4 ms·

Absolutely everything is frothy right now. I wouldn’t make any long term conclusions from the markets today, since this seems like an exceptional time. That is

by pram 5y ago

Absolutely everything is frothy right now. I wouldn’t make any long term conclusions from the markets today, since this seems like an exceptional time. That is to say, I think the “bull case” for many things atm are heavily tainted by irrational exuberance.

imachine1980_ 5y ago
I think is the case that all the non speculative assets in producción (machines and labor(industrial employes)) are simply not worth, because is not individual problem the supply disruption, The investment and all that free money is simple put in speculative assets
adam_arthur 5y ago
Imagine if Elon Musk selling Tesla was the pin that pricked the everything bubble, hah. https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1457064697782489088?t=t-vzRkRwyjcHxYM1lYn3JA&s=19 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1457064697782489088?t=t-...
- adventured 5y ago
  Or it's going to pop regardless and he readily senses the insanity of being worth ~$340b on paper as so many others also sense it ($315b gain in two years), and is using a ridiculous poll as a Musk-style ridiculous cover to finally secure some tangible wealth outside of the paper bubble valuation on Tesla (and to a lesser degree, SpaceX) and the large pile of debt-as-living ($6b and climbing) he's having to maintenance. Musk went from $100b to $340b in a year. He'd be a moron to not sell some of it, secure some safety capital, clear out his debts; if Tesla implodes, he can buy the stock all back; if Tesla's stock doesn't implode that just means he'll still be worth a zillion dollars, shareholders will be happy, and the sale won't have really mattered anyway. The only serious risk is that if the stock crashes shortly after he sells, he will never hear the end of it (and he'll have $20b in new cash to cry upon).
  - adam_arthur 5y ago
    Oh yeah, I absolutely think his intention was to sell from the start. His brother just sold a large chunk on Friday... totally not coincidental. He's also frequently made jokes about how overvalued the stock is... definitely knows it's totally mispriced/overvalued. Makes sense to diversify a bit either way. It may tank bigly before he can even sell though. I'm sure many will try to front run. But who knows, let's see.
- xuki 5y ago
  1. Use bots to vote yes 2. Short TSLA 3. ??? 4. Profit
  - nly 5y ago
    Given how irrational TSLA is, he'll probably sell and the price will go up
    - jkhdigital 5y ago
      Yeah everyone will compete to be the one who bought Elon’s shares
adventured 5y ago
The higher-end of the card collecting hobby has changed permanently. The card companies are putting a lot of effort and money into producing unique or otherwise limited cards (autographs, relics, rare prints, etc). That's not going to stop. For example a lot of the more common rookie card prices have already deflated back toward something closer to sane prices. Take the Greg Maddux 1987 Leaf rookie card - that went up ten fold in less than two years, primarily during the pandemic bubble, and has now deflated by around 60-70% from the peak of the bubble. That card (and numerous others like it from other prominent players of the past 40-50 years) is unlikely to quickly reinflate back to the peak, it might take five or ten years to get back there. What isn't going to dramatically deflate, are the exceptional cards. The higher quality 1952 Mantle cards are not going to drop by 60-70%. The 1986 Fleer Jordan rookie in a PSA 10 is never going back to the days when it could be purchased for $10,000-$30,000. A high-end Lebron James rookie (seven figures) isn't likely to roll backwards by 70% from the peak. Those days are forever over. There is a lot of money willing to pay up for such cards. The high-end part of the card hobby is and will remain closer to behaving like the art market than like the mainstream cards-from-packs hobby. And the giant premiums that card companies can command for high-end boxes, they're not giving that up if they can avoid it, they have no interest in rolling that back to the old days. Granted, Fanatics and their new monopoly may screw everything up.
- ProjectArcturis 5y ago
  I don't know. How can you say "never" with such confidence? If we get a severe recession, it's hard to say that 25-year-old pieces of cardboard couldn't lose 70%.
- OldHand2018 5y ago
