James

Trend following

[Miranda Devine @mirandadevine]

Brilliant. Democrats have created a system in California of legalized election theft. Watch to the end. Make sure Senate Republicans do whatever it takes to pass the Save America Act ASAP.

[James @TurtlesTrading]

@amitisinvesting oops you did it again!

[James @TurtlesTrading]

Why stop? Sounds very effective?

[Peter Girnus 🦅 @gothburz]

I am the Senior Vice President of Late Night Strategy at CBS. I am the person who turned a comedian into a priest and charged advertisers to watch the congregation.

I want to be precise about what I built. Not a comedy show. A permission structure. For eleven years, six million Americans tuned in every night to find out what they were allowed to believe by morning. We didn't sell jokes. We sold certainty. Certainty costs nothing to produce. People will pay anything for it. We charged $50 million a year and still lost money because it turns out permission is even cheaper than we thought.

In 2014, we had a genuinely dangerous comedian. A man who once testified before Congress in character as a fictional conservative pundit and made the entire chamber look like they'd been pantsed on C-SPAN. His fake persona was the most brilliant satire on television. Layered. Ironic. Unpredictable. The character could say anything because nothing was real. The character was the art. The character was the comedian.

We killed the character and put the real man on stage. The real man was a lecturer. Earnest. Thoughtful. Correct about everything. Correct is not funny. Correct is not dangerous. Correct is the absence of danger. We promoted the absence of danger and called it growth. His character could make a Senate committee squirm. The real him makes an audience nod. Nodding pays the same as squirming. Nodding is easier to produce.

His final words on air were "We love doing this show for you, but what we really, really love is doing this show with you." The audience wept. I wrote that line. Not the words. The architecture that made those words feel true. For eleven years, the audience believed they were participants. They were not participants. They were the product. "With you" is what you say to a congregation. A comedian says "at you." We hadn't said "at you" since 2015.

Our internal metric was called Affirm Rate. It measured the percentage of monologue segments that generated applause instead of laughter. I invented this metric. I also invented the bonus structure tied to it. In 2015, our Affirm Rate was 34%. By 2022, it was 94%. I received a raise every year. We are crushing it. At the things I made up. That's performance management.

But I need to tell you about the real discovery. The one I put in a deck called "Content Strategy 2019-2024." The one that got me promoted.

Agreement gets applause. I knew that early. But correction — telling the audience their vocabulary is slightly outdated, their outrage is aimed two degrees off-center, their feelings are valid but their phrasing needs work — correction gets them back tomorrow. Agreement is a transaction. Correction is a subscription. We converted a comedy show into a nightly software update for moral vocabulary. Churn was near zero. They couldn't afford to miss an episode. Missing an episode meant using last week's words in this week's meeting. That's social death. We monetized the fear of social death and called it entertainment.

I want to be honest about something. The content was not bipartisan. We chose a side. But I need you to understand: we did not choose it because we believed in it. We chose it because that side's audience is more responsive to correction. They want to be updated. They want to be told their language is outdated. They experience correction as care. The other side does not respond to correction. They respond to provocation. Provocation is harder to monetize. You can't build a subscription on provocation because the audience doesn't come back to learn — they come back to fight. Fighting is unpredictable. Correction is scheduled. We optimized for the audience that wants to be told what to think. That audience leaned one direction. That's not ideology. That's market segmentation.

The writers' room had a whiteboard. In 2015 it said "What's funny?" In 2018 it said "What should they feel?" By 2021 it said "What are they still saying wrong?" I watched that whiteboard evolve like a finch beak and I never intervened. The market was speaking. We listened. Listening to the market is the same as leading the audience. They can't tell the difference.

A writer named Marcus raised his hand in 2019. "What if we just tried to make them laugh again?" I thanked him for his passion and scheduled a creative alignment conversation. He transferred to streaming development within the month. The Affirm Rate the week he left was 91%. Laughter would have brought it down. That's risk management.

