As the war in Ukraine drags on, the United States is making a clash with Russia more likely with each passing week.
making
Pokemon Go Is Revamping Mega Evolution – CNET
The mobile game is making it much easier to Mega Evolve your Pokemon.
Steve Cohen On Making Trading “Harder Than It Has To Be”
Steve Cohen On Making Trading “Harder Than It Has To Be”
Submitted By Nicholas Colas of DataTrek Research
This week’s Story Time is about keeping things simple. I (Nick) will begin with a story from my time at the old SAC Capital, run by legendary trader (and now Mets owner) Steve Cohen.
I sat opposite a two-trader team who were famous in the room for wild daily P&L swings. They once added up their daily gains and losses over the year and found that their winning days totaled $330 million dollars on $100 million of capital, but their losing days totaled $300 million. They netted $30 million on the year, which was awesome because they got to keep a third of the gains as their compensation, but the way they made that money was insanely stressful.
One morning, this duo found themselves unusually deep in the hole, even for them: down $30 million at the open. I glanced across the desk. One trader was pale as a cadaver, staring at his screens in horror. The other, who had been in the office since 3am trading Europe, was in the bathroom with what can most politely be described as an explosive case of stomach troubles.
Around 10am, Steve walked over and sat down next to the pair. He wasn’t visibly angry, and he didn’t tell them what to do.
He just looked at them and said, “You’re making this way harder than it has to be.” He paused to make sure they heard him. They nodded, and Steve got up and went back to his desk. In the next hour they cut back all their losers, regrouped, and concentrated the portfolio in their highest conviction names. Over the next week they clawed back all their losses and by month end they were profitable again.
This happened 20 years ago, but I’ve never heard a clearer observation about the craft of investing/trading. Mistakes most often come from making the job of allocating capital harder than it has to be. And … The harder one makes it, the harder it is to break the doom loop and get back on the right track.
Yes, I absolutely understand why this sounds like cliched, useless advice. Of course we don’t consciously self-sabotage by making the investment process needlessly complex. The problem is that investing is a profoundly fault-intolerant discipline. A few bad decisions can swamp scores of good ones.
Ask an elite trader about their win rate (percent of money-making trades) and, if they are honest, they will tell you it’s between 55 – 60 percent. Their positive returns come just as much from keeping losing positions to 40-45 percent of the book as they do from their (narrow) margin of victory. It is no different for every highly successful investor I’ve ever met. Their tolerance for holding on to large losing positions is very low; they know a handful of wins make their year and a few bad mistakes can quickly eat up those gains.
Here are my own 5 rules for “keeping things simple”:
1: Only outcomes matter. There is an old saying among traders: “The bank doesn’t ask about your win rate when they cash your paycheck”. It is all too easy to focus on issues that don’t influence stock prices. Social media and click-hungry online news outlets only amplify those distractions. At the end of the day, however, the prices on the screen are the only things that matter.
2: Three things – and only three things – drive stock prices. They are changes in expectations for:
- future earnings/cash flows,
- future interest rates used to discount those earnings streams,
- and the timeframe over which investors have confidence in those earnings
This is equally true for individual companies and country/regional equity markets. For example, our highest conviction long term investment viewpoint is that US large cap stocks will outperform Europe and Asian equities. The American system of capitalism, from seed-round venture funding to its deep public capital markets, delivers better and more sustainable returns on capital than other regions’ approaches. Nothing we see tells us this will change any time soon.
3: Money has to go somewhere. Capital always moves to where it can earn the highest risk-adjusted return. Find those areas, and you’ve found the outperformers. This is why we have a momentum bias to some of our work. Price momentum reveals capital flows. The biggest rookie mistake out there is thinking “the market has it wrong”. Prices always lead fundamentals. There’s an old Wall Street saying that goes “Never listen to analysts. In a bull market you don’t need them, and in a bear market they’ll kill you.” That’s a hard message for a former analyst (me) to hear, but it’s more right than wrong.
4: Time management determines investment results. This is the unwritten reason successful traders and investors have so little tolerance for holding on to losing positions. Losses capture attention and soak up time, which is the one fixed constraint we all face. I think this is the core of what Steve was trying to tell the stressed-out traders: focus your time on what can make a difference and the results will follow.
