While the newly minted billionaires command the lion's share of attention, a few people are looking at cheaper alternatives that could also become $100 stocks and make themselves millionaires.

That’s a real bull market where the leaders lead, and the cheap stocks start to jump like popcorn.

Some will be duds, but now and then a few will be true champions.

The problem is that most don’t use any money management, having a dream isn’t a strategy, and that is the difference between someone who tilts the percentages in one’s favor to a scatterbrain approach.

Everyone has a favorite cheapco.

My doctor friend loved a Zinc miner at 14 cents

A PhD bro loves some out-of-the-blue Oil company at 60 cents

My banker friend buying what Trump’s kids own

The electrician who has a broad selection of potential drone breakouts

What these companies all have in common is the potential of a brighter future.

What they don’t have is investor confidence.

So, as a result, most penny stock hunters follow 5-10 accounts that provide lists of stocks they buy obediently, expecting one to pay off.

How did it work with shitcoins?

I really don’t believe that’s the ticket. When the markets don’t do what you expect, you won’t know what to do.

I’m not saying you need to think. But what I am saying is to see what’s popular in life and in the market. Not what someone else is telling you.

And yes, you will need to look at a price chart to identify points in time when the stock presents an opportunity.

If someone tells you they never look at a price chart, then they are either wrong in that assessment or someone in their circle is.

I shared a post that had the potential to continue its breakout but it turned out to be dud.

But if I was interviewed, I would say “I got in early”

I never say “wrong” because that means I’m wrong and no one wants to be wrong. So I’m early.

And , in reality, if you are wrong, so what?

There are plenty of other fish in the sea or a better opportunity at a later date in that name.

Most people I have met, even the ones with bad luck, aren’t always wrong. Everyone has a perspective that works for them. So you just need to be in the game long enough for the market to come around to your viewpoint.

So what about fundamentals?

I think the fundamentals of a cheap stock are important; that’s why I always recommend subscribing to writers who have the time and wisdom to share their views on a business.

It gives you confidence that if a reversal occurs, it won’t halt trading or go to $0 overnight, which is never fun.

And it’s affordable and entertaining. What’s the point of dry numbers if you can’t enjoy it?

Did you know NVDA was once a penny stock?

And the famous value investors Third Ave had a big stake in them?

But the fundamentals guys will tend to sell out 10,000% too early in any fabulous run, so you have to be a bit whimsical.

Have any cheap stock you want to share? Great Substack accounts that share information on companies?

I’ll be sharing this one in the chat

Here is a satellite company with growing revenue but a stock price of $12

Happy hunting for Big Game

Eric

The Dow is not the forefront of picking winners but selecting the best and getting rid of the worst.

It’s also price weighted.

So Google, which Standard and Poor deems a teleco, replaced a $40 stock that hasn’t done anything.

Net neutrality and no taxes on internet commerce changed the playing field for the internet and now Google which needs Verizon and ATT or no one will have internet connection is NOW the representative of telecommunication?

With Google now in debt, and internet commerce being taxed, what if the government will tacitly humble these overlords by allowing ATT and Verizon to start charging the businesses for favorable treatment?

Instead of charging me $100s of dollars of month?

Banks do it by charging my business crazy fees in my business, but not in my personal account.

What are your thoughts?

How did I go from high-brow pursuit to that sugar-coated dreck? (But having Adam Sandler officiate is always a good idea)

I have no clue what occurred, but the thought occurred to me that these are our Greek Gods…

They demand our attention

All the character types of the Gods in Odysseus and Iliad are playing out everyday in politics, business, and entertainment.

Instead of People Incorporated, I would argue, Barry Diller should rename Greek myths Incorporated as we will truly know what we have in our hand when we digest this garbage.

Need proof?

Here is a screenshot and AI’s help in telling us that non of this is new

Khamenei’s funeral — House of Atreus
An aging patriarch falls, and the funeral itself becomes a political act rather than a private grief. His burial was delayed, breaking with Islamic custom, which is pure Sophocles — think Antigone, where the manner of burial matters more than the death itself, because it signals who controls the narrative of the dead. The massive crowd chanting “Death to America” as the casket moved through Tehran is the chorus doing what a Greek chorus always does: converting private mourning into public vengeance-oath. This is less “a king has died” and more “the House of Atreus buries one link in an unbroken chain of blood debts” — Agamemnon’s funeral rites, except everyone in the crowd is quietly auditioning for Orestes.

Trump meeting Zelenskyy at NATO — Agamemnon at Aulis
A commander trying to hold together a coalition of allies who don’t fully trust him or each other, right as tensions with allies are already visible and observers are testing how far he can push NATO. That’s Agamemnon at Aulis — nominal head of the Greek expedition, perpetually managing prickly subordinate kings (Achilles sulking in his tent is basically every NATO member with a grievance). The wrinkle: Turkey’s foreign minister framing the Erdogan-Trump friendship as something that could help NATO — that’s a Odysseus move, a canny secondary player positioning himself as the indispensable go-between, which is exactly the kind of maneuver that decides how these coalition wars actually end.

The undercard (Florida local news) — satyr play
Every tragic trilogy ended with a satyr play — bawdy, low-stakes comic relief after three acts of doom. The turnpike vehicle fire, the fireworks haze, the Delray Beach arrest — that’s your satyr play. The gods are busy with funerals and wars; meanwhile Palm Beach is just Palm Beach.

I can easily image this…

This should help you reframe what we are seeing in a way to generate unexpected, but accurate, expectations of the future.

You are not predicting, but through 1000s of years of history seeing the only options these Greek Gods will do.

Or will be presented as such to us over the internet.

Try this yourself with a problem or investment or modern event that is nagging you, I’m sure we would love to see what you come up with.

Make it a strong sober Monday,

Eric

PS. Did you see that the financial news are having another look at alcohol? It may make a comeback?

There was a show, invite only, for the better performers, and I was selected, but I got up on stage like a good patriot and told the crowd:

“Seeing all these American flags flying around, especially at car dealerships and retail, makes me think the government is selling us a bag of goods and I’m in the USSR”

Needless to say, I bombed.

I wasn’t the only one who bombed.

