Trade Alert: Everything Is Exactly What It Seems
Everything is exactly what it seems
She’s not hiding wings beneath her leather jacket
Everything is exactly what it seems
Making my way downtown through the haze
I thought I’d figure out how to change
But you never change
Everyone is exactly who they are
You’re not straying far from who you were in high school
Everywhere is a place I’ve been before
They’ve got the same f’ing stores I always end up lost in
Everywhere is a place I’ve been before – Slow Runner, “Everything is exactly what it seems”
I’ve mentioned this song before and how it’s one of my all-time favorite songs and lyrics, but that you can’t find the song on Spotify even though the artist is actually on Spotify. I might have to try to reach out to these guys and find out what’s up with that. There’s no official version of it on YouTube, although there is a terrific recent upload acoustic cover of it by a guy doing quarantine videos from his laundry room and there’s a remix version of it there too. You can also find a travel video on vimeo for which someone used the original song as a soundtrack. Apparently, I’m not the only one who feels this way about this song. Anyway, I want to use the main part of this song to explain some stuff.
Everything is exactly what it seems. If there’s any kind of conspiracy, it’s simply the one that’s right in front of you:
It seems like the Federal Reserve is owned by the giant banks that it’s supposed to regulate and that it always does what they want it to do.
It seems like the incredibly complicated tax code that allows giant corporations and the very wealthiest individuals in your town to receive what totals to trillions of dollars in tax benefits each year and provides ever new subsidies and loopholes and targeted tax “relief” is a problem. It seems like there’s a few hundred billion dollars worth in total worth of welfare and food stamps and health care subsidies for the millions of Americans who don’t make enough money to cover the cost of their lives that the government gets to the people every year. It seems like JP Morgan and other banks make a lot of money facilitating that. It seems like farmers and ranchers get tens of billions of dollars each year in welfare too.
It seems like every socialist system drains the middle class as it enriches a few on the top and guts out small town industry while making the poorest of the society dependent on the government for ever less help even as it gets increasingly more inefficient in the services it provides. It seems like banking and farming and insurance chart/public schools and a lot of other industries keep getting more expensive despite providing less.
It seems like we already live in a socialist system that both Republicans and Democrats, including Trump and Obama and Bush and Clinton and Reagan and Carter, have always been okay with.
It seems like the whole point of government in the US these days is to create new and more complicated tax codes and subsidies and regulations and invasions of our privacy by the government and giant corporations.
It seems like the US government can’t stop bombing people in Middle East and that children are often the casualties. It seems like the US can’t seem to shut Guantanamo where the whole premise of keeping people there is apparently because the US government doesn’t have to be beholden to the Constitution while there. It seems like we have a lot of enemies out there and it seems like we are a long way from home over there and it seems like this is a vicious cycle of violence and endless war and expenses and deaths and corruption.
It seems like there was a little bit of fraud in the election, just like there always seems to be. The same Republicans who got voted in who are still fighting the election results of Trump seem to want to pretend that there was not just as much fraud (very little fraud, that is) in their own election results as there always is in every election. It seems like the Democrats are going to make all the storming of the Capital a partisan thing, just like the Republicans and Democrats do with everything else including The Coronavirus Crisis.
It seems like I’ve never been okay with either side’s socialist tendencies. It seems like nobody is willing to be brave enough to reject this busted two party system but me and a few of my friends and all we do is peacefully vote for non-Republican and Democrats and/or always write-in candidates and peacefully meet monthly over Zoom to think about ways to make the whole system more transparent and educational and simple. It seems like most people in the world just wants their family to be safe, to have some opportunities to make a fair buck in a fair exchange of goods or services or currency.
It seems like I’ll never be able to understand how anyone can be excited about anybody who continues this system by running as a politician on one of these two same old corrupt, warmongering, corporatist-favoring Republican and Democrat platforms.
It seems like none of this ever changes when you look at it from my perspective. Which is why I am able to try to stay so objective in my analysis in how these political realities, which are exactly what the seem, can affect the economy and markets.
Which brings me to something about which I’m finding my brain (and heart and stomach at this point) can’t stop worrying. It seems like Trump doesn’t want to leave the White House and that he’s going to be willing to risk more uprisings, insurgence, riots, violence and mobs. It seems like there’s a lot of people I love and respect who take Trump serious about his complaints that the election was rigged against him (but again, apparently the elections weren’t rigged for any Republicans who won). It seems like there could be millions of people who go to their state capital or the US capital to “protest” in the next few days before and during the inauguration of Biden. It seems like these people are going to bring a lot of guns and weapons and be ready to fight someone. It seems like these protests could again turn into mobs and riots and violent confrontations because it seems like mobs can’t be controlled when they get out of control. And it seems like they could get out of control.
It seems like the markets aren’t worried about this and it seems like maybe they should be just a little bit. It seems like valuations for a lot or most stocks remain wildly elevated and it seems like there might be a better time to get aggressive sometime other than right now before these risks seem elevated.
It seems like the markets keep looking past the plethora of increasing risks out there and it seems like that might never end. It also seems like I’m usually the one who’s not worried about geopolitical and partisan concerns when the markets do freak out about them.
I am, in fact, buying some puts to help hedge the longs in the portfolio this week. The puts are dated out to next Friday or the week thereafter, 2-3% out-of-the-money and I’m mostly focusing on the ETFs like IWM, SMH, SPY, QQQ. I am hoping that these puts expire worthless and that the next week is no big deal. But it seems like hedging a little bit here after reading all my analysis above might be a good idea.
