets as central to its broader macroeconomic agenda.

Catch up quick: Speaking virtually to the World Economic Forum, Trump said he'll "demand that interest rates drop immediately."

• Later, taking questions in the Oval Office, he added that "when oil prices come down, everything's going to be cheaper for the American people," and that lower energy prices are "going to knock out a lot of the inflation. That's going to automatically bring the interest rates down."
• He said he will speak to Fed chair Jerome Powell about rates policy "at the right time." Compared to the Fed, he said, "I think I know interest rates much better than they do, and I think I know it certainly much better than the one who's primarily in charge of making that decision."
• "If I disagree, I will let it be known," he added, a statement nobody who has paid any attention would doubt.

Zoom out: As in his first term, Trump rejects the modern norm of presidents not publicly commenting on or recommending interest rate policy. What's new is his emphasis on energy abundance as the reason he believes the Fed should cut rates.

• The new administration is all in on encouraging more domestic production of oil and gas.
• Trump also yesterday pressured Saudi Arabia and other OPEC countries to pump more oil to bring down prices.
• Domestic producers will be reluctant to amp up output if prices are falling due to higher output overseas.
• But internal contradictions aside, there's little doubt that Trump views bringing energy prices down as the key mechanism by which he intends to reduce overall inflation.

State of play: The Fed is likely to leave its target interest rate unchanged at a meeting concluding this coming Wednesday. As of mid-December, the median official of the central bank saw two rate cuts on the way this year.

• Further clear progress toward inflation coming down would accelerate those plans.
• Energy prices are perhaps the easiest set of prices to monitor in real time. Crude oil futures trade minute by minute, and retail gasoline prices are updated every day. So if Trump succeeds at bringing down energy prices, the Fed will know it and can quickly factor it into policy decisions.

Yesterday:

• After gapping higher for three consecutive days, the S&P 500 ($SPY) opened lower today. However, it pushed higher throughout the session, registering its first all-time high of the new year.
• $SPY peaked in early December before pulling back -4.5% on a closing basis. The market typically takes the stairs up and the elevator down. However, it only took 8 days to recover from a 22-day pullback.
• With $SPY in uncharted territory, there's virtually no price memory to prevent it from making a new leg higher. The next potential Fibonacci target is near $630, representing the 161.8% extension of the pullback.

The Takeaway: The S&P 500 achieved its first all-time high of the new year today. $SPY took the stairs down and the elevator up, generating momentum for the next potential leg higher.




jog on
duc

ducati916 said:

The US President has also called on OPEC to immediately increase oil production to lower oil prices, creating another point of contention between the cartel and the White House as ICE Brent ticked lower to $79 per barrel.

Click to expand...

at less than $US 80 a barrel very little chance, just like the oil cap Yellen tried to place on Russia

what will happen is OPEC(+ ) will sell more oil outside the US dollar ( as if plenty isn't being sold in alternate currencies now )

if Trump wants $7x the US will have to start producing themselves EXCEPT sub $US 80 several shale plays may be unprofitable at that level

and why should OPEC(+) come to the rescue after Biden trashed the strategic reserves for political gain in the last 4 years

some of these OPEC members have l-o-n-g memories and are quite aware of the 'climate agenda ' to strangle their cash cow

booting Russia out of SWIFT will have ongoing consequences ( there are payment systems no longer controlled by the US and London )

jog on
duc

Shale Oil









To increase production of shale you need higher prices.


Oil will continue to be managed in the $70-90 range because less than $70/b starts to cause US shale (the biggest global marginal supply of oil since 2008) to roll over, while oil above $90 puts oil-importing US foreign creditors into current account deficits due to their oil imports, which forces them to essentially sell USTs to buy oil. Oil above $90 starts to cause UST market dysfunction.

The best way to play the oil supply issues above is by owning gold.

Gold/$WTIC






For next week:




jog on
duc

Last week:



Trades placed on Friday for next week



CALL Vertical $60/$62.50 Expiry 21 March



CALL Vertical $42/$43 Expiry 20 June



CALL Vertical $38/$39 Expiry 20 June



Earnings play;

CALL Vertical $227/$230 Expiry 31 January

jog on
duc

Major earnings next week



jog on
duc

• It was another short week, but all four major indices closed higher, led by the Dow.
  
  
• The S&P 500 achieved its first all-time high of the new year on Thursday before cooling off Friday.
  
  
• The best-performing sector was Communications ($XLC), as its 3rd largest holding, Netflix ($NFLX) jumped +13.9%.
  
  
• Energy ($XLE) was the worst-performing sector, falling -2.9%, as Crude Oil snapped a four-week winning streak.
  
  
• Gold printed its first weekly all-time high in three months, rising +1.1%, while the US Dollar ($DXY) had its worst week in more than a year, dropping -1.8%.
  
  
• Some of the largest companies report earnings this week, including four members of the Magnificent 7. $MSFT, $META, and $TSLA report on Wednesday evening, followed by $AAPL on Thursday evening.

