Quite amazing, happy to hear you have found Jesus! Did you read the Bible without any help? It's such a complex set of texts, all from very different ages, from very different people. Couldn't imagine myself getting the most out of it without help.
579 karma · joined July 8, 2014
About family & excitement: we have little kids, so cooking at home and not going out much will be normal for us, regardless of where we live, for many years to come :-)
The wage thing is correct. Moving to NZ will cut my income by quite a bit more than 50%. But I'm fascinated with the rugged "wanting it more" vibes of NZ vs my native country. Vibes which I'm either picking correctly or just imagining. Care to comment on that?
And is NZ not just as multicultural as Australia?
And finally: another commenter here responded "New Zealand's software industry is significantly more mature than it was 2+ decades ago." Can you understand what he means by that? When did you leave NZ?
I hope you care to elaborate, we have to decide next week so any opinion is welcome, especially if you grew up there :-)
But I don't mind loosing my job for a while. We would mind having to leave the country and move back halfway across the planet after having brought over our family.
For me it's a cool job in Auckland. What worries us is the distance and the logistics of bringing over our entire family... I can see myself working there, bringing over the family, and then loosing my job e.g. because of some recession and not find another job in the grace period.
Source: see other commenter's reply, he looked it up.
There is another problem which I find more worrisome: we are expecting gig workers (and most other workers) to subject to hardcore competition for their jobs, wages and terms. The argument (also my argument above) is that it leads to efficient and honest outcomes because it involves little to no coercion.
But at the same time, governments are colluding with and bailing out the financial elites with every market crash. We did it with LTCM, in 2001, in 2008 and who knows when again. The bailout involves mass coercion of savers and an implicit punishment of those who were careful.
It may have profoundly changed the mentality of the wealthy. For the last 10 years, "if it gets bad enough, there will be a bail out" has become standard investment wisdom.
Socialism for those who own, free markets for those who don't. This contradiction is what'll ultimately do us in.
Especially in Europe, ETFs can be synthetic. In some cases this means they're made up of generic filler material (e.g. German bunds), with some secret hobo spices (derivatives) to provide the ETF's specific flavouring.
Because of 10 years of central bank buying, all these bonds have been priced to perfection for deflationary scenarios. And as the world is mostly calibrated for small, well-announced yield changes, I wonder what an unexpected discontinuous "jerk" in yields would do to such ETFs.
It's an accurate description of the mindset, up to and including the existence of a whole army of Kremlinologists who specialise in interpreting the tones, nuances and choice of words of the apparat's public statements.
But it's not limited to the US. The effort to increase the size and lower the quality of central bank balance sheets was global. At various times in the last 10 years it was even coordinated. But of course, the special role of the US dollar in the global monetary system ensures that all capital roads still lead to NYC.
Nosebleed valuations in tech. Second highest Shiller PE in S&P. The median PE of the S&P is higher than in 2001; so it's more broadly carried (can't find source right away).
It's also the age of the ETF, which was a good thing. Except that by now the industry may have created some real beauties. Remember XIV?
Also government bonds; as much as I love Italy, somebody bought the 10yr of that country for a 1% yield in 2016. Somebody also bought those Mexican 100yr bonds.
Even something as silly as Dogecoin's marketcap standing at $600 million suggests that the entire world is in the middle of a speculative binge.
You correctly mentioned being able to turn to smaller companies and low liquidity situations. Some professional players also self sabotage due to a particular mandate or ridiculous constraints, such as avoiding volatility. Having too much apparently useful information can also be a curse.
You can also choose to just "not play" sometimes. You don't have customers or bosses and you're only competing with yourself. Or rather, you're not competing at all. When things get confusing and very highly valued (as they have been for years now), you can just do nothing. Or at least do less.
Another advantage you have, which is related, is being able to have a very long term perspective. By which I mean a perspective measured in decades, which is the timescale at which the world and its financial conditions truly seem to change.
There's times like the late 70s/early 80s, where stock markets were not just ultra low, but pretty much COMATOSE. People just didn't do stocks. They remembered stocks as that thing from another age. At least in my country, the typical stock owners in that time were families whose patrimonium was tied up in 1 single company that they controlled. Needless to say, volume and liquidity was next to nothing. (By my understanding, conditions like these must have occured at least 4 times in the 20th century. Not yet in the 21st century, not even in 2000-2002 and 2007-2008, but it will.)
In a sort of Upside Down World mirror image of today, investors in the late 70s/early 80s were all about fearing stagflation, when the exact opposite was about to unfold due to central bankers receiving popular carte blanche for brutal anti-inflation shock therapy. They were quite literally lining up around the block to buy gold. Movies like "Rollover" were being made and Grandmaster Flash was rapping about double digit inflation.
Today it's all about "TINA" and low yields and the central banker put, while in reality central bankers are slowly moving back to taking orders from politicians and are walking on egg shells about a 0.1% hike because they suspect they have painted themselves in a corner. Back then some companies where almost literally hiding their profits ("pour vivre heureux, vivons caches") whereas today making a loss is almost something to be proud of.
That being said, even though these are very hard times for value investors, you can always keep searching. Like you say, it's a hobby, like going to flea markets. Personally, for the last few years, I've found interesting stuff going on in (certain) gold mines. No moat and a dependence on the price of a commodity most hated by Buffett. The general atmosphere there is depressing and it's definitely not a crowded place. There were 3 subsequent heavy tax loss selling years (2014, 2015 and 2016).
Yet the sector has been going through a very extensive cleaning period after the 2011-2016 nuclear winter and you can find (fairly) reliably profitable mid tier producers at very nice prices. They will still go up and down with the gold price, so you can't call them real value stocks. But the good ones can stay profitable even with lower prices and therefore do not go down as much as the others. So there is an obvious differentiation and a sizeable margin of safety, as big as it will ever be there. In that sense, they look like value plays to me. I'm comfortable being there.
In a more negative way, I've become interested in South Africa, an increasingly unstable country where 70-80% of the world's platinum and rhodium are currently being mined at massive losses. (Holding platinum and rhodium ETFs is commodities speculation rather than value stocks, but ok.)
And the system as a whole will still run quite hot for high CPU+GPU loads, so who knows how that affects the electronics and battery life longer term.
Please, Apple, just make it 1mm thicker already.
But your remark about the "moralising" of US companies has also been my experience. I worked in a Europe-based office for a US-owned multinational company. Alcohol was strictly forbidden. (Needless to say, the fridge was filled regardless and late Friday afternoon, people would have a beer and fraternize.)
Btw never managed to get 24 hours out of any MacBookPro?
That's why I'm currently quite fond of platinum as a speculative investment. Fuel cells require quite a bit of platinum. Yet platinum has rarely been cheaper relative to other commodities like gold. I think because the market is discounting a decline in diesel engines and maybe because of recycling. (Even though platinum has been more expensive than gold even before catalysts were common.)
In addition, platinum deserves to receive a geopolitical risk premium. 80% of the world's platinum is mined (at a loss!) in South Africa, which is prone to intense labor disputes and looking less attractive every day. And the next big producer is Russia. Yet above ground stock piles have declined in the past decade.
In the 1+ year that I've been in platinum, it hasn't been a success. The market just remains comatose. But we'll see :-)