Kicking the Can. Final Money Moday, First Portfolio Update - June I.

...Kick the can. If you were born in the US before 1975  you'll most likely recall the game, a sort of child of tag and hide&seek - were the two games to have one. More... the fulfillment in those moments on easy summer eves. Kids still outnumbered adults in most places, filling streets in loose, mostly unsupervised or at most collectively supervised tribes that ran and played throughout the afternoons. The air by and large smelled... better. Less noise, the sky a bit more blue, fewer lights, a ton more fireflies. And kick the can was, well... maybe the best, because that's when all the kids from all ages and colors and sexes casually mixed to... share. Something simple and beautiful. 

The game lends itself to such as long as you have one or two who don't mind being 'it', don't mind watching for the can awhile. Everyone else leads off in two's or ones to hide-chat-neck-laugh in hushed tones behind bushes, under wheel barrows, in the leaf can, behind the shed, basically making eveyone part of the same team. No past or future - the underlying theme is.. joy. Or was.

A great game it was, really, a way to both fiddle with and suspend time and systemic expression.

In the eighties a distortion of the phrase came into public domain: kicking the can down the road. Maybe without intention - kicking a can-ball-stone along as you walk has always been, likely, a way to free some parts of mind while occupying others in track-and-seek-and-kick. But using 'kick the can down the road' could not but bring to mind those lovely summer eves, something fun, almost as universal as... water fights. So the subterfuge: pretend something innocuous is ongoing, something for all of us, not corruption, not thievery, not something that has to be paid. Not great by any means but... let's just kick the can down the road. Maybe someone else will solve it, whatever it is.

We no longer have any mere can - by now it's the size of a tank truck. You don't kick a truck to move it, if you can move it at all. At most you might be able to nudge it a little with a lot of sustained effort. The US has federal debt levels beyond WWII. Which is problematic enough. We also have individual state debt out of control in some places. County. City. Corporate debt to disquieting levels. Median personal debt... off the charts. And expenses... fixed, that are... freaky. Directly 10 times more than other places, referring to education and healthcare costs. Not to mention defense spending. Yet we-- loose expensive wars, are unhealthy and mostly uneducated. Dumb, sick and broke. And old-ish. And badly overweight. You think an old, fat, dumb, sick and broke nation is gonna move a tank truck? 

No. More, the way our monetary system works... realistically we can't even empty the truck to make it at least lighter. Increasing debt is baked into the system, a bi-partitic grift train. The only way to keep it going: expand the debt even more. Kick the can. Then run and hide in one of your many large, comfortable houses all over the world - while the bottom 90 perent pick up the bill. It doesn't matter which party controls what. 

It's that way through most of the west, though maybe not as bad as in the US. As in: a big tank truck is arriving at the federal level - and we don't have the means to kick it on down the road. Unlike some other places, Italy a prime example, where the national governement debt is worse but has been managed better, fixing in longer low rates - the US has a bunch of refinancing to do. Added to a still increasing current debt spending. At a time when de-dollarization continues.

One might have hoped that Trump's tariff negotiations also kept the buying of the US debt by foreign countries, central. To help keep long rates down while boosting inflation- the only normalized way to deal with it. It's not gonna work. 

So we've decided to go down the same old rabbit hole: QE. More printing via more debt. A recent change in banking laws sort of implies... they're going to be forced into repression, buying US paper to artificially keep rates down- ironically what the government had been doing for them. That's not going to work either. For long. But it just might in the short term, might even lead to a futher melt-up round in equities. So hedging the market... has become riskier than before. In any case, oddly: we all know how it's gonna end. This time. Even though it doesn't have to be that way.

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   So.... my last option hedge, a Put on the Nasdaq, has at present - tanked, eating away all the gaines of the first two option hedges. It's the sort of thing one can do though when the overall portfolio has done more than well enough, up 13.4 percent in these 9 and half weeks vs the 9.2 percent of the benchmark S&P. And the original set goals, dancing with the dada for alpha while keeping beta lower than rolled out pasta dough, have so far been on target: 

Mostly the same ongoing themes as last week: trimming - though there isn't much left to trim; and adding to positions that have fallen off if they still check out. Still... the same bi-monthly suggestions from last year - see earlier post here: last year's recommendations, and for this year suggestions here:  this year, earlier, are all still valid and make up the majority of long positions in the portfolio. 

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So, from here updates on the practice portfolio will only be twice a month - and maybe, in case A. or L. or anyone else has read this far, I will start putting stuff on much less uninteresting subjects regarding 'how we got here' instead of all this, well, stuff. As always, the disclaimer: (Note to anyone perusing: 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.)