#114 - Why Oil $$ is the Only Chart that Matters, $UPST, $NET, The Closer, & Fractional Investing App Flahmingo
#114 - Why Oil $$ is the Only Chart that Matters, $UPST, $NET, The Closer, & Fractional Investing App Flahmingo
In this week's episode of Reformed Millennials, Broc and Joel explore oil price as a proxy to inflation, the downside to the 2021 trend of everyone becoming an investor, a couple public companies from a Patrick Oshaughnessey thread of the best growth opportunities over the next 5 years (including Cloudflare and Upstart). And lastly we chat a bit about Dave Chappelle's closer special and an idea that the My First Million podcast calls the "girl next door side hustle".
Listen on Apple, Spotify, or Google Podcasts.
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👉 For specific investment questions or advice contact Joel @ Gold Investment Management.
📈📊Market Update💵📉
A big concern for stocks this summer was that there weren't any bears left.
Most of the silly Perma bears had given up and moved on to torture investors in other asset classes like Bitcoin or Gold.
Sentiment this summer was a headwind.
And now it's the opposite. The sentiment is a tailwind for stocks.
Take a look at the sentiment from Financial Advisors and Individual investors. Just a few months back, we saw the most amount of bulls since January 2018, just before stocks all over the world plummeted.
All it took was half the NASDAQ stocks dropping 20% for sentiment to mean revert. Take a look at this chart showing that we're down to levels where bulls historically start showing up, and that's usually because of an increase in stock prices:
"The bears aren't taking the field, but the bulls are in full retreat..."
If you're wondering why stocks should go up, don't worry about P/E ratios, or fed printing, or new technology.
There's simply a shortage of assets.
There is more money being allocated to stocks and risk assets than there are stocks and risk assets to support that demand.
Forget all that other stuff about the Biden admin or Powell and his buddies’ day trading. It's a supply and demand situation. And there simply isn't enough supply to absorb the demand for equities.
Hence the higher stock prices.
In my opinion, it's probably something we are going to have to get used to.
Joel’s Favs:
$NET
$UPST
$TWLO
$FB
💸Reformed Millennials - Post of The Week
The Cloudflare Blog ($NET) had as good an explainer as anyone on how ($FB) Facebook was down yesterday.
This matters a lot to me as I'm an owner of NET, FB, and a whole host of other internet economy companies that were affected by this outage.
Of course, this rang true to me from the post…
Today’s events are a gentle reminder that the Internet is a very complex and interdependent system of millions of systems and protocols working together. That trust, standardization, and cooperation between entities are at the center of making it work for almost five billion active users worldwide.
IN BULLET FORM, ALL THE THINGS I COMPILED FROM YESTERDAY.
Facebook’s routers mistakenly announced to the rest of the Internet — which are just a bunch of networks themselves — that the Facebook network was no longer online; this meant that none of Facebook’s URLs could resolve to an IP address.
Facebook’s internal network is entirely self-contained; this meant that Facebook employees could no longer access anything inside of the Facebook network, including the routers with the bad config file.
Facebook engineers had to gain physical access to the routers to reset their configuration, which was made extra challenging by the fact that things like badges no longer worked to give access.
It was, in the end, a fairly understandable, if exceedingly rare mistake; one assumes that Facebook will ensure it has emergency access to its routers by a secondary non-Facebook network in the future. It’s also an object lesson about how ultimate control of the Internet depends on physical access.
https://blog.cloudflare.com/october-2021-facebook-outage/
Nat Elison on the Future of Work
"A finite game is played for the purpose of winning, an infinite game for the purpose of continuing the play."
We're all fortunate to live in a time where almost any passion can fund your lifestyle. And when we see someone obsessed with the infinite game they've managed to find themselves in, to the point where it's all they want to do in their free time, we shouldn't admonish them for being too "work-obsessed." We should be jealous of them. We should want to find that for ourselves. Because what more could we want out of life than to wake up every day excited to throw ourselves at the problems in front of us?
If your work isn't providing progress towards some meaningful goal, then by all means, half-ass it with everything you've got. Don't get trapped chasing the next rung in a ladder to nowhere. Don't let your work define you.
But if you can find that incredibly meaningful work, the infinite game you can't stop playing, don't feel bad for playing it.
$UPST Upstart: Credit Origination is Antiquaited
🌊 Canadian Companies To Peruse🌊
STRIPE IS HIRING IN CANADA - see here
Calgary-based FinTech startup Flahmingo raised $1.88 million CAD in its pre-seed funding round in the last week of September.
🔮Best Links of The Week🔮
Ben Thompson Talks Cloudflare vs. AWS
10-K Diver walks us through one of Warren Buffett's earliest business ventures - his Pinball Machine Empire. The thread goes over many characteristics of great businesses, how they work, and how 16-year-old Buffett was able to spot opportunity: Buffett's Pinball Machine Empire
Professor Kalkyl wrote a thread explaining why Liquid Death, the company selling canned water, could be one of the coolest and most innovative brands you've never heard of. It was founded by Mike Cessario in 2017, who previously worked as a Creative Director for several popular shows on Netflix.
Ice hockey all luck? - Skill vs Luck in Investing and Sports from Michael Mauboussin