Mr. President,
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I don’t know if you’ll ever read this. Probably not. But I’m writing it anyway because my wife and I talk about this all the time, and somebody needs to say it out loud.
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We can’t wait for the day you’re no longer President.
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Not because we’re tired of you. The opposite. Because you deserve to go home. You deserve quiet mornings. You deserve to sit on your own porch without the weight of 330 million people sitting on your shoulders. You deserve your family back. You deserve peace.
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You didn’t have to do any of this.
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You had the money.
You had the name.
You had the life most men only dream about.
You could’ve spent the rest of your days golfing, traveling, watching your grandkids grow up.
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Instead you stepped into a fire that nearly cost you everything.
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They mocked you. They sued you. They raided your home. They tried to bankrupt you. They tried to lock you up. They dragged your wife and kids through the mud. They put a bullet through your ear and you got up with your fist in the air and kept going.
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For what?
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For us. Regular people. Truck drivers. Welders. Waitresses. Roughnecks. Farmers. Single moms working two jobs. Grandparents on a fixed income watching the country they built get handed away.
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You didn’t owe us a thing. And you gave us everything.
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You risked your name. Your legacy. Your safety. Your family’s safety. Your brand. Your freedom. All of it. So this country could have one more shot at being what it was supposed to be.
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And the truth nobody wants to admit?
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We didn’t deserve a President like you.
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A nation this divided, this ungrateful, this asleep at the wheel didn’t earn a man willing to bleed for it. But God sent you anyway. And I’ll thank Him for that until the day I die. 🙏
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So when the day finally comes that you walk away from that desk, I hope you sleep good. I hope your wife laughs again without looking over her shoulder. I hope your kids breathe easy. I hope you golf till the sun goes down and nobody bothers you for nothing.
Donald Trump works more than one week than Joe Biden worked in four years. Yeah.
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You earned every bit of it.
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Thank you, Mr. President. From a retired auto worker in Ohio, who prays for you often.
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God bless you. God bless your family. And God bless the United States of America. 🇺🇸
I didn't buy a house.
I bought a 30 year short position on the US dollar, and they handed me a house as a bonus.
Nobody understands this trade.
A 30 year fixed at sub 4%. No margin call. No mark to market. Free to prepay. Government guaranteed paper behind it.
Pension funds and insurers pay real money for long duration fixed liabilities. Retail got them for free in 2021 and then spent three years crying about their home value on Zillow.
Here's what people miss:
Rates going up makes you RICHER.
A 3% note in a 6% world trades around 70 cents. If you owe $400k, your real obligation is closer to $280k in market terms. That's equity that shows up nowhere on your statement and is completely real.
Denmark lets borrowers buy the loan back at market price. Americans hold the exact same value. They just can't see it.
And the option runs both ways. Rates fall, you refinance. Rates rise, your liability discounts. You are long optionality in every direction and paid nothing for it.
Which is why prepaying is insane.
A dollar of principal earns exactly your mortgage rate. 3%, illiquid, unrecoverable without a HELOC or a sale.
That same dollar in T bills earns more, is liquid tomorrow, and is state tax exempt.
Every dollar of equity in your house is a decision to lend money to yourself below the risk free rate.
The house produces identical shelter at 3% equity or 100% equity. Equity adds nothing to the yield. It's dead capital sitting in drywall.
The price only becomes a real number on the day you sell. Until then it changes nothing about your cash flow. Nobody can margin call you into posting more.
The only thing that forces a sale is losing your income. And that risk gets WORSE when you've buried your reserves in the walls.
Minimum equity plus maximum liquidity isn't the aggressive position. It's the defensive one.
What you actually bought was the conversion of a variable cost into a fixed one.
Rent compounds at CPI plus, forever. Your P&I is a flat nominal line to 2054. That spread is the entire product. The Zestimate is noise.
And the debt dissolves while you sleep.
25% cumulative inflation turns $400k into $320k of real purchasing power. Payment never moves. If wages track inflation even badly, your payment to income ratio decays every year without you lifting a finger.
Nominal fixed debt is the only liability on earth that shrinks on its own.
Stop watching the asset.
Watch the liability.
Useful management philosophy. Naturally, I'm going to relate this to $ASTS.
Some will say they were never up 1-0, but those people don't actually understand where Starlink actually is in DTC.
The key for someone like Abel is to always push, no matter how painful, to ensure they remain on top and never play defense.
You think he wanted to do a convert? This guy loves his shareholder base. He would have immediately have had a Taco Bell moment when he realized he had just done the prepaid forward and now was doing the exact thing (a convert) he had just promised the market he would not do.
The chess board, however, had shifted on him. They are making more satellites than they have near-term visibility on launch capacity. Blue Origin got pushed back. They are winning sovereign projects (J-LEO) that require capital. They are getting jaw-dropping performance from their system.
To press the advantage, you have to hold your nose. This is why control shares matter: the CEO can do the right thing. He's not subject to short-term pressure of those who are the loudest, but also have the shortest time horizons. He can do as Mark Zuckerberg would do. This is Founder Energy™️.
If you want to win in a trillion dollar market, you cannot just hold on. You have to be prepared to attack each day.
Sadly, a few shareholders will get flushed out and that sucks. We all suffer mental damage from mark to market losses. However, in life it's really just about saddling up if you want to ride, or letting the horse run away. Winning is hard. And there are no guarantees you will win even if you saddle up. But you don't try, you won't win. If you give up, you won't win.
$ASTS stock pop right before close is likely the fuse lit for the fireworks we are about to receive over the weekend for what is to come. Good luck to all and happy 4th!
$SPACE: A common refrain I've heard from short sellers, skeptics, space consultants and legacy players is that XYZ space investors are absolutely delusional.
You know what, they're absolutely right. We are 100% delusional. Can you imagine holding $ASTS for almost 6 years through a constant barrage of FUD and the stock price getting shorted down to < $2? And then being delusional enough to keep buying all the way down AND THEN continuing to hold and buying on the way up?
You know who else is delusional? Abel Avellan. This mfer created the direct-to-cellular satellite broadband category in 2017 against all the haters, naysayers and legacy clowns who said it was impossible. At the low point AST SpaceMobile was worth $700M with only $100M in the bank. Throughout the lowest lows AND highest highs, Abel has never sold a single share all these years. This guy must be insane?!?
It takes a special kind of crazy to be a founder like Abel and it takes a special kind of crazy to have the conviction, fortitude and patience to be invested alongside him.
Let's tip the hat to these deluded strategic investors as well: AT&T, Verizon, Google, Rakuten, Saudi Telecom, Bell Canada, Telus and American Tower
Delusional? Crazy? Insane?
Yes that's us.
"We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard..."
- JFK (OG Deluded Dude)