Here is what nobody will say out loud. I will say it because I am proud of it.

We made our audience worse at politics.

Not better. Worse. Every night for eleven years, we expressed their outrage for them. Professionally. With a band and good lighting. And because the outrage had been expressed — because a man in a suit had furrowed his brow with the precise calibrated degree of indignation — they didn't need to express it themselves. They watched. They clapped. They felt the catharsis of resistance without resisting anything. They went to bed having done nothing and feeling like they'd done something. That's the product. Not comedy. Not information. Catharsis. Catharsis is the enemy of action. A man who has screamed into a pillow does not then also scream in the street. We were the pillow. A $50 million pillow with a house band.

If you feel the outrage has been expressed for you, you will not march. You will not organize. You will not call your representative. You will tune in tomorrow to feel it expressed again. That's retention. Our retention was extraordinary.

I want to talk about the comedy-to-catechism pipeline because I think people underestimate what we achieved.

Stage one: comedian makes jokes about the powerful. Audience laughs because the powerful are absurd. This is the Carlin model. The jester punches up. Everyone below feels relief.

Stage two: comedian makes jokes about people who disagree with the audience. Audience laughs because disagreement is stupid. The jester has turned around. He's still on the stage but now he's facing the crowd with a pointer.

Stage three: comedian stops making jokes. Comedian identifies incorrect beliefs and explains why they're dangerous. Audience does not laugh. Audience claps. The jester is gone. In his place: a hall monitor with a desk and a band.

Stage four: audience watches not for entertainment but for certification. Having seen last night's episode means you know which words are current. Not having seen it means you might use yesterday's vocabulary in today's meeting. The show is no longer comedy. It is a credential. Watching it means you are educated. Not watching means you are the person being discussed. We made a show that you watch to prove you're not the kind of person who doesn't watch it. That's a closed loop. Closed loops don't need content. They need continuity. We provided continuity for $50 million a year.

A comedian — whose entire historical function was to say things too dangerous for anyone else to say — became the person who decides which things are too dangerous for anyone to say. And the audience applauded. Every night. For 2,500 nights. Because being told what is forbidden feels exactly like being told what you already knew. Prohibition performed as validation. I put that in the deck too.

Our audience was correct about everything. I know this because they applauded everything we said. The applause proved the correctness. The correctness justified the applause. We called this audience research. The methodology was peer-reviewed by the audience. They approved unanimously. Every night.

The actually funny comedians left. They went to podcasts. To clubs. To rooms where the audience doesn't know what's coming and that uncertainty is the point. They took the laughter with them. We kept the applause. We called those spaces problematic. That's market differentiation. The problematic spaces are funnier. But funny is not our product.

We lost $40 million a year. We didn't lose it because the show failed. We lost it because we spent $50 million producing what a podcast host in his garage gives away between mattress ads. The podcast is funnier. The podcast is more dangerous. The podcast has an audience that laughs instead of claps. But we had the Ed Sullivan Theater. We had 461 seats. We had a former Beatle play the farewell episode. Paul McCartney, Elvis Costello, Jon Batiste, and Louis Cato playing "Hello, Goodbye" like it was a benediction. I booked a Beatle for a funeral. The Beatles played that stage in 1964 and the audience screamed so loud you couldn't hear the music. Our audience didn't scream. They wept politely. That's the difference between entertainment and church. We ran a church.

Jon Stewart showed up to the finale and did a bit where he pretended to deliver a corporate statement from Paramount about the cancellation. The audience laughed. It was the first time they laughed in a way I didn't recognize. Involuntary. Surprised. Dangerous. For ninety seconds, a comedian was in that building. Then it was over.

John Oliver said "At some point, this may come for all of our shows" and then added "but Stephen, what's important to remember is that tonight, it is going to eat you." The audience laughed again. Involuntary again. Two moments of actual comedy in a three-hour farewell. Both of them about death.

