Goodbye and F@*k You 2023...You Paid Me Well But Will Not Be Missed AND Is Peace The Big Trend of 2024?

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Social Leverage is an investor (Fund IV)

Good morning…

For the next week or so I will share some of my predictions (more like my interpretations of trends already in motion) for stocks and the public and private markets.

I have done this every year since 2005 (you can go to my blog and search ‘year’ and the word ‘prediction’). Sometimes I cringe and other times I think ‘I could have been a somebody’.

Here is what I had to say about 2023 back in December 2022. I was mostly right about what lied ahead but came into the year underinvested in stocks. I started ‘Trends With Friends’ podcast with my pals JC and Phil and JC got my head straight by March that we were in a bull market for public stocks and I ended up with a great year and those that listened in and followed along the podcasts and the blog hopefully picked up on a few of the winners.

I got lucky with crypto because I have kept an allocation (as did our Social Leverage Emerging Manager Fund) to funds that had great 2023’s. I have never given up on the fact that crypto is money and money is the biggest game on this planet.

Just a reminder…I am 58 and in a position to not have to worry about ‘beating the market’. Those that follow along should know I am mostly indexing and using portfolio company FREC to direct index (see the ad at top of my newsletter). I am very heavily weighted seed stage investing as well.

Onward…

My biggest prediction of 2024 is ‘More Peace’. I only predict this because the markets seems to be predicting it/pricing it in.

How can this be?

We know Hamas only wants war and Iran can’t hide their joy in Proxy wars. We know Qatar is evil, we know Harvard is the Bud Light of Academia and The New York Times is a click farm no better, possibly worse, than Facebook or Musk Or TikTok. Every ad based company big enough has done the math and knows the Arab and Muslim dollars will offset the US dollars. Twitter is full of Qatar ads and Blackrock will sponsor anything, so don’t start with me.

We know peace won’t come with the term ‘proportionate’.

We all also know that the far left (Rashida et al) is despicable and ghoulish and that any person that has the ‘simple’ worldview of ‘Oppressor/Oppressed’ is not someone you should hire and a likely menace to your corporate culture.

We know the UN and UNRWA are Hamas or at least sympathizers. We know they will triple down on this as Harvard and MIT have done.

BUT…

The markets KNOW all this!

So here we are with the US markets and many other global markets at all-time highs and as I have been saying, climbing the largest real and man made wall of worry of all time.

So I will say Peace is out there in 2024.

I guess the next question is what happens to the market if ‘peace’ breaks out?

I would be thrilled to have that problem.

Have a great day.