The Transparent Advisor

  by Danno   A friend of mine passed away from cancer in his 20's, but whenever he was within earshot of someone who asked a question with a seemingly obvious answer he would respond rhetorically "Does a bear shit in the woods?" Tesla is all over the news this year.  Whenever anything is making good or bad news, people come to me and ask if "we should be buying?" The smart people think Tesla is a bubble, but the ones who have enough conviction to sell the stock short have absolutely gotten their faces ripped off the past 16 month to the tune of +1,450%. Cult stocks will do that to the pros from time-to-time. That means that if you bet $100,000 against Tesla stock, you now have lost your $100,000 and another $1,350,000 to boot.  You think you want to be a short-seller, try getting your head around that.  Interestingly, if you've been in the NASDAQ 100, you've been participating in that upside.   If you've been in the S&P 500 though you have not be

  by Danno   Bitcoin hit the global stage in 2017 with a rise from $1,000 to $19,000 in 11 1/2 months. That's an 1,800% return on investment in one year if you saw that coming, but it was also an obvious bubble to anyone who reads history.   Over the next year it dropped to $3,000, an 85% drop.  Bubbles are impossible to predict, and that is what makes them possible.  It's fairly easy to predict that a bubble will pop, but nearly impossible to predict when.   Here is a 7-year Bitcoin chart: Now exactly 3 years later Bitcoin is back at $19,000 again, but don't mistake this for 2017. To get a sense of the bubblicious stuff going on in 2017 vs today, here is the Google Trends chart for Bitcoin searches over the past 5 years. The spike up to "100" marks the 100% highest level of searches.  Today we are at 18% of the level of searches that we were at in 2017.  Some of that lowered level of interest could be that some people who searched it in 2017 don't feel the ne