5: Look back to look forward. History doesn’t predict the future, but it does offer a roadmap for considering what comes next. Simple example: I am no fan of technical analysis, but I look at dozens of asset price charts every day and across everything from 1-day to 20-year periods. Does the data trend or remain static across a cycle? What sorts of macro environments create the greatest change? The same goes for economic and market data graphs. Every picture tells a story, and profitably predicting future trends means accurately tracing out the next chapter of that story before it is actually written.
Summing up: trading and investing are hard enough already without making matters worse by overthinking the process. Simpler is better, if only because it is more efficient. Productive investors know they can always make more money, but they can never make more time.
Tyler Durden
Mon, 04/25/2022 – 08:03
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi will make appearance on show about drag queens … again
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi will be making another appearance on a show that is about cross dressing.
Pelosi will appear on a new season of “RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars” — she previously appeared on the program several years ago as well.
“Can I get an amen?” Pelosi can be seen saying in a clip advertising the show’s upcoming season.
RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars 7 Exclusive First Look!
youtu.be
In 2018, the Hollywood Reporter posed the question to Pelosi: “What could politicians learn from drag queens?”
“Authenticity,” Pelosi answered. “Taking pride in who you are. Knowing your power — that’s what I talk about on my brief segment on the show. This idea of people believing in themselves, being themselves, taking pride in themselves, is not just a lesson for politicians but for everyone in the country. And that’s why I was so excited and couldn’t resist being on the show.”
During that interview, the outlet also asked the lawmaker whether she had ever considered what her drag name would be, but Pelosi said that she had not.
The California Democrat has served in Congress for more than three decades and holds the distinction of being the first and only woman ever to serve as the Speaker of the House of Representatives.
U.S. Rep. Carolyn B. Maloney recently tweeted support for Drag Queen Story Hour, a program that involves cross dressers reading books to children.
“Across the country, books are being banned, which are depriving our nation’s youth. But thanks to @NYPL and programs like Draq Queen story hour, NYC’s next generation are getting a well rounded education about LGBTQ+ issues and gender identity,” Maloney tweeted.
Critics pounced on the congresswoman’s post, but she remained unfazed, declaring that “the bigots are at it again in the comments.”
Looks like the bigots are at it again in the comments.nnYour hate didnu2019t stop me when I introduced the first domestic partnership legislation in NYS history when I was on the @NYCCouncil, and it wonu2019t stop me now.https://twitter.com/RepMaloney/status/1513618619233718277u00a0u2026— Carolyn B. Maloney (@Carolyn B. Maloney)
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Earth Day Checklist: 8 Things You Can Do to Make Your Home More Eco-Friendly – CNET
This Earth Day, spend a little time making your life greener.
Wall Street Interns Are Making Up To $16,000 A Month
Wall Street Interns Are Making Up To $16,000 A Month
As we have documented in the past, there is ravenous competition for talent on Wall Street, as large investment banks juice up perks to try and retain workers.
Now, even interns are seeing the benefit. Some interns are even making as much as $16,000 per month, according to a new article by Entrepreneur, which attributes the wage spike to a nationwide labor shortage.
In fact, the report says that in the last year, intern pay has risen by 37.2% at global investment banks, with some interns making as much as $200,000 per year.
Investment banks aren’t just defending themselves from other investment banks, they’re also defending themselves against tech companies that can sometimes offer a better quality of life as a worker.
Recall, we wrote earlier this year that HSBC was set to double its bonuses for junior bankers in order to try and slow defections. It marked a change for the bank, which paid “less than most rivals a year ago after cutting the bonus pool at its global banking and markets division by 15%,” Bloomberg reported at the time.
“We’ve got to keep pay across the board competitive,” Greg Guyett, co-head of GBM for HSBC said last month.
And the competition in the space is real, with investment banks jostling back-and-forth to stay competitive with pay and retain talent for several years now.
At the beginning of 2022, we reported that JP Morgan had raised its junior bankers’ pay for the second time in a 12 month period. 1st-year investment banking analysts are now set to make $110,000, up from $100,000, The Business Times reported last month. 2nd-year analyst pay will also jump up to $125,000 and 3rd-year pay will rise to $135,000.
