Jobs, T-Bills and a Market Swoon - Why Eddie Murphy Will Always Be a Better Trader Than Dan Aykroyd

Wheh! Its a helluva day to start a blog tracking a modest little investment fund experimenting with investment strategies for the working class.

Who, me? Working class? I don't write like it, that's just a fact. However, yes, for a variety of reasons, many to do with the overlapping biases leveled against persons of mixed ethnic descent, but the most important of which was (perhaps incongruously) a simple, clear institutional bias against an entirely different ethnic group from my own, classic white-on-black racism, I do not have the career I worked twenty years for, I'm often looking for employment and I've never, ever been paid a genuinely livable wage.

And, let's be clear, I know the difference between 'genuinely living' and making do without necessities. I know because yes, I once was upper middle class, and was therefore once able to live at the advantage of a 'living wage,' so that when I refer to $20 as the bare minimum standard for a 'living wage' in California, I will not be taking questions on the subject.

When I was in good standing in pursuit of my career objectives (I completed my MA cum laude, BTW, was nonetheless denied a crucial recommendation because it would have slowed the efforts of an 'Arabist' studying Black slaves in Omani pearl diving from turning an African History chair into an Arab Studies chair), I lived the reasonably comfortable (if oft dissatisfied) life of a middle, and eventually an upper-middle class American youth.

My parents grew up working-class to become doctors. My grandfathers were WWII vets. Neither saw combat, though one was still in service for Korea, a radioman who would have reminded you of a hairy, Italian Radar O'Reily from the Oakland Docks. One became a plant supervisor for a smelter on the north side of Chicago and the other, a master carpenter who planned and built the Agbayani Retirement Village for the UFW; patrolled the Delano HQ with an M4; and, his friends once told me with great admiration, was the only white man Cesar ever trusted.

My father's mom I do not think worked, but she was a good Jewish housemom in Evanston, IL who lived to be 90+ years old, passing just last year. My maternal grandmother, who was my personal hero, did work, and also went to school to earn a therapist's license, but she was also a progressive activist from the sixties and throughout her life. She preceded (to date) two generations of her daughters on the board of the Santa Barbara regional Planned Parenthood executive committee, and her husband, my 'Nono' (adapted from his Italian b/c her Mexican 'Nana' has no doubled 'n') served on it too. She was a lifetime marijuana smoker (eventually vaped), who advocated for legalized medical marijuana by being the first person in the 'Tri-Counties' north of LA to appear in a published photo smoking legal weed.

She died of Lou Gehrig's Disease, ALS, which I do not want to distance, in any way, from the preceding item about her character, which I share with her, an incorrigible pot user since college. It would be folly not to take note that marijuana use alters brain chemistry directly and that my grandmother, a longtime user, died relatively young (her 60's or early 70's), of a degenerative neurological disease. It could be anecdotal, but anecdotes are what compile into statistics.

Vices. A valid subject for a finance blog, but one which we should come back to, as there is business to attend.

As of this minute, 9:06 AM PST, March 5, 2021 (Second 'Storm' D+1, no executions as yet) the Dow is back in the green, +43.80, so what looked like a continuing slide half-an-hour and half-a-day-ago now looks, again, like the other thing it has vacillated to, a pullback, reaching solid ground while looking for fuel to grow on again. If this is so, then the pullback should be seen as releasing a good deal of air from the tech industry, until recently reputed to be overheated, because the Nasdaq is still red, -$149.74, which is more than a percentage point.

So let us anonymize this money, which, if my dreams come true and my blogging draws clicks, will be the subject of scrutiny as my personal struggles of the past many years have begun to shift already to new opportunity before I have committed money to a fund I am running in mind of my recent difficulties, which are not obviated for me now, only put in abeyance, a state I hope to keep them in, if not push them farther off, by the returns from this, the blogging, and also that, the investment returns. To what extent will I need to take wage labor to cover the difference? That will be information suited for analysis here.

For the moment, I am sheltered from that challenge by the emergency conditions and the patronage of the Federal and California State governments. I am Boccaccio, and this blog is my Decameron.

So imagine, if you will, that...I, the liberal intellectual investor without means to enter the market with significant capital, have spent six months tearing $300 lots out of your/my/our tortured budget to squirrel away in some likely stock we researched, but we are not really satisfied with the returns and the news we hoped to get a one-day lift from has already hit. Add to this a windfall lot of $10,000: from a State Lottery (I love State Lotteries, most successful socialist program ever...), a loved one's passing, the sale of an automobile...we're anonymizing, it could be many things...

