Morselli, Lottery Picks and Recursion. Monday Money. On Thursday

(in case for A or J: It's a fairly... un-stimulating deal, to drop a weekly post on basically markets. Sort of as fun as... eating two-day-old McDonalds fries. True... it's been... more than a decade since I've eaten any McDonalds food but hey. At some point soon I'll start spouting videos instead: faster and less unpleasant.)  

Guido Morselli. An Italian dude. Bolognese. Born into a very socio-economically comfortable family. A writer and novelist - and total looser, we'd call him in the states, never published in his own lifetime: his success, considerable, came posthumously. 

His mind could be described as pain-filled, rebellious, brilliant and troubled - to the point of taking the life of its body in the summer of 1973. He was 60. I was 6. Apparently an umteenth editorial rejection was a bit much for Guido to bear in his sort of loneliness and misplacement though that's a bit speculative. (There's a small bit of personal irony: I was first published the same year, a poem in the Cleveland Press sent to the daily by a teacher in cahoots with my mother, without my knowledge or involvement.) Many things can provoke what can become an intolerable dissonance, an internal dissonance in Morselli's case that, probably, had afflicted a part of him since his mothers illness and death during his childhood. How things tend to return, timelessly, to what seems to have been. But altered, never exactly the same. Things interact.

wikkywikky on Morselli

Anyway. His most famous, I think, and most likely richest novel - The Dissipation of the Human Generis (The Vanishing), completed only a few months before his suicide - finishes... in the shadow of the Swiss stock market. The end of humanity in a represented place where we are no more. Rather prescient on his part. 

There's a boatload of stuff to consider from boatloads of strata, of perspective and meaning. From the obvious - the metaphor of the market as the end of any humanity where, locked as the main character is, in a world without other people, already abstracted self and ego become abstracted out of existence. It's what it can do, that sort of representation. Lead to an utterly nihilistic affect. Ie, I doubt, therefore I cognisize therefore I am, therefore a cognisized me does, therefor I doubt not, therefore I am not. Or not in the doing. Ie2: Are doom scrolling people actually people as they scroll or are they - reduced to mere doom scrollers? To the way recursivity dominates emergence- it's not a story but interacting topologies involving identity and meaning. What am I? Why am I? 

That is... I recall a viral video of a man's reaction to a disaster. He was, his camera, watching and filming a bridge near Genova during a rainstorm. Suddenly the bridge, a very high and trafficed one, collapsed - sending the cars and people falling many tens of meters onto the buildings and roads below. His very human reaction - a stifled vocal hurl of sadness and stupor - 'Oh God, Oh God...'   heard off-screen. Someone used to trading, maybe even me once opon a time, would instead have immediatley opened the phone, ploped to a broker and bought put options - (those are leveraged devices to take advantage of specific stock or other declines) on Atlantia, the holding company of the Benettons that Italian citizens have gifted and continue to gift billions in various ways, here the highways that the company is supposed to maintain and keep safe, including the bridge, (Side note: no one was ever found guilty, neither the Benettons not anyone else paid...anything at all...) and not really give a crap of the unfolding horror in front of me. 

There's more, a ton more... but on to the portfolio updates:

Summary: as of the close on Wednesday it's up 9.5% vs the S&P up 6.8%. The latest rally has norrowed the gap, of course - cash and money market (what the ticker PULS is) make up 59,000 - well over half the total. Some trading, like selling a bit of gold before buying back and bought the vxx again after a too strong dip, for insurance. 

I've continued to trim and diversify during the rally, even buying a few lottery tickets (mostly tied to healthcare, the sort of companies which often yielded the majority of capital gains when I used to do this.) Lottery tickets aren't great for beta (beta in the finacial markets is basically if a thing might cause you to loose your underwear rather than merely your shirt or bra. Some things like shors can even add to your loosing, ie, think a thing being shoved someplace it shouldn't be.) One of those semi-lottery tickets - Coherent, COHR.  Lasers, from industrial to medical, components to end users. But the biggy: data transfer. GPU clusters, graphic processesing - AI and machine learning. And coherent is the dominant player. 

Another tiny-tiny posistion added: IBIT. Yup. The fundamentally worthless bitcoin. Still... well, the arguement why it's not a bad hedge I should video. But... If you want to diminising the vampire-bankers that dominate the Western world, you need to step around them. So bitcoin could, in effect, or other of course, become increasingly important. It allows to exchange goods and services without having to use a bank, at all, and can democratize trade for the little guys. So... it could go. IT probably wont, at least not for awhile. The vampire bankers love our blood. Money for nothing. And are willing to do any kind of abominous shit to keep the flow. But, a ticket is worth it. 

As is Innodata, INOD. Data and AI, concentrating on business and helping them in turn help AI 'learn' custom data platforms. Thing mechanic. Butler. Executive secretary, metaphorically. They make LLM's... customed for clients. Risky because ... it's a space without a massive 'moat'. A bigger company could invade the space. And it aint cheap, though much less expensive than before. 

Next: other lottery tickets, more on Morselli and recursion, and Berlioz's fantastic symphony. And,as usual: disclaimer:   for now, I've none of these things - those who know me know the primary cause. He did actually steal literally every thing. Just suggestions these and no conflicts of interest. For now.)