The daily link

It appears some of us are interested in the business of trading, hopefully for both fun and profit.
Here's a place to talk about that. I suggest two main categories. How to trade (timeless), and what are you trading now, and why, and how it turned out. Those tend to be missing from the pro boards, so pundits can have selective memory....but that's not all that is important. Being wrong is part of the game, and how to handle it and make money anyway is crucial, for just one example.
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The usual. Be nice, be informative, tell it like it is.

Re: The daily link

Postby Doug Coulter » Fri Nov 16, 2012 12:10 pm

Not a link, but this was posted by JR on ZH. I thought it worth repeating and perhaps fact checking further.
In spite of the smoke and mirrors and the accounting tricks, the true aspect of this transaction remains: it is the people’s money. Through the fingers of the Secretary of the Treasury the hard-earned value of the citizen-produced GDP continues to flow into the coffers of the International bankers as the Leviathan government buys elections and the masses deliver their vote.

This is the route to slavery; the chains of debt that would encircle every citizen, and those frugal taxpayers and savers who resist the offer will be indebted anyway…by the mob indebted to the FHAs.

Ellen Brown on Global Research today recaps Why Bankers Rule the World thusly: In the 2012 edition of Occupy Money released this month, Professor Margrit Kennedy writes that a stunning 35% to 40% of everything we buy goes to interest. This interest goes to bankers, financiers, and bondholders, who take a 35% to 40% cut of our gross domestic product.

She begins: “That helps explain how wealth is systematically transferred from Main Street to Wall Street. The rich get progressively richer at the expense of the poor, not just because of ‘Wall Street greed’ but because of the inexorable mathematics of our private banking system.

“This hidden tribute to the banks will come as a surprise to most people, who think that if they pay their credit card bills on time and don’t take out loans, they aren’t paying interest. This, says Kennedy, is not true. Tradesmen, suppliers, wholesalers and retailers all along the chain of production rely on credit to pay their bills. They must pay for labor and materials before they have a product to sell and before the end buyer pays for the product 90 days later. Each supplier in the chain adds interest to its production costs, which are passed on to the ultimate consumer. Kennedy cites interest charges ranging from 12% for garbage collection, to 38% for drinking water to, 77% for rent in public housing in her native Germany.

“Her figures are drawn from the research of economist Helmut Creutz, writing in German and interpreting Bundesbank publications. They apply to the expenditures of German households for everyday goods and services in 2006; but similar figures are seen in financial sector profits in the United States, where they composed a whopping 40% of US business profits in 2006. That was five times the 7% made by the banking sector in 1980. Bank assets, financial profits, interest, and debt have all been growing exponentially.”

But, relates Brown, an attorney and president of the Public Banking Institute, “Exponential growth is unsustainable. In nature, sustainable growth progresses in a logarithmic curve that grows increasingly more slowly until it levels off. Exponential growth does the reverse: it begins slowly and increases over time, until the curve shoots up vertically.. Exponential growth is seen in parasites, cancers… and compound interest. When the parasite runs out of its food source, the growth curve suddenly collapses….”

http://www.globalresearch.ca/why-banker ... ld/5311833

IOW, the debt will continue until the system collapses. And by the rush of post-2012 election frenzy, it looks like its on its way.
Posting as just me, not as the forum owner. Everything I say is "in my opinion" and YMMV -- which should go for everyone without saying.
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Re: The daily link

Postby Doug Coulter » Wed Nov 21, 2012 6:12 pm

On social media:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=p ... K62I-4cuSY


FWIW, when I recommend y'all get G+ accounts, it's sure as hell not for the "social media" which sucks no matter the vendor. Who cares? Not me - I'm digging the FREE video chats with engineers I've met and like, I never even read my "page" or "wall" or WTF ever you call it. I don't care about that crap. I rarely post - to anyone. But worldwide free, realtime high quality videophone service with people I know? Now that's worth it.

Did you ever have someone take you wrong in an email you sent and "go off" - doing damage to a relationship that took weeks to recover from, if ever?

Doesn't happen when you can see their face, we all know when it's sarcasm, kidding, etc.
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Re: The daily link

Postby Doug Coulter » Fri Nov 23, 2012 6:01 pm

Thanks to Annika O'Brien for this one.

Security cams also catch people doing good...kind of fun. And in a blast from the past, one of my fave SuperTramp tunes.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=p ... 0fAnwX76aI

Posting as just me, not as the forum owner. Everything I say is "in my opinion" and YMMV -- which should go for everyone without saying.
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Re: The daily link

Postby Doug Coulter » Tue Nov 27, 2012 3:09 pm

Protesting farmers outgun cops with a firehose spraying milk:
http://www.bloomberg.com/video/dairy-fa ... 8v~nw.html

Like all BBerg TV, this doesn't work with adblock enabled.
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Re: The daily link

Postby Doug Coulter » Tue Dec 18, 2012 5:37 pm

Kyle Bass is still the smartest guy in the room, even when you can't see the slides. He seems to be the only one out there who can get good numbers, accurately add or subtract them, or tell if A>B.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JUc8-GUC1hY


Maybe we can find one with the slides at some point. I note that every single thing he said a couple years ago - has happened. No one else has a track record even close.
Here he is at the same conference, but in 2010 - yes, he says just about the same stuff - but his only his time have changed, still on track - they are just 2 years longer two years ago. Consistent!