Bill Maher got fired from ABC for being skeptical.

Look, the news played on our emotions; it made us feel very uncomfortable when Elie Wiesel was in Parade magazine saying it’s a moral imperative to get rid of Saddam Hussein.

While I don’t always have time to think things through, I do rely on my gut, and I felt we were going into Iraq when I couldn’t figure out the connection between Afghanistan and Saddam Hussein.

The Colonel's speech at the UN was delivered to an audience as if they were all 3rd graders and was too on-the-nose.

Skeptical doesn’t mean unpatriotic. I just think American flags should be honored, not commercialized.

And no way am I going to wave a Ukrainian flag or any other foreign flag.

So when I saw flags flown over the White House on Easter under Biden that were not the US flag, that made me upset.

A lot of things that the past few years have rattled everything I was brought up to believe in.

I come, like most of you, from immigrant parents (somewhere down the line), and my great-aunt told me that where she was from, she was not allowed to own real estate. So every day she owns a house in her name here, she thanks God for giving her a chance to live in the land of the free.

This past spring, my inept HOA ordered me to fix my driveway, and when I was standing with my contractor, he asked me if there was anything else he could do for me?

Thinking about our military fighting for us overseas so we can be conducting business and buying ice cream with your kids and seeing how some politicians don’t give the impression of America first…

“Let’s put up a big American flag over my driveway.”

As long as the principles that founded this country prevail, never bet against America.

Something that some think is a rallying cry.

It’s not.

Rest up, fireworks aren’t just on the 4th and December 31st, we probably have 6 more months of fireworks.

We are seeing the entire world change in front of our eyes. I don’t care who you are we all have skin in the game and, like most of you, I’m a bit confused.

Look forward in figuring out a little bit with you,

Eric

PS. If you have a personal story about putting up a flag, I would love to hear about it

So why do I try to look at it that way?

History is a map if used wisely but do most use it as such?

On one side, historians like to play should have, would have could have…

Arm chair historians like to imagine themselves front and center of geopolitics as Luke Skywalker waving his lightsaber

And, for others, they want to document everything with annotations and create a tomb that thanks to AI you can summarize in a sentence

(all that work so a 16 year old can sum up in one sentence on Google Notebook LLM)

There are also the media and pop-historians who just extrapolate from the past — cut and paste…

I’m under the working theory that there is nothing new under the sun, even BS. If that theory holds up, and 3 of the most influential religions deem it canon, so why not apply those metrics?

Also, I’m under the influence that I don’t know anything, and our leaders don’t either, just the successful ones show up and play it by ear

after years of experience and practice, of course, and apply it to the matters at hand.

So let’s test the theory.

What I’m seeing is: The Incentive Map

Again, the working theory is that the tools change but the incentives don’t so therefore the current standoff over Iran should decompose into the same handful of positions eighteenth century diplomacy already mapped out.

Start with the role Britain played for most of the 1700s.

Britain rarely wanted a land war on the continent. Too expensive, too exposed, too easy to lose an army you couldn’t quickly replace across open water. So Britain ran what historians later called a blue-water policy: control the sea lanes directly, and pay someone else’s army to hold the line on land. Subsidize Prussia. Subsidize the Dutch. Keep the navy dominant and the coalition large, and let the subsidized allies absorb the casualties.

That’s a strangely precise description of how the United States has been operating in the Gulf. Control the strait. Build the coalition. Expand the Abraham Accords rather than the troop deployments. Let reconstruction money and security guarantees do the work that legions used to do. The instrument changed from a subsidy paid in gold to a subsidy paid in reconstruction funding and market access. The role didn’t move at all.

Now take the role of the power fighting for survival, not conquest.

Frederick the Great’s Prussia spent the Seven Years’ War (1756) surrounded, outnumbered, and one bad campaign season from being partitioned off the map entirely. He needed to survive long enough that his enemies found it cheaper to negotiate than to finish the job. Prussia walked away from a war it had no business surviving, intact, because exhaustion beat ambition on the other side of the table.

Just like George Washington.

Iran’s incentive right now reads the same way. Not “how do we win.” How do we survive this intact enough to claim we didn’t lose. A negotiated ceasefire, a reconstruction fund, sanctions relief, an IAEA process that lets the regime say it chose transparency rather than had it imposed. That’s a Frederick outcome. Damaged, diminished, still standing, still at the table.

That’s one viewpoint and definitely a parallel.

[Wait, what did Eric write? Iran is winning? Nope, AI took my thoughts and turned the tables on me.]

After writing to my editor AI, that I wanted to edit the above statement…

“That’s one viewpoint and definitely a parallel. But I don’t see it as such and I don’t see it written how the USA is trying to create an environment for oppressed people to rise up but only with assistance from USA after they make the first move and sacrifice. If they love the American way then that’s what they'll do. So how do we reframe it like this? I mean that’s what France did in 1776”

But Iran is not a country but controlled by an oppressive brutal regime that reigns by fear. It’s the people underneath it that is slowly stirring and not caring about victory against the USA but against its own leaders.

France helped the USA with its war, but France didn’t show up in 1775. There was no Rochambeau at Lexington and Concord, no French fleet in Boston Harbor when the shooting started.

The colonists declared independence, fought a brutal string of losses through 1776, and had to prove, at Saratoga, in October 1777, that they could actually win before France put a signature on a formal alliance in February 1778.

The first move, and the first blood, belonged to the colonists. France’s role only opened up after that.

That's the role I don't see written into most readings of the Iran situation, and it's the one I think is actually operating. Not: does the regime survive intact enough to claim it didn't lose.

The real question is whether a population willing to do what the colonists did in 1775 shows up first.

Iran's 2025–2026 protests, and the regime's massacre of its own civilians in putting them down, is the Lexington-and-Concord moment in this reading and not a finished revolution, but the first move that has to happen before anything resembling a Saratoga-to-alliance sequence becomes possible.

Nobody signs a treaty of alliance with a population that hasn't already bled for it first. France didn't in 1776. There's no reason to expect 2026 to run differently.

Then there’s the role of the power with no margin for error.

Let’s revisit Freddy from the 7 year war (he loved a good battle). He invaded Silesia in 1740 as he felt waiting cost more than moving. A narrow window to attack a weakened rival to gain concessions.