Citigroup also said it was increasing pay after a blockbuster year in 2021, moving base salaries for junior bankers up to $110,000.
Tyler Durden
Wed, 04/20/2022 – 05:45
‘Pocahontas’ Elizabeth Warren Calls for Integrity in Congress and Banning Trading in the Markets While in Office
One of the many corrupt politicians in Washington DC is now making a stand against corruption.
Massachusetts Senator (Lie-a-lotta) – Elizabeth Warren claims that politicians should not be allowed to trade in stocks.
Banning lawmakers from trading stocks should be a key priority for lawmakers, writes Elizabeth Warren in an opinion column in The New York Times.
“Whether you’re a Republican senator or the Democratic speaker of the House, it is obvious to the American people that they should not be allowed to trade individual stocks and then vote on laws that affect those companies. I have the strongest plan and the only bipartisan bill in the Senate to get it done,” she writes.
“For years, Americans have identified corrupt government officials as a top concern. And they’re right: to tackle the urgent challenges we face — climate change, income inequality, systemic injustice — we must root out corruption.”
Warren is right in that corrupt politicians in DC should not be able to trade in the markets with insider information and the ability to change the markets that they have.
Warren also says that to fight inflation companies must stop jacking up prices and stop making profits.
Warren is not really the best person to be promoting honesty in Congress. She spent years claiming she was an American Indian which likely helped her obtain a lucrative position at Harvard. Later it was discovered that she was no Indian at all.
HAH! Pocahontas Quietly Deletes Tweet Where She Brags About Being a Native American
The post ‘Pocahontas’ Elizabeth Warren Calls for Integrity in Congress and Banning Trading in the Markets While in Office appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
India Box Office Report: ‘KGF Chapter 2’ Earns $72.64 Million
Making its way to the second slot on global box office for the weekend, the Indian film ‘KGF Chapter 2’ has earned a whopping $72.64 million within four days of the release.
The Right Side of History
The act of fusion involves the merging of two or more things and making them one. It became a metaphor for the 1960s political project of Frank Meyer, a senior editor at National Review who sought to unite the conservative movement’s factions of traditionalists, libertarians, and national-security hawks. Yet this founding father of fusionism also called for diffusion: “Populism is the radical opposite of conservatism,” he once wrote, at a time when he worried about the allure of George Wallace. Meyer wanted to exclude the demagogic Democrat and his populist appeal from American conservatism.
Matthew Continetti seeks to bring the populists into the conservative movement—or at least to import them into the stories that conservatives tell about themselves. “The conservative narrative is too neat,” writes Continetti in the opening pages of The Right. “The edges of the movement have been smoothed over. Its blemishes have been covered up or ignored.” Until recently, this too-neat narrative has tended to feature Ronald Reagan as its star character, Reagan’s rise to the presidency as its dramatic arc, and the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union as its climax. For a while, this made sense. As Reagan and the Cold War have receded into history, however, this simple tale has become obsolete—and its conventional versions fail to explain the emergence of Donald Trump.
The shock of 2016 was so profound for many conservatives that they could not see past their revulsion of a man who challenged and disrupted the tenets of Meyer’s fusionism. Their instinct was to oppose him, often ferociously, as he chased the Republican presidential nomination, captured it, and went on to an unexpected general-election victory. Continetti takes a different approach. A chronicler rather than a combatant, he seeks to understand Trump and the pull of his populism—and to interpret the 45th president not as an alarming aberration from conservative orthodoxy, but as the logical product of a movement that always has wrestled with populist urges in a lineage that includes Joseph McCarthy, the John Birch Society, Reagan Democrats, Pat Buchanan, and others.
Continetti blends intellectual and political history to reimagine the mainsprings of conservative success, with populism serving as a source of energy for conservatives as well as a threat to the high principles that many of them hold dear. His engaging history moves at a brisk pace, presenting brief portraits of key figures and connecting them to major events and trends. With a combination of workmanlike prose and fresh thinking, Continetti has written what could become one of the great books of conservative self-definition, deserving shelf space beside the likes of The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America by George H. Nash and The Conservative Sensibility by George F. Will.