From JC



Forecasts: https://timharford.com/2025/01/the-truth-about-the-forecasting-paradox/

Here’s the problem with forecasts: some of them are right, and some of them are wrong, and by the time we find out which is which, it’s too late. This leads to what we might call the forecasting paradox: the test of a useful forecast is not whether it turns out to be accurate, but whether it turns out to prompt some sort of useful action in advance. Accuracy may help, but then again it may not. Forewarned is not necessarily forearmed.

Consider the challenge I was set when speaking at a post-pandemic conference. One questioner told me that at the previous conference, in late 2019, the keynote speaker — a famous scientist — had warned of the risk of a global pandemic. Could I offer a better forecast than that? It depends on what you mean by better. Could I offer a more timely, accurate forecast about a question of global consequence? Of course not. But could I offer a more useful forecast? Probably. The bar had been set lower than you might think.

The 2019 audience had heard a generic warning that there might be some kind of pandemic one of these days, collectively shrugged and done nothing. Neither they nor the speaker realised the pandemic in question was just weeks away and none of them were in a position to do much about it anyway. The forecast had been brilliant — and useless.

Twenty years ago, the forecasts of disaster facing New Orleans should have fared better. The Federal Emergency Management Agency had warned that one of the three most probable catastrophes facing the US was a hurricane striking low-lying New Orleans. As the storm closed in, in 2004, newspapers described every detail of the risk, from a failure of the levees to the impossibility of a mass evacuation and the prospect of hundreds or even thousands of deaths.

At the last minute the hurricane — Ivan — turned aside. Yet the prophecies of doom came true in almost every respect a year later when in 2005 Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans. The year’s delay could have made the forecasts more useful, not less, by giving city, state and federal authorities time to prepare. Alas, they did not.

In contrast, Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston didn’t forecast a situation in which two bombs exploded at the Boston Marathon. But in April 2013 they were nevertheless prepared when it happened, having run 78 major emergency drills covering everything from oil spills to train crashes.

The world of speculative fiction is full of forecasts that made us wiser despite never coming true. I contacted activist and science-fiction author Cory Doctorow, who pointed me to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, “the first Luddite novel”, and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. Then an insurance executive was murdered in Manhattan — a scenario foreshadowed in the short story Radicalized. The author? Cory Doctorow. Fiction can help us see the future.

Perhaps you feel that no novel should really count as a forecast. Consider instead the idea of the “pre-mortem”, advocated by the psychologist and author Gary Klein. The pre-mortem is a project-planning exercise in which a team adopts a position of “prospective hindsight”. Let’s assume the patient died on the operating table, or that the new IT project suffered a massive cost overrun, or that the dinner party was a humiliating flop. Given that assumption, why? What went wrong?

Research conducted in the late 1980s by Deborah Mitchell, Jay Russo and Nancy Pennington found that this perspective helped people to generate more ideas, with more detail, about why a project might succeed or fail. A pre-mortem is intended to be a self-defeating forecast. The idea is that by helping a team brainstorm a list of quite specific things that might go wrong, disaster will be averted.

The great psychologist Amos Tversky quipped that most people lump their forecasts into three categories, “gonna happen”, “not gonna happen” and “maybe”. That seems right to me, but the problem with such crude intuitions is not that they’re insufficiently precise, but that they allow us to short-circuit any further thought on the matter.

That’s a shame. Thinking seriously about the future can be a worthwhile exercise, not because the future is knowable but because the process is likely to make us wiser. One surprising piece of evidence for that comes from forecasting experts Barbara Mellers, Philip Tetlock and Hal Arkes. A few years ago, they ran a multi-month forecasting tournament and surveyed the opinions of the participants before and after. They found that the process of thinking seriously about forecasts softened the preconceptions of the competitors. They had become more politically moderate and more inclined to attribute moderation to their political opponents.

More broadly, a scenario-planning exercise encourages people to recognise that the world is an uncertain place. Many years ago I worked in the scenario-planning game, and one of our mantras was “scenarios are not forecasts”. I think I understand that statement a little better now. Scenarios are not forecasts because they are not aiming to be accurate, but to be useful. The forecasting paradox tells us that those two qualities are very different.



jog on
duc

ducati916 said:

I challenge you to go through every single stock in the Dow Jones Industrial Average, all 30 of them, one by one, and then come and tell me you're bearish this market.

I dare you.

Click to expand...

i will accept that dare AND say .. it looks too good to last ( long )

unless there is another massive wave of money printing , the credit-go-round must run dry sometime

i always worry more about parabolic rises

From JC,




The Fed. for Wednesday:




So as already posted on @peter2 thread, some hefty losses in:



Overall market:





I quickly took profits in my AAPL and BMY trades. I also closed XLV.

Was the sell-off obvious last week? In hindsight it always looks obvious. Obviously I didn't think so, I was opening long trades. LOL. Lucky for me they worked out. Could easily have gone south.