Israel’s posture through this conflict reads from the same page: a security margin too thin to outsource to slower processes, a preference for resolving the threat now rather than managing it indefinitely.

Then have the superpowers step in clean this up.

Eighteenth-century diplomacy always had a Dutch Republic or a Sweden in the room, a few states without the size to dictate an outcome, but with enough leverage as neutral ground to host the actual negotiation. Qatar and Pakistan are playing exactly that position now, brokering the talks rather than fighting in them. The Gulf Cooperation Council states are playing the role smaller German principalities played against a dominant neighbor for three hundred years: nobody wants to be conquered by the strong power next door, so everyone quietly organizes a coalition and a security guarantee against the day it tries.

Then the outside powers who profit from everyone else’s war without fighting it.

Makes common sense.

That’s why we see China not really taking a stance as it doesn’t pay to go to war as you can pick away at your competitors advantage.

The same occurred in 1783 as no additional military force chose to attack a weakened US. After UK lost the war in 1783 and left the field entirely, and left its former colony with no navy, no standing army, a bankrupt treasury, and no guarantee it would survive the decade as an independent nation. France the friend could have turned into an exploiter.

That restraint is easy to underrate because nothing happened. But nothing happening was the choice.

Let the fates determine the outcome of a countries destiny not arms. The current posture toward Iran, reconstruction money instead of occupation, an accord system instead of a protectorate, sanctions relief instead of a puppet government, isn’t just eighteenth-century in general shape. It’s the fact the West has tried every other strategy to no avail. So why not return to what works?

None of this required anyone in 2026 to have read a word of eighteenth-century diplomatic history. That’s the actual point. Nobody needs to have studied the Treaty of Utrecht to end up playing Utrecht’s roles.

The incentives assign the parts on their own.

Of course, if you are a student of history you can observe in real time what roles our leaders are playing.

Speaking of Treaties of Utrecht which happened in 1713. It does appear that this is where the Middle East is heading.

These treaties between France and other European powers and another series between Spain and other powers the war of who will be King of Spain.

World War II shaped the map of the Middle East but not the ideology.

Utrecht was created sweeping geopolitical and territorial shifts favored Great Britain and shaped European and colonial relations for a century:

• British Ascendancy

• Monopolies & Trade

• Dynastic Resolution

• Disintegration of the Spanish Empire

Countries since time immemorial act in their interest and never want a strong neighbor. Or a nasty and rabid pitbull.

So diplomacy adapts but not the principles. The diplomatic pouch became encrypted email. The royal envoy became the special envoy. The subsidy became reconstruction aid. The peace congress became the international summit.

Lets celebrate this 250 year of Independence by working hard to have another 250 years of growth, harmony and peace

Eric

Tradere posteris - To hand down from previous generations

and

Ex Nihilo - From nothing

shared this tweet from @VikingRobVWO about General Patton

After reading this and knowing how my grandfather did more than fight under General Patton, I can see how many of those traits trickled down to some of his boots on the ground. And how those characteristics were passed down to the next generation.

You most definitely can tell who came from a military background and who didn’t; there is a reason for it.

The founding document of this country was not written ex nihilo.

Look at the rough draft Thomas Jefferson wrote before the final version.

He may have written it, but he had a lot of input and debate before the final version was agreed upon.

This declaration has worked for 250 years. And the next great declaration was only 13 years apart, written in France but NOT ex-nihilo.

In fact, surprisingly, Thomas Jefferson helped write with the French Marquis de Lafayette the founding document of the French republic and signed by the King of France before he was beheaded, talk about irony.

“Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen”

Unfortunately, it “forgot” to mention God and a higher power, as they killed and beheaded everyone who was not on their Christmas mailing list

Because without a moral tether, man accepts one in the form of an emperor.

But the French are still the French. And this creed still has the timeless essence of Loving your Neighbor as Yourself.

Unfortunately, there is one dogma, creed that is creatio ex nihilo and should be sold in the Fiction section of any self-respecting bookstore.

The US fought 250 years ago a king without representation, and the same goes for any other ideology that forces upon you taxation, expropriation, without representation

and keeping the temperature at 78.6 degrees.

That is why Communism and Socialism (when you run out of other people’s money) fail. It’s an idea that is ex nihilo, nothing.

And nothing leads to nothing - Ex nihilo nihil fit

While we celebrate the Fourth with fireworks and air conditioning at 60 degrees, realize that the enemies of freedom are not even hiding the fact anymore, and it may take more than the ballot box to remove this scourge.

But I’m going to enjoy what a good idea, and good men do, as it has rubbed off on us 250 years later.

Make it a memorable weekend or as they used to say in Latin

Carpe Diem

Eric

What are your thoughts about the Declaration of Independence?

I started using AI because I wanted to do funny pictures and videos but kept getting censored.

And then it had “knowledge” of me and what I was thinking and would censor or shoehorn its response based on what it knows of me instead of WHAT I WANT.

And it would lie, remain inconsistent, be a censoring teacher, and spit out so much drivel…

And the damn fees.

The fees are crushing when you are a power user.

And it’s not fast. Patience is required.

So when someone who seems to give a bird eye view of the landscape like Alex Karp one should listen up.

Alex Karp is the CEO of the multi-billion dollar Palantir which is the one stop shop for AI for government and business purposes.

This wonderful interview and highlights can be read here:

https://www.zerohedge.com/ai/something-has-gone-completely-wrong-palantirs-alex-karp-goes-ballistic-openai-anthropic

His argument is that the AI you and I are using are not providing their money’s worth and you just don’t realize it.

He went one step further and wrote a manifesto on X.

My thoughts are in bold:

1. Your AI sovereignty dictates your institution’s future.

Buy your own mainframe and operate it

2. Data retention is your treasure. Transfer it at your own peril. Your ability to win is dictated by your ability to recognize and use your unique edges, and you keep winning by compounding the underlying data to generate new insights.

There is nothing free as we have seen with our private data. You cannot do this with your business. At least make them work for it.

3. Tokenmaxxing hijacks your value orientation and decreases your institutional fortitude and intelligence.

And his zinger

There is a reason why those selling tokens refuse to charge based on value.

