Tech Bubble 2.0

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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

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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.

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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

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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

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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.

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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

NRMA Motoring and Services + ClubAssist (Battery service)

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This post is more of a personal point of reference (leading on from an ongoing, personally conducted investigation into a different matter)…

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National Roads and Motorists’ Association (“The NRMA”) to me these days are more of a Travel and Tourism company and would say in my own sole opinion they are perhaps now a different organization from what they were originally before demutualization.

They apparently own several Resorts & Holiday Parks, Travelodge Hotels (as a Joint venture with TOGA / TFE Hotels), Manly Fast Ferries, Thrifty Car rental Australia & NZ along with a couple of Tour companies. To confuse matters, they do not actually own NRMA Insurance (which is currently a brand of Insurance Australia Group since 2000) nor do they own NRMA MotorServe (now also a brand of IAG). Even to this day, appears many of their own clients and members are unaware of the distinction between NRMA Insurance and NRMA Motoring and Services.

Some NRMA roadside assistance personnel (while still being provided with a NRMA branded Van and Uniform) are in fact employed through a separate company called Club Assist who NRMA Motoring and Services have contracted out to for the provisioning of battery replacement sales + assistance, and auto-glass replacement to their members. While it looks like NRMA owns 30% of Club Assist, I’m not sure how many of the other Roadside Assistance personnel are still directly employed by or otherwise contracting directly to NRMA Motoring and Services.

Club-Assist are apparently contracted to do quite a bit of the Battery related call out work by other Motoring clubs in Australasia including Automobile Association Batteries here in NZ and supply batteries bearing the branding of the Motoring club they’re working for. That said, anecdotally, some people within my immediate social circles have claimed they did not find them the best value (Club Assist reps are allegedly incentivised to sell new batteries) and I would say it still pays to shop around if you’re in need of a new battery.

Club-Assist have also been deploying the NRMA branded charging stations over New South Wales along with the RACV branded charging stations across Victoria.

NRMA Motoring and Services + ClubAssist (Battery service)

Stream of Consciousness Week 22nd June 2020

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Stream of consciousness and other personal thoughts garnered throughout the week and which will be added to as the week rolls on. These thoughts are unrefined, unquantified, unverified, and raw. Any of these may be either be edited, deleted or otherwise spawn out into its own separate post…

  • Was good to catch up with some old friends who I haven’t seen in a while (who now live outside of Auckland) and just actually relax this weekend along with visiting some older haunts.

Older Stream of Consciousness thoughts can be found here.

Stream of Consciousness Week 22nd June 2020

Pumping up the Money Supply, the ultimate treatment for financial market ailments?

Fergus YoungLeave a comment

Disclaimer: Not financial advice (as with anything else in this blog)

With endless money ‘printing’ and liquidity injection, the US Financial Markets have almost completely (if not completely) decoupled from their underlying real economy. Financial markets globally no longer represent the general health of their respective economies by any reasonable measure I feel.

The decoupling I believe started way back in the Global Financial Crisis of 2008 when liquidity creation was employed to restart the economies. So far since then, it seems when any sort of crises happens to spook the market, the treatment response has been to pump even more liquidity into the system and it seems to have been surprisingly extremely effective at least at treating any symptoms for the last 12 years.

What the end game is? I don’t know. It goes back to a post I penned back in November 2019 where I asked what would be a trigger to a sustained correction? (Not just short sharp corrections of the types we’ve been having recently)

One potential threat which could end up defeating the effectiveness of such monetary policy would include some sort of catastrophic, devastating and tragic famine by way of insect plague or widespread natural disaster where food security gets impacted and food supply contracts causing food prices to spiral out of control (by way of hyper inflation) where people find themselves being forced to sell assets into a sliding market to feed themselves and their families just to survive. Continue reading “Pumping up the Money Supply, the ultimate treatment for financial market ailments?” →

Pumping up the Money Supply, the ultimate treatment for financial market ailments?

No new active COVID-19 cases in NZ

Fergus YoungLeave a comment

There are officially no more known ‘Active’ COVID-19 cases in New Zealand. We move down in to Alert Level 1 tonight.

https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/political/418524/prime-minister-jacinda-ardern-reveals-move-to-level-1-from-midnight

Still need to be vigilant obviously.

“We will almost certainly see cases here again. That is not a sign we have failed.”

“If we get one or two cases in the future – which will remain possible for some time to come due to the global situation and nature of the virus – we need to shut down those cases fast. The last thing … we want to do is move up the alert level system again.”

My feeling is though, heading into the Winter seasons in future years, it may still be a good idea to practice some sort of social distancing primarily to protect the more vulnerable in our communities.

No new active COVID-19 cases in NZ

Stream of Consciousness Week 1st June 2020

Fergus YoungLeave a comment

Stream of conciousness and other personal thoughts garnered throughout the week and which will be added to as the week rolls on. These thoughts are unrefined, unquantified, unverified, and raw. Any of these may be either be edited, deleted or otherwise spawn out into its own separate post…

  • The question of the weekend: Can continually adding financial stimulus keep the economy propped up indefinitely regardless of what happens? Or is there a point where this plan will simply stop working and we end up paying for it dearly? What is the end game here? On that vein, the current rally being a bull trap, as part of a great depression style bear market, is something that has become less likely. Looking more towards a secular side ways market with large up and down gyrations, must like we had from 2000 to 2009.
  • Western sentiment in the last few days appears to have suddenly snapped back to “life is normal” again. More celebrity, pro-sports and entertainment news making the headlines once again. Casinos and entertainment venues around the world reopening.
  • Ticking things off for the sake of ticking them off admittedly isn’t my buzz personally and is not really how I prefer to spend my leisure time.