OPEC+ are already facilitating lower oil prices via a higher POG.

The US cannot drill/pump more with lower dollar prices for shale. They need to do as BRICKS do...let gold trade higher.



Not a good sign.



And the Hunt bros.



jog on
duc

almost made me regret not buying some BBUS in recent weeks

ALMOST

will be watching today , but am not expecting any bargains where i want to buy

... well maybe, watch coppers stocks if data center demand looks like it will crater ( at least temporarily ) maybe some good copper stocks will be discounted

divs4ever said:

almost made me regret not buying some BBUS in recent weeks

ALMOST

will be watching today , but am not expecting any bargains where i want to buy

... well maybe, watch coppers stocks if data center demand looks like it will crater ( at least temporarily ) maybe some good copper stocks will be discounted

Click to expand...

Morning Mr Divs;

So with the issue of passive flows, will this re-pricing within NVDA + others in the tech. space, cause a reversal. ie. automatic sells?



That is a BIG increase in volume at these price levels. A lot of longs have probably been trapped at higher prices. I wasn't aware of the Chinese AI issue until today.

First mention was just after midnight (US time) Monday 27 2025.






Then the SHTF



Another 50+ stories...all too late.

If you were an analyst in this space, probably you should be looking for another job.

This does have a little feel of a bubble bursting. Time will obviously tell.

Some links:









jog on
duc

I would treat every sell off as buying opportunity. Sometimes you have to take profits off the table with shares and build up your cash position.

There was to much money going into US tech stocks so the warning signs were there but people are greedy.

Bull markets are born in pessimism and die in euthoria.

ducati916 said:

Morning Mr Divs;

So with the issue of passive flows, will this re-pricing within NVDA + others in the tech. space, cause a reversal. ie. automatic sells?

View attachment 192070

That is a BIG increase in volume at these price levels. A lot of longs have probably been trapped at higher prices. I wasn't aware of the Chinese AI issue until today.

First mention was just after midnight (US time) Monday 27 2025.



View attachment 192072


Then the SHTF

View attachment 192073

Another 50+ stories...all too late.

If you were an analyst in this space, probably you should be looking for another job.

This does have a little feel of a bubble bursting. Time will obviously tell.

Some links:

DeepSeek FAQ

DeepSeek has completely upended people’s expectations for AI and competition with China. What is it, and why does it matter?

stratechery.com

China’s DeepSeek AI assistant becomes top free iPhone app as US tech stocks take a hit

Chinese AI assistant DeepSeek has become the top rated free app on Apple's App Store in the US and elsewhere, beating out ChatGPT and other rivals.

www.engadget.com

Here’s what the sellside is saying about DeepSeek

AI’s cold war is now a price war

www.ft.com

AI, Uh, Finds a Way

Has DeepSeek changed the AI game or just some equations?

spyglass.org

DeepSeek AI is next year’s nightmare for Nvidia, today

Nvidia has uniquely high growth expectations for 2026 at a time of surging skepticism on the longevity of the AI capex boom....

sherwood.news

jog on
duc

Click to expand...

i suspected this

a few years back the TOP 500 ( super-computer ) list had a particular Chinese entrant that rolled out 'impossible numbers ' with a home-grown chip/array roughly double/triple of 'educated estimates ' now one commentator suggested they did it with improved connectivity between CPUs ( servers ) sure they used thousands of servers instead of hundreds , but were hampered by 'less advanced chipery , etc etc etc.

and the other advantage China has, is a HUGE internal database to work with , so you can actually test scalability with real data

the major flaw was thinking China always 'follows the leader ' followed by limiting their access to current advances made in the West

this is how sanctions back-fire

No surprise needed:
Our SZ startup funded and built in China precovid was part of a 2017 nation wide push for ai, chipset, etc
These "out of the blue" announcements yesterday are just the consequences of years of education, brain imports and local skills training by China.
During that time, we were establishing NDIS, fining parents preventing their 12y old child from transitioning, doing BLM and in Australia refusing start-up funding to hard science patriarchal white male projects.
Well deserved.
Past the undoubted hype and startup nation mandatory BS required..not uniquely Chinese, i wish them well.
Added:
link just a quick google search but from 2018 onwards there, we AI/AR were immersed and were leveraging this plan priorities:
Shenzhen city, Guangdong province plus state via BJ University arms on top of ARM start-up incubators.
I was not at all in the funding/budget side, pure R&D but the ecosystem was very fertile

Chips anyone?

jog on
duc

Ah, may I have the fish without chips? NIce list and worth monitoring for reversal opps.

Just a thought. Could the recent high (SPY) and the very recent tech low (QQQ), when it's found, be the delimiters for a long trading range in the US markets? Long as in one to two years.

Investors will have to reassess their market expectations in light of DeepSeek's claims along with the huge PEs. The current news presents a good opportunity for a pause in the bullish sentiment.