Saturday 4^th December 2021

The FED Chair has thrown a spanner in the works with comments a few days ago around inflation no longer being ‘transitory’. Turns out it’s permanent. They’re cutting back their $120 billion a month asset buying faster than they originally planned too.

The stretched multiples of many tech stocks are coming back in. I saw a graph on Twitter recently (FYI for all it’s short coming, connecting with the right people on Twitter is a game changer) correlating the FED’s stimulus with increase market values and their tapering correlating with dropping market values.

Personally I feel we may have turned a corner and are now sailing into a bit of a head wind rather than the wind in our back pushing us forward recently. That said, I really do have no idea and time always tells.

Also xxx messaged me this afternoon saying he was buying the downturn in crypto. It dropped around 15-25% within an hour. This is not uncommon in this market though. Again I saw on Twitter the 2017 run up had six pullbacks of -29% to -38% (-38%, -38%, -33%, -38%, -36% and -29%)within 12 months. Even with these pullbacks, the price skyrocketed that year.

I’ve got to say, experiencing the volatility in this market, makes every other market feel like smooth sailing. Fingers crossed they’re not famous last words!

 

Monday 6^th December 2021

Looks like I’ve got my first NFT. Last month I mentioned Gary Vee assigning tickets to his events to his NFT’s to create some intrinsic value. An annual (now virtual) business event I attend each year in the Direct Sales profession today announced their 2022 event tickets come with an NFT. It’ll be used to deliver updates and content through out the year I believe until the event kicks off 2^nd December 2022.

I’m stoked because register to attend this event each year anyway, the event costs me $97USD for three days, plus I get an NFT and don’t have to pay ridiculous ETH gas fees to store it in my Metamask wallet. I’m most excited about experiencing this technology and watching how this company utilises it.

 

Tuesday 14^th December 2021

Tonight was the local crews USANA Christmas party at Strike Bowling in Surfers Paradise. After two years of no destination company events it’s become more special to catch up in person. At least it has for me. It was a fun night and JBraz can bowl!

 

Wednesday 15^th December 2021

Gold doesn’t seem to be a hedge for inflation in 2021. Morgan Housel tweeted:

Jan 2021 $1800USD

Dec 2021 $1788USD

But time frames matter enormously! I’ve discussed this in the past.

I’m keen to see how this plays out for gold. 

 

Thursday 16 December 2021

FED two day meeting with the main takeaways being a speeding up of tapering in QE reduction and three interest rates rises penciled in for 2022 in the USA.

It will be interesting to see how the market responds to this information.

 

Friday 17^th December 2021

I had an interesting experience recently. It took me three attempts to not have a cleaner turn up. The first one was a referral from a client of mine and the cleaner cancelled at 11am on Wednesday morning. 5 hours before our agreed start time for what seemed to be legitimate family reasons.

So I went to Air Tasker and found a cleaner with great reviews for Thursday 1pm. She messaged me at 12:45pm, 15mins before our agreed kick off that she had to cancel. Her car broke down…

I went back to Air Tasker and found cleaner number three. When it came to organising a start time for today I got a message ‘no worries’

I explained I didn’t understand the context of what ‘no worries’ meant in relation to a start time. No response…

What’s interesting is this was an easy clean and I was offering to pay way above the standard $35-$45/hour. More than double.

My feeling is people don’t ‘turn up’ like they used to and with so much support/government stimulus available perhaps some people just don’t want to work anymore? Add to this people keeping their word these days is increasingly rare, I’m not sure society is heading in a good direction.

In the end I did it myself. The money saved has already been invested.

 

Monday 20^th December 2021

I was coaching all day yesterday, but my brother told me an extremely popular café in Miami was basically empty yesterday morning. Typically it’s a line up to get a table, especially mid morning on a sunny Saturday or Sunday (which yesterday was).

Vaccine passports became mandatory in QLD on Friday 17^th December for all non-essential businesses.

xxx told me a client of his went to Dream World or Movie World (I can’t remember which one he said) yesterday and it was empty as well. They go each year during school holidays and it’s always packed but yesterday there was no queues for rides and lots of space.

Finally I was visiting a friend today and a pizza delivery guy was in the same lift. I asked if they’re busy. He said flat out, they don’t have enough staff. He and one other person are the only two on this shift making the pizzas and going delivering them.

 

Tuesday 21^st December 2021

Tech stocks in the USA have been getting hammered the past few weeks/months. It’s been a sea of red, outside of the giants like Microsoft, Apple, Alphabet, Amazon and Facebook.

That said, there have been 87 new market all time highs since February 2020, pre COVID in the USA. This is ‘positive skew’ at play. I’ve mentioned this before. Positive skew means a few giant companies have so much weighting in the index that they’re movement up moves the entire index up. Under the hood, things might not look so pretty, like many US tech stocks right now, but these negatives are far outweighed by the giants.

Here in Australia, Hamish Douglas lead listed company FMG came out of a trading holt Friday and finished down 33% today, at $19.70. You don’t see that often. It was up around $60 before this.

I’ve continued regular investing (not in FMG) despite all the noise.

 

Wednesday 29^th December 2021

Vanguard ETF’s announced their estimated distributions for the December quarter. Looks like earning for Australian and international businesses are on the rise. They’ll all be DRP’d.

 

Friday 31^st December 2021

The year in review.

ASX200 up around 18%.

S&P500 up around 26%.

NDQ up around 21%.

BTC up around 60%.

ETH up around 398%.

SOL up around 10,600%. For the Aussies not WHSP. In this case SOL is Solana. 

Who’d have thought?

This of course all depends on when you bought, how often you bought, if you’re reinvesting earnings and the list goes on. Reality is some people might be in the red while others are experiencing green galore. Past performance is no guarantee of future performance.  

All the best to you in 2022!