OT: Lets talk about stocks (Part 3)

[HuGort]

I believe they are ALL Ponzi Schemes.

Crypto is more risky

 

[SOLR]

He's making it subscription based because he ran off all the advertisers. They lost a ton of revenue and have to make it up somehow. Don't think it will work, I doubt people want to pay a monthly fee just to tweet (xeet?).

If you are at the top of a knowledge field, you have to tweet, it's where the communities are.
If you want to learn from that top group, you have to be on X.

I think advertisers are a bit ridiculous in their virtue signaling, they remove their $ from X for reasons that exist on all of social media. Facebook is no better than X, often worse. Not even going to talk about Google/Youtube.

Stocks? 5 points...

* Canadian stocks ALWAYS underperform.

* CDN Bank stocks are a bargain right now.

* Utilities are due for a come back - when interest rates fall.

* Stay away for Crypto.

* Smartest Move : Buy an ETF than mirrors the S&P 500 and forget about it.

CDN bank stocks are going to go down a lot more. One more year of this interest rate and the feds will have to bail them out.

 

[pepperMonkey]

He's making it subscription based because he ran off all the advertisers. They lost a ton of revenue and have to make it up somehow. Don't think it will work, I doubt people want to pay a monthly fee just to tweet (xeet?).

Not going to say anything about subscription but, honestly, there is nothing out there with X penetration that serves as a way to get, up to the second, unfiltered news. Watched the whole OpenAI think practically live. No need to wait for some biased news reporter to post an article hours or days later. Sure, lots of noise, lots of garbage but the raw happening around the world... Simply nothing that provides that right now. Advertisers are dumb too stay out of that.

I believe they are ALL Ponzi Schemes.

It may be but everything is pointing for crypto to move (quickly) up to the right going into the Bitcoin halving.

 

[HuGort]

Crypto is shot in dark. I made a little money on my Bitcoin. But not much. I sold out about 2.5 years ago. Around 60k back then. It wasn't reacting to market condition why I sold out. Economy soaring, VIX be low, fixed income rate virtually zero back then. It would be lose 30% overnight. It's being controlled.

 

[pepperMonkey]

Crypto is shot in dark. I made a little money on my Bitcoin. But not much. I sold out about 2.5 years ago. Around 60k back then. It wasn't reacting to market condition why I sold out. Economy soaring, VIX be low, fixed income rate virtually zero back then. It would be lose 30% overnight. It's being controlled.

Crypto moves in it's own cycle. Bitcoin is becoming more stable and it's swings are definitely less violent. Doing alright on Bitcoin. Up over 100% currently (i.e. watched it go from 60k to now.). I'm used to the swings and perfectly fine hodling.

 

[Hope Of Glory]

If you are at the top of a knowledge field, you have to tweet, it's where the communities are.
If you want to learn from that top group, you have to be on X.

I think advertisers are a bit ridiculous in their virtue signaling, they remove their $ from X for reasons that exist on all of social media. Facebook is no better than X, often worse. Not even going to talk about Google/Youtube.



CDN bank stocks are going to go down a lot more. One more year of this interest rate and the feds will have to bail them out.

Not going to say anything about subscription but, honestly, there is nothing out there with X penetration that serves as a way to get, up to the second, unfiltered news. Watched the whole OpenAI think practically live. No need to wait for some biased news reporter to post an article hours or days later. Sure, lots of noise, lots of garbage but the raw happening around the world... Simply nothing that provides that right now. Advertisers are dumb too stay out of that.


It may be but everything is pointing for crypto to move (quickly) up to the right going into the Bitcoin halving.

Don't get me wrong, Twitter definitely has its uses but Musk made it worse since he bought it. No real alternative, though Getting news through it is the only real use you it has anymore. But I really doubt most people would pay just to be on the platform.

I haven't heard anything about making it subscription based lately so maybe he dropped the idea. He gotta make up for all the advertising money he lost somehow. I don't think thoses companies are virtue signaling, they probably just don't want they product associated with conspiracy/extremism that now seem prevalent on X. Wouldn't surprise me if some are back after the storm passes though.

Sadly, if you don't "enforce/moderate" free speech on the internet, it seems the extremes always win. Free speech ends up in hate speech or ridiculous conspiracy theories. That's twitter's main problem right now. I don't know how you can fix that without moderation (that's also bound to be imperfect obviously).

 

[pepperMonkey]

Don't get me wrong, Twitter definitely has its uses but Musk made it worse since he bought it. No real alternative, though Getting news through it is the only real use you it has anymore. But I really doubt most people would pay just to be on the platform.

