This is NOT an Investment Blog ...

Someone stole my money ...

As I’ve said before, this is NOT an Investment Blog.

My mom told me when I was a kid that a company’s P/E (Price-to-Earnings Ratio)¹ was a good metric for a stable company that you expect to be around for the next 20 years or so. So (like Duh!) if a company has a P/E ratio of:

• 13, it’s probably fair-valued;

• 100, it’s probably WAY overvalued (e.g. Tesla, which I’ve written about², and Amazon), and consequently probably not a good long-term investment;

• 1, it’s probably WAY undervalued, and therefore perhaps a good long-term investment.

So, I bought a few Russian investments with P/E’s of about 1, more or less, on my E-Trade “Play Account” in early 2022 for long-term investments:

• RSX (a Russian Large Cap Mutual Fund offered by VanEck (VanEck has 60 B$ of assets under management); and via ADR’s, using American Banks,

• Sverbank; and

• Gazprom.

And E-Trade short-term set all these, my, Russian investments to ZERO (instead of showing some nice returns) during the latter part of 2022. But I see all these companies are still in business, e.g., see Figure below.

And so like to redundantly repeat myself once more again, all those, my, investments got set to ZERO.

So, like, really, actually, someone stole my money³.

And I got a little bit Pissed.

So, instead of buying low P/E stocks for the long-term, I started shorting with leverage for the short-term high P/E “meme” stocks (Tesla was one of my favorites) and more than made my money back in a few months, as shown in Fig. 2.

I did about 300 trades in those three months (fortunately a computer program will do my Taxes). And for those 3 months it became an obsession — hell, I’ll just say it, an addiction. I spent hours a day on the computer looking for and identifying patterns. It’s something that was very fun and entertaining, very akin to what I did as a physicist, but it is not how I want to spend my life and I wouldn’t recommend anyone else even trying this (I have a very close good dear friend who lost EVERYTHING because of his Stock-Market-Casino gambling addiction, and other addictions). It took me awhile, and a few vacations, to kill this addiction. I’ve sold all my positions and put my money into mostly gold and silver (e.g., CEF, PSLV and PHYS) and cash. I think the stock market today is nothing but a Casino.

When I was a kid I asked my father, why didn’t he just buy gold (back then gold was about 30$/oz, today about 2000$/oz)⁴? And he, a WWII Vet, said something like, “If you can’t believe in the U.S. Stock Market, then you can’t believe in this country”.

Well, I’m out of stocks and long gold and silver. And how do you think that makes me feel? Not very good.

1. Some argue that Price-to-Sales is a better metric. OK, like, whatever. None of these standard metrics seem to correlate with stock values today in the Casino.

2. And, on the Other-Other hand, I’m a real fan of Elon with regard to many things he says, and especially for his “Twitter Files” that Matt Taibbi has reported on.

3. Now who exactly stole my money is a good question. There could be a good Class Action law suit here, but I doubt any Woke jury would side with anyone investing with the “enemy” (“we’ve always been at war with Eurasia” [see George Orwell’s 1984]). The U.S. and NATO countries have frozen (stolen) $300 Billion in Russian assets held in Western banks. While the U.S. and Nato were heroic for promoting Freedom and Democracy by killing, perhaps millions, and destroying the countries of Iraq, Libya, and Syria (where we were arming ISIS to overthrow Assad’s government [see Seymour Hersh’s rat-line article about that], and our army is still there, because, in Trump’s words, “we have their oil”, and in Biden’s words “we’re fighting ISIS”), Russia is bad, B-A-D, Bad. Please put Blue and Yellow flags on your car, and please support the Ukraine refugees, just as you did the Iraqi, Libyan and Syrian refugees. Al Gore says that Climate Change is creating all these refugees, but he also thinks a lot of other silly things, and I suspect it actually might possibly maybe perhaps be something else causing all these refugees, but can’t quite put my finger on it …

4. Which is not to say gold or silver are good investments. Back then, when I worked at a gas station, gas was 0.389$/gallon, and cigarettes were 0.50$/pack from a vending machine. Which is not to say you should invest in gasoline or cigarettes.