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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 11, 2024

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I mostly just brag about how much money my portfolio is making. Oh? You believed all those economist that said the economy would be devastated if Trump won? Again?!

I'm already up $100,000 on my fairly modest holdings, and it's been less than a week. At the rate we're going I might retire early in 4 years.

Instead of gloating and waging the culture war, please be better and have some empathy for those who have been facing mental health struggles with the outcome of an election that impacts the lives of millions of Americans, especially women and minorities.

For example, I’ve been in a real dark place since Wednesday.

The aftermath of the election exacerbated the situation I was already facing due to this market bull run since 2023, where my leveraged equity ETF allocation has grown far too quickly. My effective leverage ratio is far higher than I would like.

I’ve already exhausted my rebalancing options in tax-advantaged accounts. Selling to further rebalance in non-tax-advantaged accounts would result in substantial realized capital gains that would reduce my accumulated capital losses from 2022 and prior. My net worth to income ratio is such that I’d be unable to make a material dent in this with future income for at least several months. Why don’t I just make more money; am I stupid?

I’ve been buying short-term US treasury ETFs with newly earned income to try and reduce my leverage ratio (buying vanilla unleveraged equity ETFs reduces my leverage ratio too slowly). However, this feelsbadman: I’m earning the risk-free on the treasuries, while paying risk-free plus a presumed spread and a management fee on the leveraged ETFs (which tends to be hefty for leveraged ETFs).

How could Trump-voters do this to me?

I thought the stock market would go down if Trump won, so I was holding my money to buy stock after the election. Now the market is at an all-time high, so I'd feel dumb to buy now. Serves me right for listening to the media, I guess.

My existing portfolio is doing great, though.

I'm KICKING myself that I didn't think to slide more money into $TSLA in the leadup to the election.

It was obvious that a Trump win would benefit Elon directly and bounce Tesla higher. It's up over 40% since the election.

I didn't even do anything different, because I'm not a reactionary investor. I just let everything I normally do ride. Granted, I have significant holdings of BTC, COIN and NVDA, and BTC and COIN seem to be directly benefiting from Trump optimism. But even my safer index funds and blue chip stocks have done fantastic this week.

I had money on Ted Cruz winning, and I otherwise decided to let things ride, which has paid off too thus far.

But I'm also selling off the last of my Crypto holdings for the time being because I STRONGLY suspect the current leap is overoptimistic, and it'll correct by or before January. For reference, I originally bought a (small) position in Bitcoin in 2014.

Ultimately yeah. I avoid reacting to any one event. But there are still times when I wish I had been bolder on certain moves.

It's hard to imagine an administration as hostile to Crypto as the Biden admin with Gary Gensler. Trump could follow through on zero of his promises, and shit canning Gary would still be an enormous boon for crypto.

It still suffers from the problem of not having much you can do with it aside store it for the long term.

And ultimately that's why I'm pulling out, I got other things I want to do with the money.