Tech Bubble 2.0

As always, all views expressed in this site is my personal opinion only. Not financial Advice

With Faceborg shares, along with other Tech shares up 6-8% today on something I can’t pin on, I’m declaring this as a classic bubble in formation as the FOMO factor along with mania very obviously increasingly takes hold. As mentioned in my previous post, If I were a short term speculator type who likes riding by the seat of their pants, yeah, I would probably look to go all in.

Also reaffirming view of the bubble scenario. COVID-19 was essentially only an interruption to the larger trend originally sensed…

Old scribble I made in November 2019. Will need to be re-drawn to include COVID-19.

Not planning to substantially change my current mix of investments, however will probably now look to offload some over valued holdings in the next month or two and then rebalance things. Currently, I see many stocks are valued far beyond any reasonable metric and strongly believe that we are in the midst of a forming classic bubble. Short term, I now expect shares, in particular, technology stocks, to shoot to the sky towards completely absurd levels. Long term, I now expect pain (should the optimism continue).

For longer term folk, who aren’t into thrills and speculating, we may just have to sit tight for a while longer. I believe personally it is fairly clear that things are now running on almost pure emotion / euphoria. Though again, who the flip knows?

 

Tech Bubble 2.0

Unusual Economics

The original bull trap assessment is well and truly dead I believe. If a down leg as part of a great depression type scenario were to have happened, it should have occurred by July and no later than the middle August. Coming to the view that COVID-19 was a mere interruption to the previously assessed larger trend.

The financial markets from many accounts appear to mostly now be sentiment (emotionally) driven and would not be at all surprised to see Asset prices continue to drive higher as a result of the FOMO affect (before possibly abruptly pulling back), helped along by Federal Reserve support and other interventionist (as opposed to classic free market) policies.

The ‘Efficient Market’ disciples can argue blue in the face that the markets are forward looking and the market is factoring in that things will drive back to normal before we know it, but this argument simply isn’t stacking up for me… at all.

I see a forming Technology bubble, driven by the likes of TSLA whose prices are being driven far beyond what facts, fundamentals and underlying data could ever justify.

While this certainly seems like a classic bubble with the usual tell tale signs including Taxi drivers talking about their gains in Property + stocks, and phases such as ‘Permanently high plateau’ + ‘This is a new paradigm!’ being banded about (i.e this time being “Modern Monetary Theory”), these bubble signs and anecdotes have been going on for an extraordinary long time, considerably longer than what would have normally occurred in a text book bubble. In fact, I’d go as far as to say that I feel the last secular bull run from 2009 to today is highly unusual.

Nothing can be said for certain as all I can see is that much of the information coming out to date is simply too poor to base any meaningful longer term decision making off of (have long held the view that Economics as a discipline is in disrepute), and that the markets in my view have most certainly been interfered with.

Current personal investment focus is towards NZ Farm Land where prices on average have not shifted a huge amount over the last decade (See Farm land price Graph at interest.co.nz and REINZ Rural + Lifestyle property data). How one might be able to partake in this may be through funds such as the Booster Private Land and Property Fund, however, the types of properties they appear to cover are rather limited. In regards to other investment related thoughts… Continue reading “Unusual Economics”

Unusual Economics

Pi-Hole on a Raspberry Pi 4

Experimented with running Pi-hole on the Raspberry Pi 4 that I have.

5 Minutes in, Pi-Hole showing how tragically ad ridden the modern web has become.

The Set up at least for the more tech inclined is very easy, all you had to do was launch a command line prompt and type this command…

curl -sSL https://install.pi-hole.net | bash

After running it for an evening. Thoughts and findings so far…

  • Predominantly Does a DNS level block with a blocklist of known advertisement serving IP addresses.
  • YouTube is a moving target whereby ads are served from youtube.com itself and therefore very difficult to (completely) block with Pi-Hole.
  • Mobile devices with Ad laden apps will perhaps see the greatest reduction in ads.
  • The default configuration doesn’t block nearly as many ads as say uBlock Origin installed on Desktop Firefox. This is not a replacement to having Client side ad blocking.

Curiously noticed these appearing in the query-log…

  • www.collab.apps.mil
  • www.gov.teams.microsoft.us
  • www.dod.teams.microsoft.us

Why would Teams try and poll for these addresses is beyond me. It does raise a sufficient level of curiosity that I will be checking this out.

 

Pi-Hole on a Raspberry Pi 4

This picture can not be explained

Update: 1st August 2020 – The Agent rang thanking me and mentioned it was given to someone in Ngāruawāhia intended to be distributed by local children for a local letterbox drop (possibly as part of a fundraiser I believe). Still strange where it ended up though.

Box of about 1,500 Real Estate flyers left under a tree in a ditch at the Waterworks Dam on Hakarimata Trail. I really don’t understand why anyone would go to the trouble of hiking in a box load of glossy flyers, then leave it under a tree all alone. Very weird and odd…

Box of Real Estate flyers dumped on Hakarimata Trail

Initially though it was gear or supplies for track maintenance and/or weed control, but seemed really weird to keep it in a cardboard box, so peered through the opening.

Took the box out of the reserve and dropped it off to Lugtons (Hamilton based Real Estate agency). While I was initially hesitant to touch it, It didn’t appear to be used to transport/hide drugs or any other nefarious activity, and I did not think the colourful flyers made for healthy fertilizer hence the reason to remove it.

In hindsight… Could be as innocuous as someone wanting extra weight to hill train with but simply aborted the idea halfway with the intention of picking the box back up upon coming back down (but never did or otherwise forgot).

This picture can not be explained