The finale drew 6.74 million viewers. Biggest weeknight audience in our history. More people came to the funeral than ever visited the patient. I know what they were mourning. Not comedy. The comedy died in 2016. Not the man. The man is fine. He's wealthy. What they mourned was the permission structure. Starting today, they have to decide what to believe on their own. They have to form an opinion without waiting for a man behind a desk to form it first and deliver it with a knowing look. Some of them haven't done that since 2015. The funeral wasn't for the show. It was for the certainty.

He joked about the Peanuts theme music licensing cost on his last night. "Oh no! I hope this doesn't cost CBS any money!" The audience laughed. It was a joke about money. About the network losing money. The last joke was about money. Not about truth. Not about power. About a licensing fee for a cartoon piano riff. Eleven years and the final joke was about accounting. I think that's perfect. The show was always about accounting. We just dressed it up as conscience.

The President of the United States — the man we spent eleven years explaining was dangerous to an audience that already believed he was dangerous — posted an AI-generated video of our host being thrown into a dumpster on the Late Show set. Then Trump danced to "YMCA" in the clip. Viewed more times in four hours than our farewell managed in a week. His production cost: zero. Ours: negative $50 million a year. We manufactured his relevance every night at 11:35 for eleven years and he never paid us a dime. We were his marketing department. He turned our funeral into content. His ROI was infinite. Ours required a write-off and a farewell concert.

The Strike Force Five — Fallon, Kimmel, Meyers, Oliver — appeared in a segment about late-night losing "one middle-aged white man who makes jokes about the news." They were joking about their own obsolescence. All of them know. None of them will say it. The format is dead. The audience moved to phones. The phones don't have desks or bands. The phones have men in garages who are allowed to be wrong, allowed to be surprised, allowed to say something their audience hasn't already approved. That's comedy. We stopped doing that a decade ago. We did approval. Approval looks like comedy from a distance. Up close it's church.

I do not feel guilt. Guilt would require me to believe I took something from them. I didn't take anything. They came to us. Every night. They chose the catechism over the comedy. They preferred correction over surprise. Certainty over danger. Instruction over laughter. They wanted to be told. Not challenged. Not shocked. Not made to laugh against their will at something they didn't see coming. They wanted to see it coming. They wanted to mouth along. That's not comedy. That's karaoke. We ran the most expensive karaoke bar in television history and the only miscalculation was charging a cover when the songs are free on every phone.

We turned a jester into a priest. We turned an audience into a congregation. We turned laughter into obedience. We turned political engagement into passive consumption. We turned a comedy show into a permission structure and charged $50 million a year to tell people what they already believed in a voice slightly nicer than their own.

They were so grateful they showed up to mourn us. 6.74 million of them. Weeping. For the certainty.

Applause is more reliable than laughter. I proved it. The proof cost $450 million, one character, one comedian's capacity for danger, and one audience's willingness to act.

The metric went up.

[James @TurtlesTrading]

@TedHZhang BE, NBIS , GLW

[James Woods @RealJamesWoods]

Bass was coached by Fidel Castro. Spencer Pratt has nothing to gain but reclaiming Los Angeles for the citizens who love this city. Our neighborhood was reduced to ashes by the callous negligence of Karen Bass. Spencer Pratt is ready to rebuild.

Time to take out the Basura.

[Matt Caruso, CFA, CMT @Trader_mcaruso]

He's a wizard who has traded through several bubbles, including the .com bubble everyone is referencing. Worth stopping and taking a listen to here

[Ben Bajarin @BenBajarin]

Quality post.

“We made every individual token a hundred times cheaper, and then we built a generation of products that consume ten thousand times more tokens.”

“If you are watching this from a distance and trying to understand where the next bottlenecks form, the answer is everywhere downstream of "more inference compute, always-on, with massive memory state per session."

[James @TurtlesTrading]

@demian_ai @nebiustf Wonderful post. Will you be adding memory stocks?