“I am not an entirely disinterested observer of this fight,” confesses Continetti, referring to his two-decade career in conservative journalism. This may be the place to say that I’m not a disinterested reviewer, nor is the Washington Free Beacon a disinterested publication. Many moons ago, when I worked full time for National Review, Continetti was my summer intern. It would be nice to say that he owes everything to my mentorship, but you could tell back then from his curiosity, intelligence, and work ethic that the kid was going places. He became the founding editor of the Washington Free Beacon, and today he is an influential political commentator, via his columns for Commentary and National Review and from his perch at the American Enterprise Institute.
Continetti starts The Right by turning back the clock, to borrow a cliché of liberals who would rather condemn conservatism than think about it. In the hands of Continetti, turning back the clock is not the worn-out habit of a reactionary but an innovation. Whereas histories of conservatism tend to begin shortly after World War II, Continetti starts in an earlier postwar period, on the day 101 years ago when Warren Harding took the oath of office. As the United States moved beyond the wartime presidency of Woodrow Wilson, Republicans such as Harding and his successor Calvin Coolidge both absorbed and rejected elements of the Progressivism that had dominated American politics for a generation. They didn’t call themselves “conservative,” but their devotion to constitutional norms, limited government, and economic growth makes them the recognizable forerunners of what eventually followed.
In these early days, however, their inchoate movement contained multitudes, including the “nostalgia, melancholy, and pessimism” of the eccentric writer Albert Jay Nock and the antimodernism of Southern Agrarians as well as the isolationism of Charles Lindbergh and the original America First crowd. Continetti also assimilates a couple of economic populists into the deep history of conservatism—the Catholic radio firebrand Charles Coughlin and the Louisiana pol Huey Long—for their attacks on Progressive elites in the 1930s.
Republicans were out of power during the long presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the New Deal era, but in 1946—the year of Trump’s birth—they captured Congress. They were widely favored to take the White House in 1948, only to watch their nominee Thomas Dewey suffer a surprise defeat to the incumbent, Harry S. Truman. Liberal historians generally have credited Truman’s liberalism with making the difference, but Continetti suggests that the real cause resides in the “me-tooism” of Dewey, who failed both to distinguish himself from liberal elites and to inspire right-leaning populists. In Continetti’s telling, Republican fortunes in future years often would hinge on the ability of candidates to win the loyalty of populists who didn’t see politics as a conflict between left and right but as a battle between up and down—a clash between coastal elites and the American folk.
Conservatives have had their own elites, of course, and their political challenge has been to tap into populist energies without surrendering to populist delusions. The case of Senator Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s is instructive. At a time when conservatives worried about Communist espionage in the United States—and feared that liberals didn’t take it seriously enough—many of them applauded the red-hunting efforts of McCarthy. Yet the senator’s sloppy tactics were a scandal. “None of us were his enemies,” wrote Whittaker Chambers, “but all of us, to one degree or another, have slowly come to question his judgment and to fear acutely that his flair for the sensational, his inaccuracies and distortions, his tendency to sacrifice the greater objective for the momentary effect, will lead him and us into trouble.”
These words from the past of course describe exactly how many of today’s conservatives feel about Trump.
And that’s the value of The Right: Continetti reorients the history of conservatism so that it can explain more than the fusionist triumph of Reagan in the 1980s, without ever descending into the Bircher-to-Birther narrative of liberal scolds. Again and again, we see preludes to Trump’s populism. In 1965, following the rout of Barry Goldwater’s presidential bid, William F. Buckley Jr. launched a quixotic campaign for mayor of New York City. He lost, but the patrician founder of National Review, writes Continetti, was “an ambivalent populist” who “uncovered, quite by accident, the future electoral base of the Republican Party: white voters without college degrees, who belonged to traditional blue-collar unions, resented liberal snobbery, and disliked the results of liberal governance.”