  Yeah, the higher end is “different” because card grading is a gatekeeper into the market. There are a lot more PSA 10 quality cards sitting in collections ungraded than have been graded and are “in circulation”. But now that those top cards are 6-figures and higher, nobody in their right mind is going to put one of those things in the mail and not get it back for 12-18 months (the grading firms aren’t even accepting cards now anyway). Something worth $1 million once graded is worth $1000 ungraded. You can’t insure it for $1 million until it’s graded. Chicken v. Egg.
whatshisface 5y ago
It's never going to be easy to distinguish between irrational overall exuberance, and enormous focused pessimism about currencies.
- leppr 5y ago
  Bubbles of this magnitude are not caused by irrational sentiment. There is irrational optimism about market returns, but that's only a second-order effect from mechanisms such as low/negative borrowing rates and scheduled asset purchases (QE), monetarily incentivizing investments, which in turns incentivizes gambling. Borrowing as much fiat as one could take and dumping it into assets was the rational choice, unless you were speculating on some black swan.
  - jkhdigital 5y ago
    > Borrowing as much fiat as one could take and dumping it into assets was the rational choice This. I had a conversation with my boomer father the other day in which I tried to explain that the availability of cheap consumer debt means that individuals can now operate like mini hedge funds, making highly leveraged bets on everything from stocks to crypto to trading cards. Used to be that housing was the only highly leveraged investment available to the average consumer (20% down = 5x leverage).
    - ProjectArcturis 5y ago
      How is there more cheap consumer debt now than 20 years ago?
      - jkhdigital 5y ago
        The answer to this question seems so self-evident that I’m not sure if you’re trolling or really just uninformed. To be fair, aggregate debt and interest rates don’t really tell the whole story, because credit providers are a lot more creative as well. Anecdotally, I routinely get offers for promotional low- or no-interest balances on unsecured credit (i.e. credit cards) that overlap such that I can fairly easily maintain a condition of “negative working capital” in excess of my annual income for maybe 2% APR.
dQw4w9WgXcQ 5y ago
Thing is everything feels frothy because people haven't reset their mental model on what the dollar is actually worth. Over the past year or so the Fed took every pre-pandemic dollar in your pocket and made it worth about 70-80 cents. PPIA (Post-Pandemic Inflation Adjusted) the values on a lot of things are just fine.
- zdkl 5y ago
  There is (was) this concept of "cinema ticket based" inflation index that linked consumer level effective inflation to the price of one entry for a movie across the years. I wonder if anyone has published a somewhat large scale estimation of the "post pandemic inflation" adjustment from a collection of these (consumer level) frothy assets.
- UncleMeat 5y ago
  Even if there were a direct relationship between printing and inflation, this wouldn't make sense. Pokemon cards aren't up 25%, which is what you'd expect if dollars were worth 80% as much and everything rose to accommodate. Pokemon cards are up way way way more than 25%.
  - MrPatan 5y ago
    Why would that be the case? Inflation doesn't put 25% more dollars in the pockets of people willing to buy Pokemon cards. It's distributed differently. Plus the existence of high inflation makes people demand inflation hedges way more, so why wouldn't they go up in price faster than inflation?
    - UncleMeat 5y ago
      Why not the opposite then? Why wouldn't 25% inflation fail to lead to higher trading card prices? Very quickly, this argument becomes fully disconnected from any principle when you say that any amount of inflation can lead to any arbitrary price change, as it lets us blame literally anything on inflation.
- throaway46546 5y ago
iamacyborg 5y ago
> That is to say, I think the “bull case” for many things atm are heavily tainted by irrational exuberance. Even Limited Edition Warhammer books have been selling for absurd prices. Many books are selling for 10 to 20 times RRP. It’s been very odd to see
- nly 5y ago
  I see this as the result of overall inequality. Only the wealthy with nothing better to spend a marginal % of their capital on, the middle class (good income) indebting themselves up the balls, and speculators looking to profit from the prior two categories, are buying these things at these crazy prices. Some poor folk might fall in to the speculator category, but they're taking huge personal risk on what they hope is a ticket to riches. Same goes for Bitcoin imho