4. Controlling your weights is controlling your fate. Weights are the distilled form of hard-won, accumulated institutional knowledge. If you let others control your weights, you are allowing them to migrate the alpha of your business to theirs.

5. There is no contradiction between sovereignty and alpha. The architecture that maximally preserves sovereignty is one that enables institutions to own their tribal knowledge, and to compound it as alpha.

That’s why outsourcing all of our industrial base overseas may not have been very wise

6. Politicizing the technical issues involving sovereignty is what your adversary wants.

A trillion dollars of investment is the economy. Don’t trivialize it over political jargon.

7. Real expertise is existential. Allowing politics or favoritism to determine your technical decisions rewards whoever is best at politics, not whoever is right.

Toy Story 5 covers this. Don’t let others tell you what to believe or feel.

8. Learn from institutions that are winning or that have consistently delivered.

And not people that show up on CNBC to sell something. See what works.

9. Only listen to institutions, countries, and people who have a proven record of being right.

Right! Not whose a billionaire or millionaire. But who has results. Its not mutually inclusive. You may be a billionaire but not in what you are being interviewed about.

I read Mr. Karp’s wonderful book and was thinking that if his product really lives by this screed, he’s truly Apple.

Apple thought differently and gave independence to its consumers as opposed to big bad IBM and Microsoft.

If OpenAI and Anthropic do indeed go public, Palantir may possibly be very undervalued.

When you watch the interview he also mentions that while his company is cash flow positive, his competitors are not.

And in the spirit of 250 years, would you invest in a company that’s pro-USA or a few that are pro-censorship and not help our society grow and thrive (based on public anecdotes)?

There is a lot more to unpack.

So share your thoughts and maybe we can come to a working consensus on AI for yourself and your business.

I’m working on developing AI, amongst other things, where a user rents out the mainframe and we provide the support and development.

Right now, I was tasked with finding the owners of any property in the US. So it’s a fun challenge. What challenges do you want AI to solve?

Eric

He is having a bad year from leaving California over a wealth tax to losing some money in NYC.

I am not beginning my article to rag on him. He is brilliant and among the smartest as well that roam the earth. But sometimes you can’t be the best in all areas of life and what he may be learning is humility.

And that a mind virus can’t be stopped as has been practiced the past two decades but other forms of deterrence. One can only hope.

Because many of these billionaires are globalists who feel they will just jet on to another utopia if things hit the fan. Or live in a bunker. They basically imply they have no skin in the game.

I beg to differ and argue we are all in the same boat. What better metaphor is the zombie apocalypse.

When I finished film school, but still wanted to keep the flame alive I would binge on directors and genres like “of the Dead” films by George Romero

He was famous for his zombie movies way before Walking Dead stormed the world.

What do the zombies symbolize?

He made one that still naws at me just like the zombies on fresh mortals.

As I wrote about aliens that we forgot what the true meaning of what they represented (the Communist scourge), we must also realize the reason the zombie apocalypse appeals to us.

For me, it’s ideas that are turning seemingly innocent victims into bloodthirsty zombies.

So how can some idea turn your loved one?

Time and time again ideas with an influential leader or a nicely packaged product with a hint of sin tends to lure people.

What may have been appealing at first with a newly elected mayor seems to be spiraling out of control.

https://nypost.com/2026/06/13/opinion/the-dsa-is-exploiting-zohran-mamdanis-nyc-mayoralty-for-a-stealth-revolution/

It’s as if everyone not caught up in this wave and living comfortably feels everything is going to work out in the end.

It’s just a midterm election thing.

But people not in the apex of society may be waiting for their chance to storm the HQ of paradise. Even though what is paradise if your fellow brother is in squalor?

If you haven’t watched it and into these things, its an enjoyable movie. We have had 100 years of development of the greatest art form (since it combines all forms of art) and many times the finished product is greater than we realize …

Even if its a cheap zombie movie.

As reference, the Knicks and hoi polie were celebrating with their +$20,000 tickets while the zombies were celebrating … destruction.

and here

Agree? Disagree?

Follow the money and be prepared.

Tomorrow I hope to finish some thoughts on Sable Offshore which crashed to $3.00 a wonderful company in a non-friendly state with a lot of debt.

Seize the Day (not someones wallet)

Eric

Toy Story is poetry. It captures the metadata of our youth. Not the child in us, but the toys that represent it with humor and charm.

I finished high school when the first movie came out, and now I'm sitting with my children for the 5th one. I have to admit it’s tough to watch, especially since it is more girl-oriented, so I appreciated the fact that my son was able to sit through it with his younger sister, who watched it from beginning to end.

If you were to ask me to summarize the movie:

It’s a remake of Taylor Sheridan’s Dutton Farm for kids.

They both finished their popcorn and M&Ms, and the 1-hour-and-45-minute movie kept them entertained. I am thankful every day that theatres have installed recliners and allow adults to consume something other than sugar.

To get to the theatre, I did need to wrangle my son’s arm, though, because he wanted to watch it from 1-5 to be caught up in the lore. The lore! Toy Story as lore. Unreal. The marketing departments have got people really transfixed on this. And I taught him a lesson that it's entertainment, and they want you in the seats, so don’t worry about catching up.

Enjoy the moment.

The only FUD that I saw was that Tarantino, the famous director of classics like Pulp Fiction, said he won’t see the newer Toy Story films because perfection has been achieved.

But that’s not the point, and he knows it. I am 100% sure he is taking his kids to it. Because each time you see it with a new family member, or an older you, you see it from a different perspective.

This magical movie franchise shows us, and also questions, whether anything has changed fundamentally about who we are.

Technology and life as we know it have changed, but not growing up. And the same feelings and challenges that happened in 1995 are still with us today. The only thing that has changed is how we interact with modern technology.

While it’s pulling teeth to get a movie review from the fam, I’m learning how to ask the questions better to get some kind of response and got

“Potty jokes are funny, cool adventure, but it’s a girl movie, nothing else really”

And I said that’s not correct.

“Did you see how a computer screen can give misleading statements and make you believe something that you are not comfortable with?”

The kids paused and said, “Yeah, I see that now.”