I haven't heard anything about making it subscription based lately so maybe he dropped the idea. He gotta make up for all the advertising money he lost somehow. I don't think thoses companies are virtue signaling, they probably just don't want they product associated with conspiracy/extremism that now seem prevalent on X. Wouldn't surprise me if some are back after the storm passes though.

Sadly, if you don't "enforce/moderate" free speech on the internet, it seems the extremes always win. Free speech ends up in hate speech or ridiculous conspiracy theories. That's twitter's main problem right now. I don't know how you can fix that without moderation (that's also bound to be imperfect obviously).

Then just moderate it and have it on as a filter that you can turn on or off. I.e. give the user the choice. I can't see it being that difficult to do.

 

[Hope Of Glory]

Then just moderate it and have it on as a filter that you can turn on or off. I.e. give the user the choice. I can't see it being that difficult to do.

It isn't a technical problem, it's a Musk problem. To spew extreme right bullshit you need to hide behind "free" speech it seems.

Disclaimer: I have nothing against the right (or left). You need both in a healthy democracy. Extremism, however, is a cancer. And Musk, like many other, is exploiting it. Unfortunately, rising anger amongst the populace leads to rising extremism. And I think this anger has a lot to do with wealth inequality, which has been rising steadily since the 60s/70s with no sign it will stop. And now populists and extremists are using this anger to rile up people. Social media (especially unmoderated) is the perfect place for that. It's a real tricky situation, especially since I don't think the people stirring people's anger actually have any desire to try to lessen inequalities (or other similar problems).

 

[SOLR]

It isn't a technical problem, it's a Musk problem. To spew extreme right bullshit you need to hide behind "free" speech it seems.

Disclaimer: I have nothing against the right (or left). You need both in a healthy democracy. Extremism, however, is a cancer. And Musk, like many other, is exploiting it. Unfortunately, rising anger amongst the populace leads to rising extremism. And I think this anger has a lot to do with wealth inequality, which has been rising steadily since the 60s/70s with no sign it will stop. And now populists and extremists are using this anger to rile up people. Social media (especially unmoderated) is the perfect place for that. It's a real tricky situation, especially since I don't think the people stirring people's anger actually have any desire to try to lessen inequalities (or other similar problems).

Musk only made Twitter better. Might want to judge it for yourself vs. what is said in the media and all the drama surrounding Musk (I'm not a fan of the man per say, but he's certainly one of the top tech operators alive).

This is factual:
Checkmark for celebrity needed to stop, $ for status isn't aligned with democratic values and social mobility, the idea of merit. Social media will work when we'll make it membership only (no more free ride for bots).
Government tap-in and censorship are effectively worse than the radicals expressing hate (at least now you can hear them and know who they are)
Community notes are a game-breaking invention for our society and every social media should and imo will follow suit.
Profit sharing like YT for creators.
Memberships are better and offer more value.
The codebase is better, the site is getting faster
Post Editing
Now he's adding Grok to it, I think that could become interesting, no other social media has an LLM integrated, I know Facebook isn't far behind and LLama is better than Grok right now.
etc. etc.

I'm someone who used Wechat quite a bit because I've lived in south east asia close to Chinese companies, so I really want that. I'm more used to GoJek (the Indonesian version), its an awesome product and Zuckerberg has been sleeping on this big time.

+Everyone who says Musk made Twitter worse doesn't have much credibility in my book for the simple fact that Twitter was no longer functional and was heading for bankruptcy in a matter of 6-9 months, a Twitter is better than no Twitter. So you really want Zuckerberg to control the town square TOO?

 

[Hope Of Glory]

Musk only made Twitter better. Might want to judge it for yourself vs. what is said in the media and all the drama surrounding Musk (I'm not a fan of the man per say, but he's certainly one of the top tech operators alive).

This is factual:
Checkmark for celebrity needed to stop, $ for status isn't aligned with democratic values and social mobility, the idea of merit. Social media will work when we'll make it membership only (no more free ride for bots).
Government tap-in and censorship are effectively worse than the radicals expressing hate (at least now you can hear them and know who they are)
Community notes are a game-breaking invention for our society and every social media should and imo will follow suit.
Profit sharing like YT for creators.
Memberships are better and offer more value.
The codebase is better, the site is getting faster
Post Editing
Now he's adding Grok to it, I think that could become interesting, no other social media has an LLM integrated, I know Facebook isn't far behind and LLama is better than Grok right now.
etc. etc.