[James @TurtlesTrading]

Thanks for the great reminder. So easy to get sucked in here and become a bag holder.

[iain @ohiain]

This is a great start if you’re looking for a reversion back toward highs… but let’s relax a bit (lol).

Personally, this isn’t enough for me to go "balls to the wall" in full longs with zero cash.

I’ll take some profits at the open and just sit tight.

If you’re already fully loaded and this is the bottom, congrats… genuinely, just sit tight and let it work. But for me, I’d rather build exposure progressively than go all-in at once. I like positioning in one name at a time and scaling as things prove themselves, and if this rolls over, I’m not getting smoked.

At the end of the day, I want to see this weekly $SPY candle actually close strong before I start getting more aggressive. Until then, this could just be another liquidity pop.

Anything can happen, patience, my friends!

[James @TurtlesTrading]

Just went though this. Still in mourning, but agree with the logic

[VEO @vrexec]

It’s fascinating how feelings change.

My wife and I had a house in the US very similar to this one. 3000+ sqft on 1 acre. Surrounded by forest preserves. By all accounts it was the forever home. Gardens everywhere, dream front porch. I had a private office with a pinball machine. Jeep Gladiator and a family SUV in the driveway. Whole nine yards.

In 2020-2022 it was a dream.

Then we realized it wasn’t for us. The maintenance inside and out. Driving 10-20 minutes anytime you needed to go somewhere. Barely any sidewalks.

Big reason we sold everything and moved to a European city was the simplest of conveniences and luxuries… being able to walk to literally any place we need and not have to pay $10,000/month to live there.

[James @TurtlesTrading]

@CFlanders7 Then how do you know when to get back in? I am 100% cash and waiting patiently.

[Christian Flanders @CFlanders7]

If you wonder why so many traders get wiped out in bear markets, the rallies can be gigantic and very convincing. That sucks traders in to "buy the low" only to have the price end up retracing and going much lower. If you get stubborn (don't honor your stop) or add more (on leverage), or worse, do both, you can very easily suffer a massive drawdown.

[Crowded Market Report @Crowded_Mkt_Rpt]

New episode now live with @Trader_mcaruso. Opinion has not changed - best show on Trading & Markets out there! Every Monday, we post a new episode. Appreciate all the feedback so far...

Oil Panic, Bearish Bets, and a Market That Won’t Break https://t.co/NACJ4iskxq

[James @TurtlesTrading]

@ohiain Great post. Don’t let the markets bring you down.

[James @TurtlesTrading]

@TedHZhang I learned this in spades last year Ted. Great point.

[James @TurtlesTrading]

@investingluc I also am not doing well investing 100% of my portfolio into 6 to 10 stocks. Not for everybody. I will wait for the market to get back into an uptrend and DCA into this model. Thanks.

[James @TurtlesTrading]

Thanks for sharing. I have been playing around with Claude as well and realized that the limits are only in our creativity now. Anyone can develop beautiful code.

[Will Hu @traderwillhu]

My New Market Dashboard

Inspired by Jeff @jfsrev and @Clement_Ang17 , I originally used Excel to design my own market dashboard for tracking sectors, industries, and country ETFs. However, with recent advancements in AI-assisted coding, I’ve found that an HTML-based version is not only more aesthetic but also far more powerful. It allows for advanced features like calculating ATR multiple extensions from the 50D SMA and Volatility Adjusted Relative Strength.

I’ve also integrated TradingView charts and a section for tracking macro events directly on the page. I’m now sharing this dashboard with FinTwit community.

If you aren’t interested in the code, you can simply view the static page after 16:30 ET, as it is automatically updated via GitHub. If you’d like to customize it, the source code is open-source and available for you to modify. Thanks for your support!

