Cameron McAlees

esports, partnerships and sports business in a past life.

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[Cameron McAlees @noremachi]

The economic activity and community support sports teams and arenas bring to cities/states are tremendous.

It’s sad to see teams move as a result of politics, because in every one of those instances the biggest losers end up being the city and the fans.

[Cameron McAlees @noremachi]

I’ve been out of the game long enough that I feel like I can tweet my opinions on this stuff now.

This is no different than if the Blazers went over the bridge to Vancouver, WA. There are now multiple examples of teams moving (slightly) into a different state/jurisdiction.

[Yogi @Houseofyogi]

Chicago lost the Bears this week. A team that's been in the city since 1921.

They didn't lose them to a bigger market or a better deal. The Bears decided they'd rather be a tenant in Indiana than deal with Illinois for one more year.

Think about how badly you have to run a place for that to be the smart move.

They lost them for two reasons.

The people running Illinois would rather villainize a builder than keep one. And they're bad at their jobs.

In 2021 the Bears spent $197M on the old Arlington Park racetrack.

Before they could break ground, Cook County valued the empty lot at $192M (Bears said $60M). They were salivating at the chance to extort a building that didn't even exist yet.

That fight dragged on for years.

The Bears were ready to put $2B into the stadium. All they wanted was a promise the county wouldn't reassess them into oblivion, plus $855M for infrastructure everyone uses. Roads, transit, utilities. A $3B project, two thirds of it private money pouring into Illinois.

Springfield had since 2021 to get this done. They dragged it to the final night of session, passed it through the Senate at 3:39AM, and the House went home without voting.

So now it's all gone.

The funniest part? This started because Cook County tried to grab the tax early. They knew a built stadium would pay $53M a year. Now they get under $4M on a vacant lot. No jobs, no buildout, no new anything.

Congrats on fighting for scraps and losing the whole prize.

Pritzker: they're "an $8.5B valued business" that doesn't need propping up.

But be smart for a second. Almost every NFL city throws in public money for a stadium. Not charity. The return is real. Tourism, hotels, restaurants, jobs, game days, property tax on a huge development. The math works.

Indiana did the math. While Illinois sat on it for years, Indiana passed a bill in months, put up $1B, and took the team.

And the Bears took a worse deal to get there. In Illinois they were going to own their stadium. In Indiana they rent it from the state. A team that wanted to build its own home gave up ownership just to escape Chicago.

Nobody won but Indiana. The Bears lost their stadium. Illinois lost the team, the $2B, and $53M a year in taxes.

Pritzker after they left: "I wasn't willing to give up billions of dollars of taxpayer money to give it to a billionaire-owned family or team."

There it is. "Billionaire-owned."

That's how Democrats talk about any business right before they run it out of town. Call them a billionaire, act like you're saving working families, take a victory lap while the tax base drives across the state line.

Meanwhile they're running the whole state into the ground. And you already know how this ends. You're living in it.

Pensions are $143B in the hole, worst in the country and not close. You pay $6,285 a year in property taxes, double the $2,969 national average, for a city that's $1.15B in the red. The mayor called its finances "the point of no return."

When you run things this badly, you sell what's left.

They leased the parking meters for 75 years to Morgan Stanley and a sovereign wealth fund in Abu Dhabi. Took $1.15B and burned through it in two years. The investors already made it all back, with 58 years left to collect.

Sold the Skyway. Sold the downtown garages. Every asset that made money, gone for one check.

But a fixed property tax rate for a team that's been here 106 years? That's "propping up billionaires."

Companies are leaving. Boeing for Virginia. Caterpillar for Texas. Citadel for Miami. In 2023 alone Illinois lost 56,000 people and $6B in income to other states. The ones who left earned a third more than the ones who moved in.

Indiana didn't outbid anyone. AAA credit, 16 years straight. A $676M surplus. Fourth-lowest debt per person in the country. They just weren't a disaster.

Illinois could have collected $53M a year. It chose zero. Ignore all the bad management but make sure to stick it to those evil, pesky billionaires.

[Cameron McAlees @noremachi]

@traderthiz

[Kyla Scanlon @kylascan]

One of the most important things to understand about the moment we are living in

[Cameron McAlees @noremachi]

@YetiCapital @traderthiz Doing my best but its hard out here…

[Cameron McAlees @noremachi]

@traderthiz 🐐

[Cameron McAlees @noremachi]

@Jordnstm Sandwiched between comments about AI is some of the best advice for anyone who wants to generate real alpha in the market. Good read. One of my favorite follows by far on fintwit.

[soothsayer @iamasoothsayer]

2023: Corona ended
2026: Hantavirus

[Cameron McAlees @noremachi]

@traderthiz Absolute monster month brother 👊🏻

[Cameron McAlees @noremachi]

The one and only P/L post I'll ever make publicly, because it's directly relevant to the tweet above.

Bag held GME five years ago and lost $1,000 not having a clue what I was doing. Needless to say this about covers that; what a journey.

[Cameron McAlees @noremachi]

Full circle moment for me.

Five years ago, I fell in love with the market through the GameStop short squeeze.

Five years and over half-a-million in trading profits later, I’m staring at the best example of an institution-driven short squeeze in a decade.

Incredible stuff.

[Cameron McAlees @noremachi]

@JeffEisenband How are we feeling after today?

[Simons @Simon_Ingari]

Boss: “We’ll also give you a 95% raise—just don’t leave!”
Employee: “Sorry, it’s too late now.”