Older Stream of Conciousness thoughts can be found here.

 

 

Stream of Consciousness Week 1st June 2020

Stream of Consciousness Week 25th May 2020

Fergus YoungLeave a comment

Stream of conciousness and other personal thoughts garnered throughout the week and which will be added to as the week rolls on. These thoughts are unrefined, unquantified, unverified, and raw. Any of these may be either be edited, deleted or otherwise spawn out into it’s own separate post…

  • Walked Pae O Te Rangi Farm Summit, looping back via the Disc Golf Course. Fairly short walk of approximately 2 hours return. Track is not marked on any of the Topomaps I can see, however, was present on the Kauri Die Back map as being an open track. Open Tracks PDF Auckland Council.
  • You know why people are saying the COVID Tracing QR codes ain’t working? Because there are two systems which are branded so similarly (with the yellow stripes), no wonder people are complaining when they use the official COVID-19 NZ Tracer app, they get an error. See both the official NZ COVID Tracer app developed by Rush Digital for the Ministry of Health NZ and then Simple Trace developed by a separate company called Springload.
  • Easy and cheap credit I feel is eroding the value of working. Seems the days of actually earning your keep and then using your hard-earned money to say buy a place of your own is now getting further and further out of reach of people. The pathways are disappearing. We are rewarding rampant speculation, supporting zombie corporations that should have gone under decades ago, investment into non-productive assets and further deepening the wealth divide.

Older Stream of Conciousness thoughts can be found here.

 

 

Stream of Consciousness Week 25th May 2020

Stream of Consciousness Week 18th May 2020

Fergus YoungLeave a comment

Stream of conciousness and other personal thoughts garnered throughout the week and which will be added to as the week rolls on. These thoughts are unrefined, unquantified, unverified, and raw. Any of these may be either be edited, deleted or otherwise spawn out into it’s own separate post…

  • Huntly Bypass was apparently opened on early March 2020. Only discovered it last night 17May2020 when coming home where I found that the Expressway continued on after Taupiri. The Weekend just past has been the first weekend on Covid-19 alert level 2 (Previously, interregional travel was not permitted)

Older Stream of Conciousness thoughts can be found here.

Stream of Consciousness Week 18th May 2020

NextCloud Snap Packages updated to version 18

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Just saw a notification that the Snap NextCloud installation I had running had been updated to version 18.0.4. For me this is fairly significant in that you can now self host your own office suite with “ONLYOFFICE” community edition and if you are ambitious enough, allowing the option to move away from the likes of Google and Microsoft (Office 365).

The catch is that you have to set it up yourself by installing the needed Apps.  To do this, go into Profile, then Apps and enable “Hub Bundle” (or at the very least “Community Document Server” and “ONLYOFFICE”)

Upon doing that, I ran into headaches with this vague and unhelpful error message…

Diving into the nextcloud.log… (the location of which is going to be different depending on your installation. Helpful I know.)

"message":"Allowed memory size of 134217728 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 315857416 bytes)

I had to fire up an SSH session and send the following commands (applicable to Ubuntu Linux). One to increase the memory limit to 512 Megabytes and the 2nd one to restart the NextCloud service….

sudo snap set nextcloud php.memory-limit=512M 
sudo snap restart nextcloud

Back in NextCloud’s web interface, navigated back to Apps section and tried Enabling the Hub bundle again. Still got a flipping error!

"Cannot declare class OCA\\Talk\\Migration\\Version2000Date20170707093535, because the name is already in use at xxxxxxxxxxx"

At a loss as to now what to do, I then went through for each App under the Hub Bundle, clicking on Enable one by one and it worked for some completely and disconcertingly unknown reason (No errors happened this time around… have no idea why, sorry.)

After that, I went back to my Files and had a play at creating new word documents… (Success I guess)

Seems to work pretty well for a family user set up, even on the lowest tier VPS plan with my provider. (1CPU / 2GB RAM). Included with the ONLYOFFICE suite is a Word Processor, Spread Sheet and Presentation (slides) application. At the moment, the biggest issue I can see is the lack of a working spell checker on the community server plugin as reported here and here which I feel is fairly fundamental to a Word Processor. Little bit concerning is that the web browser based (core or plugin based) spell checkers don’t appear to work inside of it either.

I think at this stage, for word processing, will stick with using the visual Markdown editor “Text” (by Julius Härtl) and continue trailing out the Spread Sheet application by doing my Tax return on it and then reporting back here.

Despite the messing around and troubleshooting to get it working I’m overall pretty otherwise pleased with the “Only Office” implementation (Community Server plugin) as a proof of concept.

 

NextCloud Snap Packages updated to version 18

Stream of Consciousness Week 20th April 2020

Fergus YoungLeave a comment

Stream of conciousness and other personal thoughts garnered throughout the week and which will be added to as the week rolls on. These thoughts are unrefined, unquantified, unverified, and raw. Any of these may be either be edited, deleted or otherwise spawn out into it’s own separate post…

  • Looks like we are indeed going to need to be a lot more cognizant of all respiratory diseases and not just Coronaviruses going forward I feel. If CoVid-19 is causing this much concern, then Influenza while not the focus at the moment I assert is also a bit of a worry. Even though we have Vaccines for seasonal Influenza, my current feeling is that they have been pretty woefully ineffective in recent times, particularly in the elderly. Some sort of social distancing and social counter measures every flu season is likely to remain for the foreseeable future.

Older Stream of Conciousness thoughts can be found here.

Stream of Consciousness Week 20th April 2020