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Eastwood

Certifiably Surly
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Everything posted by Eastwood

  1. My bet is on Pfizer coming out with the vaccine first.
  2. Eastwood

    The Wire

    I think an underlying theme that sneaks under the radar with Season 2 is how the old establishment was getting quickly pushed out by people way more extreme and serious than the old guard could handle. Sobotka was a perfect representation of that. Your good, old fashioned union that Frank Sobotka knew had a little light graft, a little bribery and gaming the system, the occasional load of alcohol or container of VCRs go missing, that's just part of life on the docks. But now it's outright corruption, hard drugs, and living, breathing human beings in those containers and basically overnight Frank is in over his head and has no idea how to handle it. He thought he had a chance at the end and he paid for it. That theme was a little bit ahead of its time in regards to the rising sophistication and global integration of crime. Frank's situation, turns out, was just the tip of the iceberg of what was coming in our world. People like Frank were quickly becoming analog players in a digital world.
  3. If all the animals along the equator were capable of flattery, then Thanksgiving and Halloween would fall on the same date.
  4. I took a break from college to try my hand at the real world and found myself in a warehouse in San Antonio during the summer. Job wasn't paying enough, so 6 months later I took a night shift job working the fuel island of a long-haul truck maintenance facility where I also had truck washing duty. Some time around midnight in late December, the temp was in the low 20s during my shift. The water from the pressure washer nozzle was freezing on contact, creating a dirty ice casing around the trucks and I still had 3 hours to go before I would see the inside of a heated building. That, combined with other horrors that are found in the sleeper cabin of a leased long haul-truck, had me change my position on whether I needed a college education. I still have over a decade to go before my oldest will be at a working age, but the stories from that place will be sitting in my back pocket until then. Unfortunately, the thing about most boys in their late teens is that they won't believe a word you tell them. They need to feel the rap on the nose themselves before they get the idea.
  5. That Citigroup buy was bad, IMO. Citigroup has the most exposure to not only the mortgage bond CDOs that crashed the market in '08, but they turned around and exposed themselves to auto loan bond CDOs.
  6. As an independent contractor, I've created a pay schedule in excel to turn in along with the forgiveness app. I am also including bank statements for the two months prior at the old bank as well as the following two months to show that no income was coming in to the old business account during the time I was depending on the PPP loan. Looks like borrowing 2.5 was a bit much and I'll have to decide whether to take the excess as a 1% loan or just pay back the principal. I'll run this by you more clever money types, but wouldn't it make sense to just take the 1% loan, continue to pay myself, and just drop that excess into my IRA next year? Seems like that pays for the 1% and then some.
  7. Misery is part of the game. Full confession time, I had an embarrassing fuck up on Monday. Bought 10 times as many logitech calls as I had intended because I was just flying through and not paying attention. Immediate gut punch when I realized, but I decided to let it ride. By the end of the day, I was down 10x more than I was comfortable with. I basically had half of my liquidity in this trade. This was the day of earnings. They blow it out of the water, but the candle is magically red for the day. Real red. The high happened in the first 10 minutes of trading that day. I wake up the next morning to it popping 4% in the overnight. Perfect. Just gotta cash out at even and call it a day. Tons of volatility out of the gate, I can't seem to get a hit at break even, though, so I sell at about a 10% loss when it was over 30% at the end of the prior day. I check a little later and if I would have just relaxed and trusted my TA, I would have been up 40%, at one point. But I don't have the stomach for half of my liquidity riding on one trade. That mistake cost me about a week's worth of gains. I dug around in Thinkorswim and changed the default buy amount to make sure that never happens again.
  8. Elon will make Austin weird, again.
  9. Felt like a damn Wall Street wolf this morning. Got tired of watching my Exxon stock in parenthesis every day in my P/L Day column so I bought some puts yesterday mid-day. Sold them this morning at what looks like the low, on the button. Now my stock and my puts are positive for the day. The profits are only in the hundreds, but hell, that's money I didn't have yesterday.
  10. Oh, I'm good. It wasn't me that was hit. I was in the corporate building when we found out someone else in the company was hit. Six figures is big loss up front for a title company and is absolutely devastating. Changes the entire direction the company wants to go that particular year. Also makes your underwriters particularly grumpy and can trigger some very uncomfortable provisions in an underwriting agreement.