Lesson for Leaders:
Employees don’t leave only because of money—they leave when they feel undervalued or unappreciated.

Retaining good employees isn’t just about increasing their pay; it requires recognition, growth opportunities, and proactive leadership.

Take care of your best employees— before they decide to leave you.

[Cameron McAlees @noremachi]

I’m cooked.

[Dr. Dominic Ng @DrDominicNg]

Regular exercise is linked to slower biological aging - but only in people sleeping 7+ hours.

People who slept under 6 hours and exercised actually aged faster.

[THE SHORT BEAR @TheShortBear]

There are 100x more people living in mediocrity because they were told they couldn’t than those who used that same doubt as fuel to rise.

“You can’t” isn’t guidance.
It’s usually projection, confession.

The spiral starts when people who never took the chance try to protect themselves from discomfort.

Watching you attempt, and possibly win, forces them to confront their own inaction. Your ambition can trigger their inferiority, so they try to shrink it.

But here’s the truth most overlook:

The biggest achievers in the world are often those who faced the highest levels of adversity, and turned it into work ethic, resilience, and relentless output.

Even envy, misunderstood and mislabeled as purely negative, can be one of the most powerful driving forces when redirected toward growth instead of the negative jealousy.

Most negativity pushed onto you isn’t about your limits.
It’s about someone else protecting theirs.

The strongest resistance often holds the greatest fuel potential.

Greatness doesn’t come from avoiding adversity.
It comes from pulling back the curtain, stepping through it, and using everything you find on the other side.

The world is a web of push and pull mechanism designed by our drive to conform to social norms.

[Cameron McAlees @noremachi]

I’m shocked that it took this long…

[Daniel Wallach @WALLACHLEGAL]

NEW: Polymarket hit with a nationwide class action lawsuit in the SDNY for operating "an illegal online sports gambling platform that is marketed as a 'prediction market,' but in reality, is an unlicensed sports betting enterprise prohibited under various state laws."

[Grant @Grantblocmates]

Anthropic have just buried OpenAI and ChatGPT with this ad lmfao

There’s no coming back from that

[Dylan Allman @dylanmallman]

We are living through a moment where a group of people do not just disagree, they do not even acknowledge a shared fundamental reality.

There is no common frame of reference, no mutual set of facts from which discourse can even begin. They can watch the same video, from multiple angles, and walk away convinced they saw a completely different event.

They exist inside a narrative so deeply entrenched that to question it, to even acknowledge a contradiction, is to commit some sort of ideological treason.

This is a deliberate, conditioned immunity to contradiction. It is a cultivated resistance to evidence. They have developed a mind so thoroughly welded to its chosen reality that it will alter, discard, or fabricate whatever it must to maintain coherence.

They can be shown, in real time, the unraveling of their worldview, and they will patch over the holes with fantasy rather than face any doubt whatsoever.

Politics has turned knowledge itself into a partisan weapon. The expectation is no longer to seek truth, but to defend your team at all costs.

There is a lingering obligation to have an opinion on everything, to be informed at all times, to adopt the correct stance. And so, they improvise. They adopt prefabricated opinions handed down by their faction. They fill in the gaps with instinctive loyalty rather than demonstrating any semblance of independent thought.

The game is rigged, and they know it. Two parties, two choices, two sides that everyone is herded into, and neither is worth the loyalty demanded of them.

But to acknowledge this would be to admit powerlessness, to admit that they are trapped in an illusion of choice. So they cope. They retroactively justify their allegiance by turning their side into something righteous, infallible, and necessary. The alternative is too terrifying.

It is a coping mechanism turned mass psychosis. And it is escalating. When reality itself is dictated by allegiance, when loyalty outranks reason, when every fact must be bent into submission to fit the tribe’s chosen narrative, the outcome is inevitable: war.

When factions exist in separate realities, they cannot coexist. They cannot negotiate, they cannot reason, they cannot even comprehend the other side as anything but a threat.

This is irreconcilable. We cannot function like this. A society cannot sustain itself when its people are no longer individuals but ideological husks, possessed by abstractions, fighting battles for masters who do not even know their names.

You are not your faction. You are not your party. You are not an extension of a collective mind.

The moment you outsource your thinking, the moment you allow yourself to believe that your side must be right because the alternative is unbearable, you have ceased to be an individual. You have become another interchangeable pawn in a game that does not need you to think, only to obey.

Wake up. This war for reality is not one you want to be drafted into.

[Boring_Business @BoringBiz_]

I will keep pounding the table on this because people don’t realize how bad it is

We are actively destroying family formation and upward mobility of people in their 20s and 30s just to make boomers happy

They are already the wealthiest generation by far. They already make up the majority of the political class

But it is still not enough
> more money printing that benefits the asset holders at the expense of savers
> more regulations that prevent new housing construction at the expense of new homebuyers
> more tax cuts that transfer wealth from the working youth to the idle old
> more deficits and national debt that the younger generation will have to bear the burden for

The youth no longer believe in a capitalistic system because their elders have taken it as hostage for themselves

The youth no longer have skin in the game of society. A generation with no stake in the system would rather watch it burn

[Cameron McAlees @noremachi]

In a world where everyone has access to artificial intelligence, or limitless knowledge at their fingertips, what differentiates you from the person next to you? Agency.

It is your ability to be intentional, self-regulate and advocate for ideas or people… not AI prompt writing.