While they just saw old vs. new, the movie showed

that there is something going on behind the scenes whether you realize it or not.

So trust your feelings and intuition.

Now I’m going to go on a slight rant…

On why toys are not as popular to screens. And the wrong argument.

Toy are manufactured poorly but priced to perfection. That’s why they are not popular. Screens and streaming are essentially free. And as I wrote before the time consumed is the big value driver that the kids will reflect on when they are older.

Mattel and Hasbro, our toy overlords, got into their heads that they wouldn't just manufacture in China but also cut quality.

The one proof, the only one I need is Todd McFarlane toys. He wanted to create quality for his fans.

Quality before quantity. And once you hit quantity, critical mass, do not cut corners.

What we are missing, as I see it, are quality memories, quality products, quality entertainment.

That’s why we are such critics of movies, video games, etc. We have outsourced quality to folks we don’t know, and it’s coming back to bite us.

The future is finding quality and meaning in your life and not outsourcing your life and memories to jokers.

So today, as the 250th anniversary of the USA approaches, quality manufacturers are looking to invest.

Have some thoughts? We all look forward to valuing your contribution

Seize the Day

Eric

Isn’t there a saying that there is never a bad time to take profits?

Yes, but that’s a low state. And it will get you into serious trouble.

Especially if that logic will also get you into other stocks that are falling like a knife,

that may not bounce back.

Looking at Sirius over the past 5 years, it was only around $20, which I assume he paid.

Given the risk he took, I would argue you'd better hold this for a long while, or you should be trading SanDisk and Micron.

When you see headlines like this, it may be a time to open a position as opposed to just scooping up the first profit you see.

There is a concept I recently learned, known as the Pareto Principle, which holds that 80% of your profits come from 20% of your portfolio.

This aligns with good logic: the more your insight and habits are aligned with the market, the more you still need to have the popcorn pop. And not all of them do.

Whoever bought SIRI at the lows may have been very wise, but if you close out your trade, you’ll never know.

What are your thoughts on success in a portfolio?

The S&P 500 is up 7.25% this year vs. my Fat Dogs index which is up 21.6%

Here is a SPY ETF monthly chart

The performance was measure by equal measures of the components as of Friday.

To learn more about the Fat Dogs concept read my thoughts in December of last year:

It is a concept that monitors 7 stocks that are the essentials of mankind through the millennia

Firearms, Alcohol, Tobacco, Drugs, Oil, Gold, and Steel

830 starting index price

1009 ending index price

+179 points, or 21.6%

Want another idea?

I created one more portfolio earlier this year

Model Portfolio X -

Down about 11% if you are passive,

but up 2.44% with my method

Focuses on only holding companies that are trending UP. It requires a weekly review and one method to close out poorly performing companies.

The idea it to pick ANY portfolio from leading websites for the year and follow it with one simple strategy you need to monitor weekly but rarely used throughout the year.

You can find the portfolio I picked here:

https://www.barrons.com/articles/best-stocks-buy-2026-amazon-exxon-disney-439f8e78

Anyone can do it. No math is required.

Just a few minutes a week

If you would like to learn more about them, subscribe today

These are old school principles that tend to work for those that are lazy.

And for $5 a month, the value proposition is just waiting for you to seize the moment.

Subscribe now

While my ongoing discourse and chat should help build patience and forbearance not to pull the trigger like Sue in the Johnny Cash song.

Make it a great day for ideas,

Eric

PS. I’ll be working on my third portfolio based around the stocks that are cheap, basic, and easy to understand.

Mostly a summary of my emails highlighting a company.

And…this post is for educational purposes only. I make no guarantee whatsoever and I can be completely wrong. You can lose all of your money taking any of my ideas. You can even owe money to your broker if you are leveraged.

Enjoy.

I always had a knack for investing, but not trading. It took me years to understand the difference, and longer still to understand that the difference was really about time: who controls it, who’s pretending to.

Film enthusiast, said something to me once that I haven’t been able to shake. He said you don’t need to watch the whole movie.

Who has the time?

But that’s the point. He meant it as a kind of efficiency as you know how it ends, you know the beats, why sit through all of it.

I think he is wrong, and I think the reason he is wrong is the whole subject of this essay.

Because the movie is not the plot. The plot is what’s left over after you remove the two hours. What you actually paid for, what you sat in the dark for, was the two hours: the part everyone is now in such a hurry to cut out. As he quipped today:

We do this with everything now. We summarize, we abbreviate, we skip to the end, and we call it efficient, and what we have actually done is remove the only part that was any good. There is no joy in a synopsis. There was never going to be.

Joy doesn’t live in the conclusion. It lives in the duration, and we have spent twenty years building machines whose entire purpose is to get you to the conclusion faster, and we are surprised that nothing feels like anything anymore.

I think about this every time I look at a stock chart, which is a strange place for the thought to live, but there it is.

A few months before the 2008 crash, I kept shorting the market. I had good information and I’d done the work, I believed the thesis but I kept losing, week after week, until I had to stop trading entirely, and of course the market cratered about six weeks after I gave up. I complained about this for years afterward, the way you do, and my boss finally told me, “Eric, it’s all about timing.”

I fought that sentence for a long time because it felt like an excuse dressed up as wisdom. His boss owned one of the largest mansions in Florida, so I suppose somebody was timing things correctly. I was not the one to argue.

But I don’t think it was about timing, not the way he meant it. I think I was trying to do to the market what Bongiorno does to a movie: skip to the part where I’m right, without sitting through the part where the market hadn’t decided yet.

The crash was coming. I just couldn’t make it come on my schedule, and the market, like a film, does not move at the speed of your certainty. It moves at its own speed, and your only choice is whether you sit through that or not.

I think about 7:29 left in the fourth with the Spurs in a dominant position. If you stopped the broadcast there you would know exactly how it ends.

Except you wouldn’t, because the part where it actually ends had not happened yet, and what happened in those 7:29 minutes is the entire reason anyone still talks about that series.

The lead was real. The outcome was not yet decided. Those are different facts and we keep treating them as the same fact.