Successful Republicans took advantage of this insight. “There are conservatives whose game it is to quote English poetry and utter neo-Madisonian benedictions over the interests and institutions of establishment liberalism,” wrote Kevin Phillips, a strategist who helped Richard Nixon win the presidential election in 1968. “Then there are other conservatives—many I know—who have more in common with Andrew Jackson than Edmund Burke. Their hope is to build a cultural siege-cannon out of the populist steel of Idaho, Mississippi, and working-class Milwaukee, and then blast the Eastern liberal establishment to ideo-institutional smithereens.” This marked an alternative course for conservatives, writes Continetti: “Phillips repudiated the cornerstone of Burkean conservatism—the protection of established order against radical change—in favor of upheaval, demolition, and power.”
Populism also contributed to Reagan’s victory in 1980. “Watch Reagan win in November by a landslide—because he is a conservative populist where Goldwater was a conservative elitist,” wrote supply-side guru Jude Wanniski. Continetti points out that even as Reagan welcomed immigration from Mexico and called for free trade in North America, he ran a campaign ad with a prophetic slogan: “Let’s make America great again.” According to Continetti, populism became “the X factor that could make or break GOP presidencies.” It also could form congressional majorities: In 1992, Newt Gingrich smashed the Democrats’ 40-year grip on the House of Representatives in part because he targeted elite corruption and “marched under a populist banner.” And although George W. Bush will be remembered as a war-on-terror internationalist, Continetti attributes his initial success to a pre-9/11 agenda of domestic reform.
When Continetti’s account finally arrives at the phenomenon of Trump, readers will be ready for it. In 2016, Trump’s mix of conservatism and populism may have seemed exotic. On these pages, it feels like the result of ordinary evolution. Continetti never argues that Trump was inevitable, and much of Trump’s success has depended on his unique strengths and peculiarities. Yet Continetti does show that his achievement was more plausible than it might have seemed at the time.
What comes next is anyone’s guess, whether it’s fusion, diffusion, or something else. Continetti avoids predictions but he’s surely right about one thing: “When you study conservatism’s past, you become convinced that it has a future.”
The Right: The Hundred Year War for American Conservatism
By Matthew Continetti
Basic Books, 496 pp., $32
John J. Miller is director of the Dow Journalism Program at Hillsdale College as well as a writer and podcaster for National Review. His book A Gift of Freedom: How the John M. Olin Foundation Changed America recently came out in paperback.
The post The Right Side of History appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.
Apple HELP! Stelter Desperately Wants to Keep Musk from Buying Twitter
With Elon Musk making his formal offer to out-right buy Twitter, liberal media defender and CNN+ host Brian Stelter appeared desperate on Thursday’s Reliable Sources Daily as he looked for other “tech players” to step in and make their own offers. He even suggested that Musk would turn Twitter into a less-successful social media site such as “Parlor or Rumble.”
“Elon Musk is saying Twitter needs to be transformed, so he’s offering to it. He’s offering to buy the company for about $43 billion and take it private. Make no mistake this is a hostile takeover bit rattling Silicon Valley,” Stelter warned in a very sober tone.
After admitting Musk’s offer is “higher than Twitter’s closing price on Wednesday” and “a lot higher” than when” he became a shareholder last week, Stelter brought on Puck News co-founder William Cohan and tried to argue that Musk’s offer wasn’t enough because Twitter’s stock price was higher over a year ago:
But the stock was up at 70 even $80 12-14 months ago. Does that signal to investors there’s a lot of unlocked potential in Twitter and if they just get rid of Elon Musk and get rid of this problem, they can get back to there?
“[W]hat the stock was whatever it was 18 months ago at its all-time high is not relevant anymore,” Cohan broke the bad news to him. “What’s relevant is where the stock was before he started buying, where the stock was before he made his offer. As you pointed out, both are up, you know, 50-plus percent. That’s the relevant data point.”
Growing more desperate, Stelter openly hoped that another “tech player” would interject, but Cohan had more bad news:
STELTER: Bill, why wouldn’t Apple or some other tech player swoop in and take control of Twitter right now?
COHAN: Look, Brian, they certainly could. But, you know, you have to look at this as a practical matter.
STELTER: Tell us.
COHAN: I mean; Apple is a unique world. It’s a world of Apple. You really want to dilute that with Twitter and the controversy that Twitter generates on a daily basis? No. Apple is a beautiful closed system, why muddy it up?
