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Sunday Reads And Listens - Is The Market About to Crack? Birkenstocks are 250 years of Ugly, Is China Losing The Chip War? and Spam 3.0

Author

Howard Lindzon
June 16, 2024

Happy Fathers day to ME…and some other great fathers I know.

My plan for today is to finish this newsletter, hop on the Peloton (I rode outside the last 2 days), eat some pancakes (Ellen makes incredible pancakes) and watch the US Open.

Everyday is father’s day for me these days. Rachel is so independent and Max is with us for the summer working two jobs, taking a class and grunting in my direction once in a while. Low maintenance.

I am home for three weeks in Coronado with no plans but work. Coronado is the gift that gives 24/7/365.

Onward…

Since I am doing some personal portfolio rebalancing this week, top of my mind is equity allocations.

If you follow me here I mostly index (FREC.com) and all I heard about this week from my favorite market follows was the ‘divergences’ in breadth.

One chart from my friend Krinsky at BTIG shows it well.

The $QQQ is up 16 percent this year so I am good with booking some profits.

JC Tells me that we just saw the highest weekly close for the S&P500 in history. Do you know how many stocks on the entire NYSE closed at a new 52-week high today? 

TWELVE.

I will dig into all this more on Momentum Monday with Ivanhoff and this weeks Trends With Friends.

Next up…

I worry about my kids ‘worrying’ and while they will not have to worry about shelter, I can’t imagine the level of worry for most young people.

Kyla Scanlon dives into this worry and what she calls a ‘housing crisis’. Kyla will be fireside chatting with me on this subject at our Stocktoberfest event Oct 20-22.

Is China losing the chip war? I imagine them losing is not good for our own safety. This war scares me.

My son Max has Birkenstocks. They are still very ugly. But, they have NEVER been more popular and that is saying something because they are 250 years old! I plan to buy my first pair soon. The stock is at an all-time high despite every brand knocking them off. I liked this Bloomberg piece. (you may need the paywall hack again)

Nikki Glaser absolutely crushed her Tom Brady roast. (use the archive link for the paywall). She is NOT an overnight success.

Speaking of comediennes, one of my favorites is Michelle Wolf who is now a Punchup.live customer/partner. This ‘otter’ bit is hilarious.

I have been getting much more spam in Gmail and my IPhone text messages. Seth Godin calls this Spam 3.0. I agree.

Any fully open system of digital communication will corrode over time. Bad messages will crowd out the good ones.

The new normal: Someone finds a database of every residential property, then another of cell phones. An AI is trained to call every homeowner, every day, asking if they’re thinking of selling their home. Millions of calls an hour. The leads (one out of 40,000 calls, perhaps) are sold to real estate brokers.

Multiply this by 500 different hustlers in a dozen industries, and now the open nature of the phone is gone forever.

And then texts.

And of course, email. An inbox with 100,000 unread messages in it is no longer a functional tool.

Open systems come with the requirement of self-restraint and humanity. When we replace those with automated stealers of attention with a profit margin, the system can no longer remain open.

Permission and trust keep going up in value, precisely as quickly as selfish forces work to succeed without them.

Have a great Sunday.

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