This, I think, is the case for owning a stock the way you’d own a piece of memorabilia rather than a chip you’re trying to flip before the buzzer. A Funko Pop gathers dust on a shelf and you tell yourself it’s worthless right up until, decades later, someone wants exactly that one. Nobody is charging you rent on the shelf. Nobody is calling your loan. The stock certificate does the same thing, quietly, in your brokerage account, while you go on with your life and this, as far as I can tell, is the only form of investment where you are actually allowed to control the time instead of the time controlling you.

There is a second thing hiding inside all this, which took me longer to see, and it is this: time spent is not just tolerated by value, it is what creates it.

We talk about patience as if it’s merely the absence of interference: you wait, you don’t disturb the thing, and value accrues on its own, like a Funko Pop quietly aging on a shelf. But that’s not quite right either. The waiting isn’t passive. The hours themselves are doing something.

My son will tell you he has put in over a hundred hours on a One Piece game on the PS5, and he will tell you this the way other generations announced a varsity letter or a black belt. He is proud of the hours, not just the outcome. And I used to think this was a kid thing, a generational quirk, until I realized it’s actually the oldest economic truth there is, just relearned by people too young to have known it was lost.

Social media spent fifteen years training us that value comes from the take: the clip, the highlight, the summary and hid from us, deliberately or not, that value actually comes from the put-in.

The hundred hours is not the cost of getting somewhere. The hundred hours is the thing itself.

This is why I think Disney has a harder decade coming than people expect, and it isn’t really about movies at all. Disney’s whole machine used to run in one direction: make the film, build the character, and the character’s accumulated meaning, all those hours audiences spent with him, across years, across sequels, is what justified the theme park, the toy, the lunchbox. The character had to earn the park.

Comcast, oddly, has the more honest model right now, because Universal doesn’t insist its characters were born in-house; it borrows whoever already has the hours logged with an audience, wherever those hours came from, and builds the ride second. The ride was never the point. The ride is just where you go to spend a little more time with something you already gave a hundred hours to.

And the toy companies and the game studios understood this before the studios did. Nobody builds a following by starting with the theme park. You start with the thing people return to → the toy they keep on a shelf, the game they put a hundred hours into, the figure they trade with a friend.

The following comes from the accumulated time spent with that character, not from the spectacle built around him afterward. Entertainment worked when you could relate to a character, which is just another way of saying: when you’d spent enough time with him that he started to feel like he was yours.

It is the same with stocks, and I don’t think this is a metaphor so much as the same mechanism wearing a different name. You don’t really own a company because your account shows shares. You own it the way you own a character by the hours you put into knowing it, watching it, sitting through its bad quarters the way you’d sit through the slow part of a film, until eventually you relate to it the way you’d relate to someone you’ve actually spent time with.

Why do you think the big corporations blast their logo everywhere and show up to an interview at any given time?

It was never about the plot and getting down to it. It’s the adventure and the journey.

Enjoy yours today

Eric

You may not agree with what I have to say. But I show through cultural icons and headline news a way to create a mental model for RISK.

Risk of property. Risk of Investment. Risk of physical injury.

The value proposition you get in anything that I write, in my humble opinion, is that I take what we enjoy and consume and extrapolate how it can be applied to current events.

You have to realize everything I’m sharing reflects the inputs of so many talented contributors and their unique experiences along with a finance guy who took his money to invest in these ventures.

In truth, I stand on the shoulders of giants and add a sentence or two.

While you will have a deeper appreciation of a headline, a movie, a quip, and what it takes to appreciate this wonderful form of freedom we must fight hard to keep.

Maybe an investment insight or two

Or we will just not enjoy each others company anymore.

To begin…

If I were a White dude, I wouldn’t want to be anywhere near NYC and the race war coming up…it’s inevitable now.

At first, it’s “hilarious” but later it won’t be.

The Knicks games where tickets were going for $3000-$500,000 had a very white tone-deaf crowd that were, on the most part, not very Republican but very much in support of ideology that belie the audiences skin color.

What the newly emerging Democrat Socialists are espousing in New York City.

They should have had subsidized ticket holders right next to the celebrities, right? Isn’t Mamdani freezing rent?

To hammer this home, this happened to the former mayor of NYC where the event took place:

It wasn’t hilarious.

That headlined motivated me to write but I only figured out what to write after seeing Larry David at the game.

What I find hilarious is Larry David’s court side appearance with the head of Warner Brothers getting ready for his new show on HBO

The other day I mentioned Charlie Chaplin is the epitome of a comic. A hero. A true comic tells jokes but underneath those jokes are reflections of our true nature.

He may not have your viewpoint but you can respect his perspective.

Truth to power. Only a free society is allowed to deliver this.

And then there is Larry, who I thought was a comedian, but is now just an entertainer after seeing a headline to promote his new show.

“Embarrassed” isn’t funny. And just random. I’m sure you can find many things during other President’s that were equally as such, or more. You got to be consistent buddy. Truth to power isn’t one side vs the other but our nature.

I would say a comedian is actually the modern day prophet who spots our weaknesses. An entertainer just says things to get you interested and enjoy a moment or two.

They break that promise and go down the ladder to political shill when the apparently the show is produced by the artistic, not Presidential, Barack Obama.

Note the progression:

Comedian→Entertainer→Political hack

Which follows the title of his new show

Life→Larry→Pursuit of Unhappiness

The symmetry is uncanny.

A comedian is his former partner Jerry Seinfeld. You know the one that is not vulgar and had the monster TV show Seinfeld, who points out life’s absurdities including ones that you may be harboring.

He’s willing to get booed if that’s what it takes.

Now lets get back to the elephant in the room: Hitler and Nazis and what the big fear of what “could” occur in NYC. A rise of rate, revolution, and complete overturn of what makes America, America.

But you wouldn’t know it from entertainer Larry David who wrote a piece with the New York Times about Bill Maher’s dinner with Donald Trump who he alleges is a Nazi.

Nowhere to be seen is a comment on what is occurring in NYC or Maine where the Democratic candidate for Senator had a Nazi Tatoo and salutes as one.

But a true comedian, the legends, the ones that are remembered don’t do potshots at political foes, he makes a movie…his first one in sound…and for the first time the entire world hears words coming from Chaplin’s mouth about the dangers of Nazism

and this was before the horrors were known…

That is a true comedian

Unfortunately, not everyone, as is the case with prophets, can handle their brilliance.