  11. I have first hand knowledge on real estate wire fraud. Title companies are getting absolutely hammered on this. Someone spoofs the email of a party in the transaction and it's off to the races. The title company, the realtors, and the parties to the contract are all typically very tech illiterate, first off. Hats off to the IT people at a title company because they have to put up with so much bullshit. Secondly, the breaches are most likely coming from the realtor side. The IT people in title companies are very quick in detecting breaches and everything now is moving to remote systems where the network environment is closed off to everything except email and email has so many filters that sometimes confirmation of receipt of emails has to be phoned in because there was no space after a period and the filter read it as an unauthorized website. A realtor goes to a Starbucks, a bar, or a restaurant with free wifi. They go there so often that they automatically connect to the free wifi every time. The data sent over that free wifi can be intercepted by anyone. It makes too much sense that someone could sit in the parking lot and start sniffing packets and monitoring traffic specifically for realtors. Why not spend a couple days a week monitoring free wifi locations known to be frequented by realtors when you're going to steal 6 figure amounts each time? A realtor grabs a coffee and while there gets an email about closing next week and that same email is read by the person in the parking lot and it's off to the races. That's how a lot of the celebrity photo hacking happened, btw. Celebrities would hook up to hotel wifi and hackers would catch their email details for their icloud, then phish them with fake icloud emails. Same thing could be done to realtors hooking up to free wifi all over the damn place. The most sophisticated wire fraud I've seen executed against a title company was the entire amount of a seller's proceeds was swiped. The hacker got ahold of the realtors email, waited for the copy of the voided check to be scanned in, immediately photoshopped account information onto the voided check, and spoofed the realtor's email saying "sorry, wrong check. Use this one." The first check had already been verified by phone by the title company, didn't verify the fake one that came a mere 30 minutes after, and $320k was out the door. Title company was on the hook for that one. Moral of the story is to never hook up to free wifi. Also, these hackers are specifically targeting real estate transactions AND are intimately aware of the policies in place that are supposed to keep it from happening. That leads me to believe they have people in the industry feeding them the policy changes, because the fraud changes almost instantly with the policy changes. So, the only way to really avoid it is cashier's checks. If that isn't an option, verify the wiring instructions by calling the numbers provided in the contract hard copy ONLY. No numbers from email, websites, or anything else that can be electronically altered or spoofed. It may seem like a huge inconvenience in this day and age to have to deal with actual, honest to goodness, wood pulp paper, but suck it up. There's literally hundreds of thousands of dollars at stake.
  12. Throws shit against the wall. Gets pissy when asked to explain.
  13. Plot twist: everyone in that new scene is dead. They're talking in the purgatory Chris described in his near death experience.
  14. 13 years ago, the market took the banks at their word on the valuation of mortgage backed securities in the face of key indicators saying otherwise. It nearly collapsed the global economy. 6 months after the first major institution, New Century, went bankrupt the Dow hit its all time peak. Literally 4 months after that, the government had to begin bailing everyone out. Now the market is ignoring key economic indicators while all the market players are taking each other at their word that the next 6 months worth of bad economic news is already priced in, despite the economic fog of war. I'm not saying to withdraw your Roth and slap it all on 150 SPY puts for Jan 2021, but it's too soon to tell if March was a foreshock or the main event.
  15. WSJ reporting industrial vehicle sales are down 72% over this time last year. Sounds like bad news for CAT later in the year.
  16. Final total of people cut at HAL in Houston reported at ~1k, per my news ticker on thinkorswim.
  17. Fudge Nugget is the Branding Iron of stocks.
  18. Happened to me with AAL. Sold a put of AAL that ended up getting exercised, so I was holding 100 shares that was down out the gate. Have clawed back the losses by selling calls that would break even for me if exercised, but the calls either expiring worthless or closing out the call to take profit has softened the blow by a couple hundred dollars. I've definitely learned a lot about the mechanics and strategies over the past 2 months. This market has been a real teaching experience.
  19. I bought a May 22 125 Put yesterday expecting the bad earnings.
  20. I have a buddy who drives a truck for a railroad in PA. He said that they are starting to stack containers in the yard and that's always a bad sign. Product just isn't coming in.
  21. It's already happening on the local level with restaurants. A local brewpub here was doing a 6 pack of their brew with a 1 topping pizza for $16. The pizza by itself used to run close to that. Imagine what clothing retail is going to look like when fall/winter catalogue starts approaching and their summer inventory barely got touched because summer wasn't a thing this year.
  22. Also was able to provide direct deposit info on Friday. No update since, though.
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