As we anticipated in last week’s Peoplenomics ChartPack, the market is now in position to break higher despite headwinds. Some of these include falling presidential polls, diesel being a question mark, and the whole intergenerational “Is there some point, here?”
Friction, Folly, and Life
In case you didn’t know, Amazon’s Prime Big Deals are on today and tomorrow (technically to 1 AM Oct. 8). And yes, we got our order in overnight, but there’s not much in this stack.
To “armor up” for the occasion here are three portable ideas to keep within easy reach:
- When you spend money, solve a friction problem. Some things in life just slip along on their own (time). Other conditions involve “friction.” Slow, pernicious opposition to your successful ‘best game.’ Spend money to solve your problems. Things that will genuinely make life better, smoother, less time-wasting around the edges and you’ll be ahead of most.
- Folly to avoid is going along with the crowd. Don’t spend your money following fashion, annual models of automobiles (or software, or….) because that’s the shortest path you’ll find to an empty wallet.
- Life is a “cyclical thing.” When born, you’re an “intelligent spirit” captured in an animal body. When old age ends, you “exit the animal.” Therefore, first half of the ride sets up the second half. So… 1) Buy when young to own when old. 2) When old, think about “spending down” before the exit.
As a Test-Fitting Ape myself, I have to confess to picking up a few baubles; the monkey needs to be entertained. Still, other than a 1:64 balun for the wine room HF antenna ($29) and a telescoping pole for the wine deck end, I’ve managed to keep the dopamine in check. Good luck with yours.
Still, the Xiegu G106 small HF QRP (low power) radio is tempting at $189. This is when the self-talk about “friction” kicks in. See, I already have an assortment of low-power ham radio stations. Heathkit HW-9 complete set, uxSDR, Micro BITX 6, and the computer-based Hermes Lite 2.
Personal Friction Analysis says “Ure problem is time, not assets.” Then quietly, a moment later: “Do you need to write ANOTHER check to not solve the real problem?”
Ah…confession helps. Good luck. The monkey wants another radio as 31 stations doesn’t seem to be enough.
News Compressor: ON
You can almost look at futures pricing and see if “the news” is even worth reading. With the Dow futures up 288 when I checked, the answer on news-reading is “skippable bullshit, mostly…”
Still, we spent the AI money, so you don’t have to. Waders on? Roll ’em up, and let’s stomp.
Middle East first: The interesting thing isn’t that the war has gone away. It hasn’t. It’s that oil is increasingly trading barrels instead of bombs. Middle East exports have remained surprisingly resilient, emergency G7 supplies are coming onto the board, and Brent has slipped below $100 despite continuing Gulf security problems.
Brilliant Bingo time for the ration of Treasury recycling this week. Super marvelous for the Bullish case.
Which reinforces yesterday’s point: watch diesel, tanker insurance, freight and refining more closely than crude. The economic damage may be migrating from not enough oil to expensive plumbing for moving it around. No winner, no chicken dinner – but that’s later.
Ukraine isn’t staying politely inside Ukraine. A Russian drone struck a Ukraine-Moldova border crossing, injuring a Moldovan citizen, while European governments increasingly describe Russian cyber, sabotage and influence operations as a coordinated pressure campaign. Not NATO-versus-Russia shooting yet—but the perimeter continues widening.
France remains our European dashboard item. External wars (Ukraine) are preferable to internal ones (diaspora cost with interest). So? School blockades and union unrest are landing on top of fiscal trouble that helped knock the euro to a 17-month low. French yields backed off Tuesday, but that’s price movement—not problem removal. Europe is beginning to look less like several unrelated stories and more like one accumulating stress system.
Run a travel agency? How about a “Visit Europe before the war” package? You could have six months to a year or three…
Disease gets promoted onto the BlinkLab board. Kenya has confirmed an imported Ebola case from Congo; the patient died and authorities identified 28 potential contacts. Separately, New York declared a statewide measles emergency after 108 cases this year. Neither says “pandemic,” but infectious disease has become active enough to warrant a permanent scan lane again. And you thought “Let’s have shots” meant something else. Didn’t you get the memo?
Inside Pages
Best politicians’ money can buy dept: Brazilian stocks surged after the presidential first round; Spain heads toward a November 29 snap election dominated by housing; Latvia appears headed toward another strongly pro-Ukraine government.
Say hi AI dept: Australia is wrestling with mandatory breach reporting, while industrial AI money keeps getting very real: Schneider Electric’s proposed $22.6-billion PTC acquisition is another reminder that AI isn’t merely chatbot subscriptions anymore.
Domestic ugliness includes a 12-year-old girl killed in crossfire at a Baltimore youth football game. Out West, a M3.7 rattled the Lake Tahoe area without major reported damage.
BlinkLab Trends
Yesterday’s signal survived another 24 hours:
War ? shipping/refining costs.
Ukraine ? wider European perimeter.
France ? financial/social stress.
Disease ? geographic mobility.
That’s four different atoms beginning to merge into two or three compounds. But with Dow futures +288?
The market’s morning vote is essentially:
“Yeah, yeah. Wake us when something breaks.”
Fair enough. Coffee’s still cheaper than panic. Did you see the International Trade presser just out?
Fed rate hike odds, meanwhile, are still running under 22 percent as we look to tomorrow afternoon’s Fed minutes.
Around the Ranch: Woo to PN
Sometime after about 50 years of life, the “spiritual” aspects of the ride come into focus. And often, they don’t fit inside the “neat borders” we like to draw around things here in shared/waking.
Two quite remarkable dreams will be covered on the Peoplenomics side tomorrow. But if you’ve read my novel DreamOver, there’s a scene in that book where one of the characters is talking to a shrink. And he goes into the process of what it’s like to “be” looking at the world through another person’s eyes.
I wrote DreamOver in 2014 when this “being in another person’s head” got real for me. In the novel?
“Interesting, Richard…It’s not often that people even in lucid dreams remember food taste and experience, so that may be notable. Even quite exceptional for an Epic Lucid Dream. “
Sperry sat in his chair while Jan DeVoe thumbed through the careful notes she had been making on Sperry’s exceptional dreams.
Finally, looking up, DeVoe took off her glasses and set them down. “I’m going to record this Richard, if that’s OK with you?”
Sperry nodded.
“What I want you to do now is to go back to the major dream before the “Child Dream”. That’s the one that we call the Eastern Europe Waterfront Dream. Did you do that homework project I asked you to do in case the dreams continued?”
Richard nodded his affirmation.
“Think back as much as you can this long after the fact…where did you think the dream took place? Didn’t you say along the Caspian Sea somewhere?”
“Gosh, I’d almost forgotten that, but it was along the same lines – real intensive visuals. Oh, I did remember to draw a sketch of that one…I’m not a very good artist so I did this on my computer so you’d be able to make sense of it…”
He unfolded a rough computer drawing from his pocket…”
I don’t know if I have ever mentioned this before? But that dream was a personal experience. Compelling and hell. And now, more than a dozen years after its occurrence, the recalled details are just as vivid as any other experience in “waking” from the period.
This time it’s not a Russian fisherman picking up marine supplies. It’s an Asian warlord upstairs with an arms dealer downstairs while in another such “jump” this week…
Well, let’s not ruin tomorrow’s report. Just know that the Western “hard boundary” between fully awake and totally deep in a lucid dream is not a line.
It’s a gradient.
Write when we all wake up,
George@Ure.net