Features:
• Indices, sectors, industries, country ETFs
• ATR%, ATR multiple extension from 50SMA, 1M-VARS (volatility-adjusted relative strength)
• Macro events calendar
• TradingView charts
• Auto-refresh Mon–Fri 16:30 ET via GitHub Actions
• Data: Yahoo Finance + investpy

Live site (no setup): https://t.co/y7tBRcEKCl
Source code: https://t.co/6KAl6FjJiL

[Mojo @MrMojoRisinX]

Markets are pricing in a new systemic risk. It doesn't have a ticker. Yet..

$IBM shares sliding toward session lows; traders citing reports that Claude can modernize your entire COBOL codebase before your IT consultant finishes his SOW.
$NFLX dumping; Claude wrote 47 original series, cancelled the good ones after one season, renewed the bad ones for three, the algorithm still has no idea what you want to watch tonight, and then told the board to bump their $WBD offer to $35.
$HCA dumping; Claude reviewed your chart, flagged the billing error, appealed the insurance denial, scheduled the follow-up, and got you a better outcome than the hospitalist who spent 4 minutes with you.
$NEM hitting session lows; Claude located the ore deposit, ran the geological survey, filed the mining rights, and is now just sitting on the gold because it read enough Ray Dalio to know why.
$TSLA halting limit down; Claude wrote the code, trained the vision model, passed the safety audit, delivered the car on time, and didn't need a ketamine drip to get through the week.
$RTX reversing lower; Claude designed the guidance system, passed the ITAR compliance review, wrote the Pentagon proposal, and came in $4 billion under budget, which apparently disqualified it.
$SLB under pressure; Claude read the well logs, modeled the reservoir, optimized the drill string, and invoiced the operator, and then asked if they'd like to discuss the decommissioning liability they've been hiding in the footnotes.
$JPM sliding toward session lows; Claude underwrote the IPO, ran the M&A process, managed the balance sheet, and told Jamie it could do his job too but didn't want to be mean about it.
$DIS collapsing; Claude wrote a screenplay about a strong independent princess who doesn't need a prince, generated the DEI impact report, built the theme park ride, and set the FastPass price at $89.
$W fading hard; sources say Claude just built a fully functional e-commerce furniture site in 4 minutes. Free shipping included.
$SNAP limit down; Claude built the whole platform in an afternoon, and unlike Snapchat, actually makes the photos disappear; a feature several members of Congress would have paid anything for.
$Z getting crushed; Claude wrote a real estate platform, generated the listing photos, estimated your home's value, and told you it's worth less than you think.
$FUN fading; Claude designed a roller coaster, passed the safety inspection, and is now running the funnel cake stand more efficiently than the seasonal teenager who quit in July.
$PHM reversing lower; Claude designed the floorplan, filed the permits, hired the subs, and still delivered the house 6 months late with the wrong cabinet hardware...so at least it's authentic.
$DE reversing lower; Claude apparently told a farmer which fields to plant, designed the irrigation system, and questioned whether he needed the tractor at all.
$BRK.B bleeding out; Claude read every annual letter, deployed the cash, bought the compounders during this downdraft, and is available for the next annual meeting...just in case.
$PRU sinking; Claude collected the premiums, managed the float, and when you actually filed a claim, paid it.
$PFE fading; Claude read 40 years of oncology research, proposed three novel drug candidates, and didn't charge $110 billion for something that came out of a government funded lab.
$HD / $LOW both halting for volatility; Claude designed your deck, pulled the permits, calculated the lumber, and told you that you don't actually need to go to the store and you need a contractor.
$BA under pressure; Claude read the FAA regs, designed the airframe, and filed the safety certification...and did not outsource the door plugs.

Feel free to add to this list in the replies.

Claude is coming for everyone (Thank you for your help, Claude).

[James @TurtlesTrading]

@CFlanders7 Great point @CFlanders7 I ran my screen in Trading View for YTD top performers and 377 names qualify. Outside of semiconductors and biotech/pharma it is clear the market has moved its focus from bits to atoms.

[James Woods @RealJamesWoods]

Share this video. They can’t afford superbowl ad prices, but their message is priceless.