I'm someone who used Wechat quite a bit because I've lived in south east asia close to Chinese companies, so I really want that. I'm more used to GoJek (the Indonesian version), its an awesome product and Zuckerberg has been sleeping on this big time.

+Everyone who says Musk made Twitter worse doesn't have much credibility in my book for the simple fact that Twitter was no longer functional and was heading for bankruptcy in a matter of 6-9 months, a Twitter is better than no Twitter. So you really want Zuckerberg to control the town square TOO?

I won't adress every single point since I don't use it much anymore and I'm not versed in the technical details.

But besides Musk himself, where there I actual analysts predicting that Twitter was headed to bankrupcy? I don't remember that at all and a quick search only got me Musk quotes (of course he would say that). Why would he buy something for 44B if it was headed to bankrupcy? For name recognition? He literally changed the name.

I agree about needing to get rid of bots but why hasn't Musk tackled this already like he said? Probably because it would tank his user numbers too much and with advertisers leaving he's probably not doing too good on the money front.

I also partly agree with the censorship part buy you still have to have a way to moderate (maybe that's not the right word) public discourse because otherwise the loudest (and the often dumbest) will drag the discourse down if not outright make the debate about provable falsehoods. Won't pretend to know what's the best way to do that but I agree it shouldn't come from the government.

And no I don't want Zuck in charge lmfao. All those rich guys shouldn't have that much power over society.

 

[HuGort]

Crypto moves in it's own cycle. Bitcoin is becoming more stable and it's swings are definitely less violent. Doing alright on Bitcoin. Up over 100% currently (i.e. watched it go from 60k to now.). I'm used to the swings and perfectly fine hodling.

Do you buy whole Bitcoin?

 

[HuGort]

Twitter never made money except in 2018 and 2019, then it fell off a cliff (I don't recall why) in 2020. Now, whether or not it was going to go bankrupt before Musk bought it? I don't know. But Twitter could never figure out a way to monetize their service (at least considering their userbase quantity).

As for buying for 44B...he didn't want to buy Twitter, at least not at that price. He tried to do everything in his power to get out of buying it but Twitter took him to court to force the sale (by this point, you have to remember the market, especially tech, dive-bombed and most had gone done 30-70% including Twitter). Unless I'm mistaken, at the very start, I believe he only joked he would buy it. As for changing the name...yeah, that's purely because he just wanted to do it. I believe he always wanted an app called X. He already had tried x.com the bank, prior to Twitter but that merged with another company which eventually became Paypal.

As for bots...I believe he has gotten a lot of bots but in order to really get rid of bots, you have two main choices. Make sure each user is real...i.e. use ID's, etc. (which would go against those who want to use anonymity) or make it cost (to have an account or to post), i.e. subscription of some type.

If Zuck's services (Insta, Facebook or WhatsApp) did replace Twitter...they censored the crap of their feeds, especially censored stuff on request from governments...so you can guess how manipulated the feeds are. Of course, this was the same for Twitter before Musk.


I wish I could just go plop $$$ and buy bitcoins by whole numbers

Are you into the ETF?

 

[LeHab]

I believe they are ALL Ponzi Schemes.

There are certainly shady actors and we had several centralized exchange platforms misbehave. However regulation, especially in US, is coming to provide more stability. Fundamentals are solid with many good use cases, especially for blockchain technology. Take Ethereum for example, from decentralized finance to supply chain management, Tokenization of real world assets, Identity management and many others there is a lot of potential to give more control over data back to the user, enhance security/privacy and increase transparency in various industries. A lot of regulatory and technical challenges remain to be solved but slowly we are moving towards wider adoption. Expected Spot ETF approval for BTC and ETH in US will attract more institutional and retail investor money.

Musk can evolve Twitter to become, among other things, a decentralized financial institution incorporating crypto and blockchain.

 

[pepperMonkey]

Are you into the ETF?

Into "the" EFT? Err...which ETF are you talking about?

 

[pepperMonkey]

There are certainly shady actors and we had several centralized exchange platforms misbehave. However regulation, especially in US, is coming to provide more stability. Fundamentals are solid with many good use cases, especially for blockchain technology. Take Ethereum for example, from decentralized finance to supply chain management, Tokenization of real world assets, Identity management and many others there is a lot of potential to give more control over data back to the user, enhance security/privacy and increase transparency in various industries. A lot of regulatory and technical challenges remain to be solved but slowly we are moving towards wider adoption. Expected Spot ETF approval for BTC and ETH in US will attract more institutional and retail investor money.