The 2011 conference it linked upthread somewhere. Same story.
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Re: The daily link

Postby Doug Coulter » Wed Dec 19, 2012 3:11 pm

We've been living in the eye of a financial hurricane for the last few years. The other storm-wall is on the way soon. You've been warned.
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2012-12-1 ... d-new-year

Funny how China reports a lot more exports than all their trading partners combined claim they import from there - book-cooking is the new global sport. Probably both sides are. But some things are hard to cheat on...and those all look pretty darned miserable.

Even Kyle fails to mention the roughly 700 trillion (yeah, that's with a T) or 10x global cooked GDP in "bad paper" that is off the books that people who know (for example, Todd Harrison who has been pointing this out for a few years at least - and he was trading this dark pool, he'd know) say is there. Banks claim it's net-zero. So why haven't they just canceled all those contracts? Picking up pennies in front of the steam roller?

I know I'm changing fiat money into hard assets. Not so much gold, but things I know I will need no matter what - cars I can depend on, food, land, tools. If that's not a good investment for you - I'd advise thinking about why, and questioning your assumptions. Sure, humans as a race have a great track record of finding ways to muddle through - as a species. During those times, individuals don't always fare so well if they aren't paying attention in time.
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Re: The daily link

Postby Doug Coulter » Thu Dec 20, 2012 9:15 pm

apocalypsejokes.jpg
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Re: The daily link

Postby Doug Coulter » Mon Dec 31, 2012 1:50 pm

IRS horror story. I know it's true because it just happened to me:
http://www.pmbug.com/forum/f9/irs-horro ... -now-1963/

OK, there's been a running dispute, that when the dust settles, they're going to owe me money. I failed to file for a year in which I made money, because in the 2 years after that, I lost very roughly $400k (split between a 300k cash account and a 400k IRA, but with substantial losses in the cash one). Income averaging says it's at worst a wash, or they owe me "earned income credit", but of course, being the IRS, that's not how they started. I trade a LOT. It's nothing for me to churn 10x my account size through an account in a year, so I might make a million in transactions in a 100k account for example. The IRS defaults to the absolutely ridiculous idea that stocks just fall on you from the sky, and therefore every single sale is 100% profit - they'd sent me a million dollar bill. But after filing, even for 2007 (the year I did make money) and 2010 (also made money) my accountant says, well, you owe them about 8k, but we have to wait for them to assign the penalties and interest on that, and when we file for the losing years, we probably get even that back.

Yet, at 11:53 this AM, the IRS *stole* $1460.62 from my cash account, and locked the rest down (about 40k more) so I can't get it at all. So really, they stole it all. TD had left me a voicemail a few days back in warning saying something like "IRS is demanding some info by dec 31" but the IRS didn't contact me - and they do know how, didn't do anything with my bank (that I know of, yet, which did have 1.5k+++ in it) but I guess it's time to check on that one too. I might suddenly have gone from being fairly well off to wondering how I'm going to pay for a meal once the groceries run out. OK, unless the bank has something going on they've not told me about (and they are normally very good about that) they didn't touch my regular bank accounts at all. But I'm going to call them and find out if there's something lurking.
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Re: The daily link

Postby Doug Coulter » Thu Jan 10, 2013 1:17 pm

Kind of cool. If you are the Army you like to blow stuff up. Well, after WWII, there was all this sodium left over, and the army decided to just ditch it - all at once.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HY7mTCMvpEM
Posting as just me, not as the forum owner. Everything I say is "in my opinion" and YMMV -- which should go for everyone without saying.
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Re: The daily link

Postby Doug Coulter » Fri Jan 18, 2013 4:14 pm

This pretty much sums things up:
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-01-1 ... ornication

From the article:
After witnessing the fighting of undeclared never ending wars, passage of freedom destroying legislation like the Patriot Act & NDAA, approval of pork barrel spending to the tune of hundreds of billions, rule by Executive Order, using ZIRP to extract hundreds of billions from senior citizen savers and give it to criminal Wall Street banks, forcing the American people at gunpoint to replenish the Wall Street banks with $700 billion after they had committed the greatest financial fraud in history, and a continuing trampling of the U.S. Constitution, the American people continue to remain willfully ignorant of the truth. The American Dream is dead. We’ve allowed a rich, privileged, elite few to achieve hegemony over our economic and political system with their control of the media and manipulation of our financial markets. They will collapse the country because they will never be satisfied with the amount of wealth and power they’ve accumulated. Their voracious greed will be their downfall.


I'm seriously looking to get out of this business, it's too depressing and makes me too cynical - I make most money trading by assuming the worst in others - and it's a winning strategy, sadly. During my lifetime we've gone from "don't do wrong" to "don't get caught" and it seems those in power are leading that charge. Just a couple generations of not allowing morality to be taught in schools, and look what you get.
Posting as just me, not as the forum owner. Everything I say is "in my opinion" and YMMV -- which should go for everyone without saying.
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Doug Coulter
 
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