Investing

[Deleterious]

I don't understand why TSMC would do this.  I guess they must need the capacity now.

Great move for Intel though.

 

[gehringer_2]

5 hours ago, chasfh said:

That's OK, they'll be back on board the MAGA train well before lunchtime tomorrow.

sadly true

[gehringer_2]

5 hours ago, Deleterious said:

I wish he had asked him how he thinks the Fed can lower rates.  Everything just got more expensive across the board, which means inflation.  Lower rates would be a disaster right now.

Rates will fall if the economy slows because demand for credit will fall. The *right* result but for all the wrong reasons.

Edited Thursday at 09:11 PM by gehringer_2

[gehringer_2]

57 minutes ago, Deleterious said:

I don't understand why TSMC would do this.  I guess they must need the capacity now.

Great move for Intel though.

 

This reminds me of Ford taking an interest in Mazda when they were building their US presence. Companies that are primarily competitors still find reasons to work together. One piece you have to count is the international situation for TMSC with China. Increasing their stake in US manufacturing capacity as much as they can widens the escape hatch for them to relocate the company if the Chinese try to take over Taiwan.

Edited Thursday at 09:11 PM by gehringer_2

[romad1]

no investment advisor in the World would say buy tomorrow.  Except, imagine if they knew he was going to rescind it all. 

[Deleterious]

32 minutes ago, gehringer_2 said:

Rates will fall if the economy slows because demand for credit will fall. The *right* result but for all the wrong reasons.

In a normal economy.  But that isn't what we have.

With the government artificially raising prices there is a good chance we get stagflation.  If you have inflation over 5% and lower rates, hello 10% inflation. 

[Deleterious]

31 minutes ago, gehringer_2 said:

This reminds me of Ford taking an interest in Mazda when they were building their US presence. Companies that are primarily competitors still find reasons to work together. One piece you have to count is the international situation for TMSC with China. Increasing their stake in US manufacturing capacity as much as they can widens the escape hatch for them to relocate the company if the Chinese try to take over Taiwan.

They would want controlling interest in that scenario.  If they have to skedaddle Intel isn't going to offer a soft landing spot.  Especially if TSMC has already shown them how to properly run a foundry. 

Most feel this is TSMC pushing their lower end GPU chips onto Intel.  That way it opens up space at TSMC for the bleeding edge AI GPU chips. 

[1984Echoes]

7 hours ago, romad1 said:

 

"shot"?

The correct word is "murdered".

[gehringer_2]

1 hour ago, Deleterious said:

In a normal economy.  But that isn't what we have.

With the government artificially raising prices there is a good chance we get stagflation.  If you have inflation over 5% and lower rates, hello 10% inflation. 

That's the question the Fed has to struggle with. We had 'stagflation' before monetarism took over at the Fed. From Volker on forward any Fed we've had would first stomp inflation and we'd just have the recession - employment be damned. We don't know what this one will do. Powell talks a lot about 'dual obligation' to inflation and employment. I think that's a canard - the fed needs to control inflation, they don't any tools to push employment beyond where it wants to be without creating inflation so it's something that it was economically foolish for Congress to task the Fed with, but that the ignorance of US politics.

Edited Thursday at 11:11 PM by gehringer_2

[Screwball]

INTC was one of the few stocks up today. Not much other green. Giggle.

This is why I hate the market, and myself. All this was well known a week or so ago, and what did I do - nothing. Could have bought a VIX ETF about a week ago and got a 50% rip in a week. Pull the rip cord, laugh, and thank you very much.

The everything bubble has been looking for a pin since the swine bankers blew up the world in 2008/2009 and now we have one. Trump = pin. It will be interesting to see how far this goes. They are laughing at us. Wait till we bail out the banks - again.

Long toilet paper. JNJ? They were green today too.

[Screwball]

Note to the **** for brains that run this country; crude got hammered today too (down to 66 and change), so now might be a good time to start refilling the SPR.

We probably won't see that at the pump.

[Edman85]

Selling this off today as part of a long-desired reshuffle in my taxable account and getting a nice discount on my taxes in the process. I was up something like 20% at the beginning of the year when I realized fees on this fund had increased, but didn't want to take the tax hit to sell it off.

[Hongbit]

Jobs somehow came in hot today despite nothing indicating it would.   I didn’t believe these numbers in the past administration and I definitely don’t under the current one.  

If every facet of our government up to and including the Supreme Court has a political partisan, why should we believe the Bureau of Labor Statistics would be any different?  

[Edman85]

3 minutes ago, Hongbit said:

Jobs somehow came in hot today despite nothing indicating it would.   I didn’t believe these numbers in the past administration and I definitely don’t under the current one.  

If every facet of our government up to and including the Supreme Court has a political partisan, why should we believe the Bureau of Labor Statistics would be any different?  

Yeah, I suspected they would take over BLS and cook the books some.

[Tiger337]

1 hour ago, Hongbit said:

Jobs somehow came in hot today despite nothing indicating it would.   I didn’t believe these numbers in the past administration and I definitely don’t under the current one.  