“Who else? Google, you can say the same thing about. Possibly Facebook but I just don’t see it. Microsoft’s got its hands full with Activision Blizzard; that’s a $70 million deal,” Cohan noted.
Cohan did admit that blue-check journalists were only on Twitter for the drama and warn (or promised) that they would all leave the platform if Musk “radicalizes it and brings back Trump or does other things that he’s talked about[.]”
Stelter then suggested Musk would tear down Twitter and turn it into “Parlor or Rumble or one of those right-wing alternatives.”
A few minutes later, Stelter spoke with Bloomberg senior executive editor Brad Stone who suggested Musk’s offer (which included an official SEC filing), was just an act. “I have a hard time seeing this as anything other than a public performance by Elon,” he scoffed. Stone also suggested Musk was “addicted to the attention that comes with a dramatic public performance.”
The transcript is below, click “expand” to read:
CNN+’s Reliable Sources Daily
April 14, 2022
11:01:41 a.m. Eastern
BRIAN STELTER: If you can’t beat them, buy them? Elon Musk is saying Twitter needs to be transformed, so he’s offering to it. He’s offering to buy the company for about $43 billion and take it private. Make no mistake this is a hostile takeover bit rattling Silicon Valley.
This higher than Twitter’s closing price on Wednesday. It’s a lot higher than when Musk started to buy up shares in the company. The stock was up big in pre-market trading but it is largely leveled off. It’s clear that some investors are not taking this very seriously. But the Twitter board has to.
Musk putting it simply in a tweet, saying ‘I made a bid.’ But it’s not simple at all. He’s saying to the Twitter board, take my deal or I might sell my shares and tank your stock. So, the board of Twitter is in a very public fight with the richest man in the world.
(…)
11:03:44 a.m. Eastern
STELTER: But the stock was up at 70 even $80 12-14 months ago. Does that signal to investors there’s a lot of unlocked potential in Twitter and if they just get rid of Elon Musk and get rid of this problem, they can get back to there?
WILLIAM COHAN (co-founder Puck News): No, I don’t agree with that. I mean, what the stock was whatever it was 18 months ago at it’s all-time-high is not relevant anymore. What’s relevant is where the stock was before he started buying, where the stock was before he made his offer. As you pointed out, both are up, you know, 50-plus percent. That’s the relevant data point.
(…)
11:05:51 a.m. Eastern
STELTER: Bill, why wouldn’t Apple or some other tech player swoop in and take control of Twitter right now?
COHAN: Look, Brian, they certainly could. But, you know, you have to look at this as a practical matter.
STELTER: Tell us.
COHAN: I mean; Apple is a unique world. It’s a world of Apple. You really want to dilute that with Twitter and the controversy that Twitter generates on a daily basis? No. Apple is a beautiful closed system, why muddy it up?
Who else? Google. You can say the same thing about. Possibly Facebook but I just don’t see it. Microsoft’s got it’s hands full with Activision Blizzard; that’s a $70 million deal.
(…)
11:07:31 a.m. Eastern
COHAN: Well, just one other thing. You know, he’s in a tough situation too because if he—if he changes – One of the things that makes Twitter so much fun and why journalists like us are involved with this to such an extent is because of the daily sort of controversy and fights.
But if he, you know, radicalizes it and brings back Trump or does other things that he’s talked about doing and half the audience leaves, then it’s just going to be an echo chamber and he’s going to be the king of nothing.
STELTER: It’s going to be like Parlor or Rumble or one of those right-wing alternatives.
(…)
11:11:24 a.m. Eastern
STELTER: Where’s your head at about this? This could be the biggest tech story of the year. Where’s your head at right now?
BRAD STONE (Bloomberg News, senior executive editor): Right. What a morning. Thanks, Brian.
You know, I have a hard time seeing this as anything other than a public performance by Elon. When you look at his career, his mission at Tesla to create sustainable energy transportation, or SpaceX to make humanity a multi-planetary species, I just have a very hard time seeing how the rehabilitation of a relatively small social network with 240 million very insular users really fits in the span of his career.
(…)