He was kicked out of the US in the 1950s (for Communist sympathies and other questionable moral values)

Something that Larry won’t have to experience, possibly.

And I hope I’m wrong. And I hope to hang out at a deli with Larry.

But as in many things, that’s wishful thinking

Eric

What are signs that I’m ignoring? Things that are concerning? Or not at all leave a comment.

and for betting enthusiast (and stock traders) you can have AI build you one at essentially no cost.

But there is always a cost and that is where I come in at the finishing line.

For most people, they don’t have the time to CONSISTENTLY use their winning strategy for success.

And if they do have the time, their development skills lack the last “push” to get it to the finish line.

So I help “get ‘er done”

A good customer who enjoys betting on UFC fights built a strategy that

observing the odds from 40+ bookmakers against a six-category analytical model to produce a hybrid confidence score that tells you when the numbers agree...

and more importantly, when they don’t.

When the market and the model diverge, that’s signal.

So the beta version he asked for looks something like this:

I have no idea really about UFC fighting, but I enjoyed putting all the pieces together

Want to learn more?

Join chat

Regards,

Eric

So who is Einstein? A scientist who we all know but rarely think about the ramifications of his insight. Do we really in regards to Quantum? to AI?

Charlie Chaplin, my comic hero, summarizes best Einstein’s mojo the one time they met:

“Einstein: ‘What I most admire about your art, is your universality. You don’t say a word, yet the world understands you!’

Chaplin: ‘True. But your glory is even greater! The whole world admires you, even though they don’t understand a word of what you say.’”

What would Einstein and Trump have to say if they ever met?

Lets flash forward to yesterday and we hear that Trump said about Einstein “Nobody cares…”

My impression of watching the clip is something anyone over 75 likes to do, give insight. The Energy? secretary I think was trying to get his facts right and Trump is telling him a truth about oratory…no one cares if its 120 or 140 years… keep it going forward with confidence.

A masterclass on how to speak, let no one confuse you on that.

But taking things out of context and commenting on it is what we do and what the media fuels.

We like a story, an agenda, and things nice and neat. Business isn’t always that copacetic (did I use that word in the right place correctly?) I noticed that when have it the corporate overlords will keep raising prices on you.

So I suspect that EVERYONE will be right in the next market crash. The big name stocks that have gone up 3000% will fall but is it really a market crash?

And the other 99% of stocks may get a bid. So the headlines will get to say fear inducing drama while real participants will be profiting.

Example:

Today, Gold is down but interest rates are down also. But the news claims gold is down due to new Fed chairman’s drive to raise rates.

Is it that easy?

One way to monitor the health of the market is observe two opposites:

Goldman Sachs and Accenture.

Goldman is the banker for all these IPOs and financing of AI and Accenture is the BIG consultant who will lose all of its business thanks to AI and its moat.

If something changes, I’m sure the market will adjust before the news shares it with you.

Just look at both of these long term to see how investors just knew:

By the way ACN has a 10 P/E and 5% Dividend. Is it a classic investment now?

The main question has the moat changed.

When stocks hit value areas can the Barbarians invade or do we have fake news?

Have some value you are itching for others to chime in? Join the chat.

Regards,

Eric

I really didn’t want to work for the man, let alone my dad. I want to be the guy driving the convertible.

Phil Ivey was the man. He had that cool stare as he took your loot. Just a phenomenal player.

(I’m still wearing ball caps as a result of this)

But did he really?

Did he really pocket $55 million? We are going to visit him at the end of this little journey I call

Did they really?

Instead of poker, I am 100% sure many young people, without realizing it, are gravitating to event-based betting sites like Polymarket as they see some shlub making $100k.

But did they really?

Look at today’s headline:

It’s not just in gambling.

It’s in entertainment more broadly. Here is the epic example.

Sadly, the great music producer Clive Davis passed away. He truly was a legend but even legends have a mortgage to pay.

And one of his biggest acts Milli Vanilli were lip syncing other singers voices. He gave the audience what they wanted, which was anything but reality. But an escape from it.

Need more examples?

Wall Street. It’s making a big comeback right?

(Maybe you know some girl who dreams at taking on Wall Street, but I am hard pressed to see believe that. Spending money yes, but making it.

Well, to be determined, this summer my daughter is working with me)

and yet is Wall Street really making a comeback?

I just saw this in the Wall Street Journal.

Speaking of Wall Street, they make their money on margin loans.

The more loans, the more interest. And the more leveraged trading. They now have competition in Perp Futures.

But are they really “shaking up” Wall Street?

Personally, it’s enriching them as it is yet another marginal area that will get a bid and keep those stocks rising.

Leveraged trading

really LEVERAGED trading

At least with futures, and margin on stocks, you are responsible for the losses so some form of animal spirit is left in check, but with the creation of Options and now Perpetuals you can dream big and bet bigger.

I come back to my eBook on 8 key factors of market health, where Sunday, I touched on IPOs Sunday with Goldman Sachs and today this headline smacks of liquidity. The markets need to keep pumping and with margin loans at record highs. A “risk free” perpetual contract with leverage is the next best thing.

I feel perpetuals are the modern day bucket shop to allow small accounts to place trades on $1000 stocks and

24 hour trading…

When you have virtually unlimited leverage, no closing price, and non-stop trading is this a real market anymore. Are people trading a company? Or just the price action?

what’s the true closing price?

Does price action truly represent?

Volume

Do you really believe chart patterns can work as people practice them now if the underlying premise is that the current price represents everything we know about a stock.

But what if MOST people that trade don’t know anything about the stock and they use more leverage than the people that do????

Then the theory will reflect an ignorant viewpoint as opposed to an informed one.

Here is how Google summarize price action of markets:

What are your thoughts?

Leave a comment

Eventually everything comes full swing but we are making a mockery of markets and making it a casino game. Who needs to read Adam Smith when I can pull up a 5 second chart of SpaceX?

Cynically, I’m beginning to believe the rich under the Ann Rayndian libertarian viewpoint are anxious for a 99% market crash, so they will own all our resources.