If every facet of our government up to and including the Supreme Court has a political partisan, why should we believe the Bureau of Labor Statistics would be any different?  

I think every prior administration might fiddle with the numbers by maybe changing the definiions of employment or something.  I actually expect this regime to just make stuff up.  I have zero trust in them  

[Hongbit]

I understand the desire (and reason) to keep politics out of this thread.  

Is that really possible to do anymore and still maintain an honest discussion about investing?

Edited 13 hours ago by Hongbit

[RatkoVarda]

the $10T (that's TRILLION) the Markets have lost since inauguration day are primarily due to (stupid) politics

[Deleterious]

1 hour ago, Hongbit said:

I understand the desire (and reason) to keep politics out of this thread.  

Is that really possible to do anymore and still maintain an honest discussion about investing?

I say do what you want.

Like Screwball said the last time it came up.  Most of the people that actually posted about investing left a long time ago. 

[chasfh]

TBF, the political environment is such that run-of-the-mill retail investors like us can’t really make reasonably-informed investing decisions and expect conditions to not be suddenly changed willy-nilly at the whim of a single individual who has designs on mad royalty. Things just are nothing like normal, even in terms of recent history.

[Deleterious]

We are all about to become very interested in other countries' unemployment rates.  Last one to rock bottom wins.

 

[ewsieg]

I almost pushed my 401k to just Money Markets / Bonds a few days ago.  But I figured with so much tariff talk, that the 'drop' was already priced in.   Crap, maybe it was to a point and we still saw what we saw, jeez.  

Bummed I didn't do it, but hey, not like I actually believe I'll be able to retire anyway.

[Screwball]

Wild stuff, no? The market takes a **** and all of a sudden the economy is the market. I'm sure the 40% of our population who don't have $1000 gives one good **** the DOW dropped 2200+ points.  But I digress...

Let's look at a few charts - because I love charts - and charts give us a visual history. As we all know, the last few days have not been pretty. First chart is today with a one minute candle. Gap down open, drifted up and down all day, but mostly down, then tanked in the last half hour. It was close to hitting the circuit breakers but didn't and after 3:30 they are shut off.

Let's put this in a little more context. This is one day. Let's look back 20 years.

This little "correction" doesn't look so bad in this context - or does it? Let's take a longer look. Going back to before the Dot-Com bubble of 2000.

Where do we go next? Here's a two year of the S&P. The huge gap down and then blowing through some potential support makes one think the 4950 level is in play. Not much underneath until you go back to late 21 and the 4800 level.

Then there is NVDA. I posted some chart porn a while back on them and thought a $97ish number might be a buy point... Maybe not. $90 might be in play, and that gap will eventually fill. Do the math.

And a look at INTC. If you had the balls and played the volatility in this one you could have made a killing. They were green yesterday but got jackhammerd today. The price swings are wild - and you could trade that and make a killing. I should have drawn the red box way back in November. 19 to 25 ish...

Then to get some more funny into the massive chaos we are living in. I used to watch Bubblevision years ago. Some of the same people are still there. Two of the most entertaining people were Steve Liesman and Rick Santelli of Tea Party fame. Especially when they fought like cats and dogs Today was another example.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2025/04/03/liesman_vs_santelli_trump_tariffs_confronting_the_dark_side_of_everyday_k-mart_low_prices.html

Wild stuff that exchange. It took years to export our jobs all over the world to take advantage of wage and environmental arbitrage along with the skills it took to be the manufacturing leader of the world. But it's all good, we replaced it with easy and cheap credit instead of a skill. Cheap isn't always good. Neither is credit.

It's all ****ed up. Where is it all going to go? How are you positioned? Are Trump and his tariffs the pin to blow this prick all to hell? Looks like a bubble waiting for a pin (charts would agree) - and it has to happen under someones watch - why not him? The most hated guy in the world. Blame this asshole. The 40 percent of our population who don't have 1000 bucks probably won't notice or care.

He don't give a ****, he's in on the scam. Just like the rest of these worthless ****s. They are laughing at us, and should be. We ain't too smart. Cheap and easy money isn't the answer unless you get it first like the people in the big club do.

We learned nothing from 2008/2009.

Quote

 

There is no means of avoiding the final collapse of a boom brought about by credit expansion. The alternative is only whether the crisis should come sooner as the result of voluntary abandonment of further credit expansion, or later as a final and total catastrophe of the currency system involved.

- Ludwig von Mises - Topics: Monetary Policy, Debt.

 

Voluntary abandonment requires a plan - not rapid unscheduled disassembly. Giddy up!

 

 

Edited 2 hours ago by Screwball

[gehringer_2]

31 minutes ago, Screwball said:

and all of a sudden the economy is the market. I'm sure the 40% of our population who don't have $1000 gives one good **** the DOW dropped 2200+ points. 

But that's the funny thing SB, everybody hears the DOW number every night on the news and they *do* think it's the economy. Don't ask me why.

[mtutiger]

35 minutes ago, Screwball said:

The 40 percent of our population who don't have 1000 bucks probably won't notice or care.

The stuff like Nintendo delaying pre-orders of the Switch 2 kinda matters here.... this stuff breaks through to everybody.