With your seventh month's contribution, and a slight retreat from cost basis, you have available for trade $12,059.65

Now I will immediately split off the $2,000 in my head, and the $59.56 comes to effectively petty cash for rounding errors, so we have, mentally, $10,000 available to invest today. If the $2,000 feels like, at the very least it will not retreat further, leave it where it is, otherwise, buy 3M or something. Honestly, from the picture I've painted of that $2,000, you're better off just selling and leaving it available in cash with your broker, which is, frankly, where this entire lot of $12K+ has sat all week while I attempted to design and launch this lovely site, which is fun, and I enjoy doing, but really is a creative endeavor requiring the usual creative space and time for decompression, which I am only now retraining myself to in quarantine conditions.

Heh heh. Quarantine conditions. My computer battery died at this point: I came home, took a nap, edited a different blog post, then came back to this one and revised it through back to this point. It is exactly noon, PST. Little secret, the $12,000 under discussion are entirely new to my account, they are a part of that force which has eased my own financial struggles for the moment, and not related to roughly $9,000 I have collected, saved and, yes, cultivated in the market since January of 2020, about three months before I went on UI. And, yes, money from that UI benefit did go into that $9,000, if you don't think that's a good thing, first, recall that here you are, reading the white paper on my new business, then second, suck it.

As of noon, pacific time, the Dow is now up more than 500 points (1.72%), NASDAQ up more than 1.5% and S&P up too, which it would be if both DOW and NASDAQ are up (S&P is more industrial/manufacturing, NASDAQ is tech and the U.S. economy, roughly equating to the Dow, is mostly manufacturing and tech these days). My personal portfolio, which has different dimensions and a different starting place from the public one I will be blogging about, has gone from down 2% on the day to only about .5% off. That's not mentioning it's performance over the last week except to say that it has clearly influenced my decision not to just write this post and put up the financial blog page, at least, earlier in the week.

Even though, technically, there is time to check out a couple of buy opportunities and get orders in before the weekend bell (its now 12:30, markets close 1:00 PM here) there are multiple reasons I will not. The first is that I cannot blog and, so I would be whipping out those trades, then returning to try to narrate my thinking retrospectively. There may be plenty of occasion to do exactly that, obviously, the markets run on timing, but as a preference, it would be better to 'blog and' for the initial portfolio architecture. The second is that haste makes waste, even in spite of the above-noted truism on markets and timing. Prudence and promptness are apt watchwords for all investors, and the varying mix of each for each different investor is a part of what makes strategy non-transferable but still comparable.

The third is that the weekend is like a long overnight for the markets, things happen in something like slow motion, and it almost lends itself naturally to a weekend of blogging, research and spitballing. And the final reason is that the market looks more like it is poised to rebound than it did at lunchtime in Manhattan, but I haven't forgotten how many times I, myself, said it had vacillated from slipping to poised and back again all week. The market has rhythms. I don't know them all. I don't know any of them with great confidence, that's the idea here, I apply my broad, Top 100 Schools public education to learning the markets and you read along.

What I do know is that the rhythms at the end of the week involve the necessities of a weekend, no mater how much adopters would like you to believe that the market has been turned over entirely to machines and none of this matters anymore. Those people are stupid. It should make you optimistic that such silly enthusiasts are perfectly able to learn the ropes well-enough to make reliable money, even though they're entirely unable to read contour in the changes they're hammering at crudely. Note that it will be a byword of this blog that 'Eddie Murphy will always be a better trader than Dan Aykroyd.' Aykroyd may close the gap, but it will always be asymptotic.

What does a weekend require? Profits obviously. Cash. But also, positioning. As I understand it, within the daily cycle of a Friday market there is usually a stage during the midafternoon (Manhattan time) when those profits are taken, after which, money comes flowing back in to the market as positions expected to move upward on Monday morning take on volume.

So, whew!, we're actually back at where we started. I just scrolled to top to add the Murphy/Aykroyd aphorism to the blog title and was reminded that this whole thing started this morning with 'futures.' That is, the projected payout on government loan notes, the industrial-size version of government bonds, rose. I haven't, like, gone in depth to grab citations for this, I'm just writing off-the-cuff, but if my market awareness is in-tune T-notes, which are extremely reliable, slow money generators, have been devalued by the heat in the stock sector.

Again, I'm stringing this together from my own knowledge, but I imagine that the moment these showed some strength this morning, the nervous money that already thought the tech market, especially, was overheated immediately fled for more reliable money. Given the instability of the week, who can blame them?

Good news, as I'm prayer-beading all the way through this thought, I'm gaining confidence that the market will trend up again next week, the relatively stable trend toward the green through the remainder of the day is really comforting.

And seems like the place to leave this for today. I've got two days to do research, plan out moves and write about it, so let's heave to. Welcome, I hope to hear from you, and I hope this investment journal helps you plan your own moves against the market.