Kind of like communism but with benevolent dictators

So whats the next 10 years like?

I feel the true power now is in trading commodities for foreseeable future.

And something more tangible for those that want to get their hands dirty.

Building things.

is spearheading a movement unlike anything we have seen. Instead of Communism and Socialism this longhaired bro is teaching youngsters to build and develop themselves.

My viewpoint is not exactly mainstream but lets revisit Phil Ivey and finish up my thinking.

Did he really cash in $50 million? He may have won it but he had help. Whose to say he shared it with other people at the table to increase his odds?

Does his skills pay off in the real world?

Well read this headline from 2014. The house wouldn’t let him.

So the moral: by humble enough to know the old axiom “the house always wins” and if you are that 1 guy who happens to make two trillion dollar companies Tesla and SpaceX

Aspire to be that guy. And see how long it took him to achieve success.

He bet on himself and that is the only way to win

Unfortunately, it’s the only one where motivation comes from not comparing yourself to someone else, but improving yourself daily

Make it the most profitable day by treating yourself kindly

You are the best investment you can make.

Eric

The water is the data. The glass is the system. Your hands are the team.

Always keep that in mind if you ever do integration work with a team.

Today, after many years in this business, I walked into the office baffled. A team had been in place overnight to execute a gateway integration. What I found when I arrived was a lack of coordination that shouldn’t exist at this level.

So I observed with a post-Father’s Day hangover and I asked questions.

And then I sat down and wrote a memo.

I’m sharing it here because I suspect you’ve either lived this moment yourself and, if not, how to avoid.

Rules for Integrating a Gateway

1. State the goal and the specific timeframe.
Not a general direction. A stated destination and a clock. Everyone should know exactly what done looks like and when it needs to happen.

2. Don’t assume your team knows what was done before or what is in your head.
This one breaks more integrations than bad code does. Write it out. Say it out loud. Confirm it was received.

Pictures! Verbalization. Definitions.

3. Know who is involved and what each person is responsible for.

The Day Supervisor and the Night Supervisor each carry the same responsibility: ensure the right logins are in place, the right communication channels are active , and they personally test the solution.

Not delegate the test but run it themselves.

The Developer needs three things: Access to the gateway, the correct credentials, and a direct line to a supervisor if something is unclear.

No guessing, no waiting in the dark.

The Software company and rep gets held accountable too. Did they provide the right information? Can you document exactly what they provided? If you can’t answer both questions, the handoff isn’t complete.

4. How to write a proper work ticket.
Write out the purpose: the stated goal. List the tools you believe are necessary. Then test those tools before the work begins. Not after. Before.

5. Know what a completed integration actually looks like.
And come prepared with a mental checklist or real one to go through and test it.

The memo is simple. None of this is complicated.

But it’s time consuming.

I’ve watched good teams spill the water anyway because nobody agreed on how to hold the glass.

The glass doesn’t care about your intentions. It only knows whether you spilled.

If you have something to add or share specifically, we would love to hear:

Leave a comment

Have a nice afternoon,

Eric

And just like that, Wall Street brokers are reliving the cad dads of the 60s. But this time with moms.

But why?

For a fully fully fleshed-out perspective was recently offered by Josh Brown, who has finally discovered Substack.

Who is Josh Brown?

Josh Brown runs a fabulously successful wealth management company and is a CNBC contributor who sometimes offers good insights for us plebeians, though late, when you consume his info passively.

I believe CNBC is positioning him for the Mad Money crowd, if and when Jim Cramer steps down.

He has a good read on how to participate in AI and Space ventures by investing in banks that sell debt and are there for IPOs, like Goldman and Morgan Stanley.

This aligns with what I created in the 8-part weekly view, one of which is to monitor IPO issuance.

The more IPOs, the better these banks are going to do.

For today’s chat, what are the signs to monitor for the continuing growth of these banks? And what would make you think that these names are a bit top-heavy?

If you are looking for a more speculative name that almost went bankrupt due to a bad financing deal, I’ll share the name in chat.

Have a great Father’s Day

and if you think you’ll get in an argument with your dad, then wish him one the next day.

Life’s too short

Eric

So my question is…Did top?

My journey today is observational and with time maybe I’ll dig deeper into the #s.

Take Two Interactive is going to be releasing its much anticipated 6th version of Grand Theft Auto. The financial markets are already pricing perfection.

I question if we, gamers and new recruits, really want to experience this again. So if the excitement is not there, will investors be as forgiving?

I view the game as gangsta lifestyle and from what I see… no ones wants to experience it

Briefly, with a few screenshot from Google:

1. YouTube recommendations. Nothing recent.

Crickets from YouTube since 2024

2. What is the GTA 6 theme?

   Google defines it through AI that GTA VI doesn’t glorify the gangsta lifestyle but parodies American capitalism.

Ah, this is a comedy game.

And when you ask Google Trends, in the scheme of things it hasn’t been that interesting for a very long time

So if you kind of feel what I’m arguing and maybe there is a market sell-off, I would like to think this is a contender for a weak stock.

Agree? Disagree?

Leave a comment.

The best way I think for a comment is not your opinion. But objective facts that I’m not seeing or someone else isn’t.

(Work in progress)

Leave a comment

Enjoy Saturday

Eric

He wrote about why Electric cars are the future and very efficient, energy speaking. His yardstick to measure this was natural gas.

Not exactly related, but to my way of thinking it is. I thought about the overall performance of Crude Oil to Natural Gas and saw that in 26 years…

A trading range

Just this chart and historical perspective is worth a subscription to me.

This is very valuable information.

It’s interesting as one can begin an argument that this is definable bottom (which means a long term risk management low) and can help you structure an investment or a trade in commodities or stocks, related to these commodities.

So my question to you:

How would you setup the trade?

I encourage my readers to open up and share a thought or two.

And I’m not just saying that, but the first Trillionaire in existence, Elon Musk.

The same book also had this nugget from Elon Musk:

“It’s important to take feedback from your environment. You want to be as closed-loop as possible.”

Enjoy this wonderful summer day,

Eric

PS. Entertainment recommendation of the day in celebration of Juneteenth and a better version of Scary Movie