by pram 5y ago

imachine1980_ 5y ago

I think is the case that all the non speculative assets in producción (machines and labor(industrial employes)) are simply not worth, because is not individual problem the supply disruption, The investment and all that free money is simple put in speculative assets

adam_arthur 5y ago

Imagine if Elon Musk selling Tesla was the pin that pricked the everything bubble, hah. https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1457064697782489088?t=t-vzRkRwyjcHxYM1lYn3JA&s=19 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1457064697782489088?t=t-...

adventured 5y ago
Or it's going to pop regardless and he readily senses the insanity of being worth ~$340b on paper as so many others also sense it ($315b gain in two years), and is using a ridiculous poll as a Musk-style ridiculous cover to finally secure some tangible wealth outside of the paper bubble valuation on Tesla (and to a lesser degree, SpaceX) and the large pile of debt-as-living ($6b and climbing) he's having to maintenance. Musk went from $100b to $340b in a year. He'd be a moron to not sell some of it, secure some safety capital, clear out his debts; if Tesla implodes, he can buy the stock all back; if Tesla's stock doesn't implode that just means he'll still be worth a zillion dollars, shareholders will be happy, and the sale won't have really mattered anyway. The only serious risk is that if the stock crashes shortly after he sells, he will never hear the end of it (and he'll have $20b in new cash to cry upon).
- adam_arthur 5y ago
  Oh yeah, I absolutely think his intention was to sell from the start. His brother just sold a large chunk on Friday... totally not coincidental. He's also frequently made jokes about how overvalued the stock is... definitely knows it's totally mispriced/overvalued. Makes sense to diversify a bit either way. It may tank bigly before he can even sell though. I'm sure many will try to front run. But who knows, let's see.
xuki 5y ago
1. Use bots to vote yes 2. Short TSLA 3. ??? 4. Profit
- nly 5y ago
  Given how irrational TSLA is, he'll probably sell and the price will go up
  - jkhdigital 5y ago
    Yeah everyone will compete to be the one who bought Elon’s shares

adventured 5y ago

The higher-end of the card collecting hobby has changed permanently. The card companies are putting a lot of effort and money into producing unique or otherwise limited cards (autographs, relics, rare prints, etc). That's not going to stop. For example a lot of the more common rookie card prices have already deflated back toward something closer to sane prices. Take the Greg Maddux 1987 Leaf rookie card - that went up ten fold in less than two years, primarily during the pandemic bubble, and has now deflated by around 60-70% from the peak of the bubble. That card (and numerous others like it from other prominent players of the past 40-50 years) is unlikely to quickly reinflate back to the peak, it might take five or ten years to get back there. What isn't going to dramatically deflate, are the exceptional cards. The higher quality 1952 Mantle cards are not going to drop by 60-70%. The 1986 Fleer Jordan rookie in a PSA 10 is never going back to the days when it could be purchased for $10,000-$30,000. A high-end Lebron James rookie (seven figures) isn't likely to roll backwards by 70% from the peak. Those days are forever over. There is a lot of money willing to pay up for such cards. The high-end part of the card hobby is and will remain closer to behaving like the art market than like the mainstream cards-from-packs hobby. And the giant premiums that card companies can command for high-end boxes, they're not giving that up if they can avoid it, they have no interest in rolling that back to the old days. Granted, Fanatics and their new monopoly may screw everything up.