Musk can evolve Twitter to become, among other things, a decentralized financial institution incorporating crypto and blockchain.

Yup, I agree with your thoughts on Crypto.

As for Twitter: I'm not sure if his thoughts have changed or not but he has, in the past, mentioned numerous times how he wanted to make Twitter the WeChat of the West. If he does go for it and if he is successful (both very big ifs), Twitter would be rolling in $$$ or be solidly successful in any case.

 

[Habs]

I am pretty deep into crypto and have associates across the globe who we deal with. This is a summary I like to repeat especially with Binance now in trouble.

1) killing off the exchanges and letting Wall St come in to sweep up the remains so they can be at the forefront of digital assets when worldwide adoption/trading hits. It's the banks, Wall St and Blackrock that run the govt, not the politicians.
2) the US doesn't control USDT or issuance of new money, they hate it, they always need to be in control of their own currency. That is their biggest target.
3) US (and the rest of the world) will bring CBDCs to the forefront. They can issue and control it however they want, determine who can use it and how they can use it. People won't ditch cash for CBDCs unless they create another huge worldwide crisis that forces behavioral change in humans to make the switch. (think - "you gonna die if you don't get the jab!!! get the jab now!!!..............and yet those who never took it are doing just fine.......)
4) Digital assets are here to stay, but not until a 99% purge is done on all the useless coins. One more black swan event has to happen for this.
5) Off-chain assets = real world assets(RWA) = real estate, precious metals, loans, bonds, FX, just about any financial instrument = will be moved to the blockchain as tokenized RWAs for companies that can handle DLT.

I park money into xlm, sol, xrp, avax, BTC and ETh, that's it. Those will be the ones that survive. Avax will lead the gaming charge.

 

[HuGort]

Into "the" EFT? Err...which ETF are you talking about?

Bitcoin ETF.

 

[pepperMonkey]

Bitcoin ETF.

Ahh, nope. I only own BTC. However, if I had $$$ lying around in my RRSP or TFSA account, I would consider it. Though, I think I would be more interested Coinbase or RIOT/Mara (short term), etc.

 

[calder candidate]

Bitcoin guess I don’t Understand the pitch… the blockchain isn’t proprietary and if everything fail why wouldn’t bitcoin fail as well because if the power grid go out, gouvernement become a dictature, the bank fail or whatever catastrophe why would bitcoin be safer or more accessible. To me it seem that the biggest thing was the network of miners but with bigger and bigger farm popping up not sure the network is that diversified anymore those corporations could flip to any crypto at anypoint if there a better opportunity bitcoin might be the safes because people mining are kind of invested and the a lot of money ridding on it. Also other negative seem that everyone is holding on to it as speculation because why buy a Coffey when you could buy a car with the same coins later, ultimately if no one is spending can it even be currency… also with quantum computers is any blockchain or wallet safe… I don’t get it ultimately even being the best crypto seem like being the tallest midget… Maybe there someone that understands it that can tell me what I’m missing or why it is crypto great?

 

[HuGort]

Charlie Munger died today, 99 years old. A month shy of 100.

I remember among his sayings, pay up for quality business.

Taking away from Buffett following Ben Graham method of getting the final drag of a cigar thrown away.

 

[Andrei79]

Charlie Munger died today, 99 years old. A month shy of 100.

I remember among his sayings, pay up for quality business.

Taking away from Buffett following Ben Graham method of getting the final drag of a cigar thrown away.

Always enjoyed hearing him at the Berkshire conferences. Quick wit even in his 90s. Buffet must be pretty sad, those two have been friends and associates for decades. Those three (Graham included) were the foundation of my financial decisions, after I started reading on them, in high school. I finished graduate school with a quarter of a million while my friends were tens of thousands in debt. Very sad day.

 

[Runner77]

Charlie Munger died today, 99 years old. A month shy of 100.

I remember among his sayings, pay up for quality business.

Taking away from Buffett following Ben Graham method of getting the final drag of a cigar thrown away.

 

[Non Player Canadiens]

I'm used to the swings and perfectly fine hodling.

but is crypto actually useful as an alternative currency? or is it just an investment vehicle you hang on to until you sell it off to a Bigger Fool?

 

[Runner77]

 

[HuGort]

Some of Munger quotes could be applied to hockey. Like paying up for quality companies. Look at Vegas and Florida and acquiring Tkachuk and Eichel? Gave up a lot but got the star.