ProjectArcturis 5y ago
I don't know. How can you say "never" with such confidence? If we get a severe recession, it's hard to say that 25-year-old pieces of cardboard couldn't lose 70%.
OldHand2018 5y ago
Yeah, the higher end is “different” because card grading is a gatekeeper into the market. There are a lot more PSA 10 quality cards sitting in collections ungraded than have been graded and are “in circulation”. But now that those top cards are 6-figures and higher, nobody in their right mind is going to put one of those things in the mail and not get it back for 12-18 months (the grading firms aren’t even accepting cards now anyway). Something worth $1 million once graded is worth $1000 ungraded. You can’t insure it for $1 million until it’s graded. Chicken v. Egg.

whatshisface 5y ago

It's never going to be easy to distinguish between irrational overall exuberance, and enormous focused pessimism about currencies.

leppr 5y ago
Bubbles of this magnitude are not caused by irrational sentiment. There is irrational optimism about market returns, but that's only a second-order effect from mechanisms such as low/negative borrowing rates and scheduled asset purchases (QE), monetarily incentivizing investments, which in turns incentivizes gambling. Borrowing as much fiat as one could take and dumping it into assets was the rational choice, unless you were speculating on some black swan.
- jkhdigital 5y ago
  > Borrowing as much fiat as one could take and dumping it into assets was the rational choice This. I had a conversation with my boomer father the other day in which I tried to explain that the availability of cheap consumer debt means that individuals can now operate like mini hedge funds, making highly leveraged bets on everything from stocks to crypto to trading cards. Used to be that housing was the only highly leveraged investment available to the average consumer (20% down = 5x leverage).
  - ProjectArcturis 5y ago
    How is there more cheap consumer debt now than 20 years ago?
    - jkhdigital 5y ago
      The answer to this question seems so self-evident that I’m not sure if you’re trolling or really just uninformed. To be fair, aggregate debt and interest rates don’t really tell the whole story, because credit providers are a lot more creative as well. Anecdotally, I routinely get offers for promotional low- or no-interest balances on unsecured credit (i.e. credit cards) that overlap such that I can fairly easily maintain a condition of “negative working capital” in excess of my annual income for maybe 2% APR.

dQw4w9WgXcQ 5y ago

Thing is everything feels frothy because people haven't reset their mental model on what the dollar is actually worth. Over the past year or so the Fed took every pre-pandemic dollar in your pocket and made it worth about 70-80 cents. PPIA (Post-Pandemic Inflation Adjusted) the values on a lot of things are just fine.

zdkl 5y ago
There is (was) this concept of "cinema ticket based" inflation index that linked consumer level effective inflation to the price of one entry for a movie across the years. I wonder if anyone has published a somewhat large scale estimation of the "post pandemic inflation" adjustment from a collection of these (consumer level) frothy assets.
UncleMeat 5y ago
Even if there were a direct relationship between printing and inflation, this wouldn't make sense. Pokemon cards aren't up 25%, which is what you'd expect if dollars were worth 80% as much and everything rose to accommodate. Pokemon cards are up way way way more than 25%.
- MrPatan 5y ago
  Why would that be the case? Inflation doesn't put 25% more dollars in the pockets of people willing to buy Pokemon cards. It's distributed differently. Plus the existence of high inflation makes people demand inflation hedges way more, so why wouldn't they go up in price faster than inflation?
  - UncleMeat 5y ago
    Why not the opposite then? Why wouldn't 25% inflation fail to lead to higher trading card prices? Very quickly, this argument becomes fully disconnected from any principle when you say that any amount of inflation can lead to any arbitrary price change, as it lets us blame literally anything on inflation.
throaway46546 5y ago

iamacyborg 5y ago

> That is to say, I think the “bull case” for many things atm are heavily tainted by irrational exuberance. Even Limited Edition Warhammer books have been selling for absurd prices. Many books are selling for 10 to 20 times RRP. It’s been very odd to see

nly 5y ago
I see this as the result of overall inequality. Only the wealthy with nothing better to spend a marginal % of their capital on, the middle class (good income) indebting themselves up the balls, and speculators looking to profit from the prior two categories, are buying these things at these crazy prices. Some poor folk might fall in to the speculator category, but they're taking huge personal risk on what they hope is a ticket to riches. Same goes for Bitcoin imho