Jimmy Carter died. Many of the critiques of his presidency come off as circular, e.g. “Jimmy Carter was bad because the economy was bad,” which although true, does not necessarily implicate Carter. The ’70s were sluggish due to many factors: high commodity prices due to Middle East conflict and embargoes, high inflation due to oil, and the Volker fed aggressively raising interest rates to try to mitigate this inflation, which led to a severe recession until around 1982, incidentally when Reagan was in office, so Reagan got credit for the recovery. Had Carter been reelected, his economic scorecard or legacy would have improved considerably owing to these external factors.
To recap my 2024 predictions:
I was right about Meta, Walmart and ‘big tech’ surging. I was wrong about SVIX, which despite a strong start for 2024, ended the year negative, but fortunately this was a small part of my portfolio. I ended the year up 100% on all the accounts overall, including from shorting Bitcoin. The leverage tech with shorting Bitcoin as a hedge worked perfectly even after Bitcoin rallying following Trump’s win. I cannot be more pleased.
I was however wrong about McDonald’s stock, which ended the year down 2% versus 23% gains for the S&P 500. I was right though about emerging markets underperforming. But I was wrong about Bitcoin lagging TQQQ and other 3x leveraged tech funds. Save for FNGU, Bitcoin outperformed all the leveraged tech funds.
Plotting all these together, the big winners for 2024 were Meta and Walmart:
Getting the big picture right is more important than the individual predictions. So being wrong about Bitcoin was offset by being right about big tech. The 2-3x leveraged FANG+ index of the 7-9 largest tech companies beats everything out there. Save for Nvidia or MicroStrategy, no individual stock or other index comes close, yet without the risk that comes with individual stock picking. Until I began investing in big tech, I lost money from 2005-2014. Leveraged tech has been a godsend as far as investing is concerned.
I was right about the GLP-1 weight-loss drugs not hurting food sales despite many predictions in 2023-2024 to the contrary. These drugs can work well for some, but the response rate is too variable to affect U.S. obesity rates or food consumption much. Men tend to lose a lot less weight compared to women, for example.
I was right about the Syria-Israel, Russia-Ukraine, China-Taiwan, and Gaza-Israel conflicts/tensions simmering down and the lack of escalation in those regions. The reason why so many geopolitical forecasts, even by experts, tend to be so wrong is people tend to underestimate the muddle-down period, which is when both sides enter a prolonged stalemate after the intensity of the initial conflict subsides.
Regarding predictions of China-Taiwan conflict, I think it’s time for those people to give it a rest and just admit they were wrong instead of repeating the same prediction every year to no avail. Predicting the same thing over and over and eventually being right, is just luck, not skill. The 20th century was an outlier in terms of the U.S. decisively winning wars or conflicts having definite resolutions.
For 2025, I am rolling over my 2024 predictions, so big tech stocks keep surging, U.S. economy keeps growing, etc. There will still be more division and polarization of politics, but it will not lead to anything serious beyond what we’re already accustomed to. There will be another major school shooting. Unlike the in the past, these shootings do not get as much media attention or lead to the long debates about gun rights like they did in the 2010s. Probably people have become inured to it. The media also figured out that giving these shooters the attention they sought, only incentivizes further shootings.
Regarding AI, by investing in leveraged tech, I have that covered. Every trillion-dollar tech company is now effectively also an AI company. I don’t need to predict the winner when having diversified exposure means I will be invested regardless. The winner could be Tesla, or Meta, or Nvidia. Microsoft has exposure to Open Ai, having in 2023 acquired 50% of the startup. Instead of having to predict which one, I just split up my capital between them.
A common prediction is that Trump is unserious or unstable, and that this is potentially destabilizing economically and geopolitically. Very little of importance hinges on Trump’s actual decision making abilities. People made this exact argument in 2016 about Trump being unserious and a threat to democracy, yet the only thing that went wrong, Covid, was out of his control, and the U.S. economy still pulled away ahead of the rest of the world post-Covid. Same for the development of the vaccine. There was no economic collapse, world war, or nuclear war under Trump as widely feared or predicted by the media. So rather than just admit they were wrong, the media makes the same prediction for 2024 and pretends no one will notice how wrong they were in 2016.
I am very confident though Trump will give the ‘crypto people’ the cold shoulder. The ‘crypto reserve’ is DOA , assuming it gets put to a vote. Same for all the rollbacks of regulation or other reform. Bitcoin will probably crash to $60k when it becomes evident none of the stuff that was hoped for will come to fruition. Trump has a long history of overpromising and underdelivering. There’s no reason to think this has changed. There is little evidence to suggest Congress is now pro-crypto. Same for DOGE: nothing will happen.
You lost all the goodwill you earned. All of it. Every time you say anything, it just reminds people again and digs the hole deeper. https://t.co/QhSJbATyMH
— 9mmSMG (@9mm_smg) December 30, 2024
As the tweet above shows, people are mad now, but memories tend to be short. The H-1B Maga-Musk war will blow over, as mentioned in my last post. What alternatives are there to Twitter/X? Alternative platforms are still tiny. Outside of maybe Rumble, alt-tech hasn’t worked, and nothing can come close to replacing the big platforms. Musk is smart enough to know that he cannot be too heavy handed with censorship, as much as he may wish to banish Fuentes and others from his platform.
Similar to in 2016, Trump used the dissident/alt-right for for support during his campaign. But as the H1-B situation showed, such support was unrequited. For some reason, people keep expecting ‘this time will be different’. Why would it. Trump is cozying up to big-tech because, correctly, he knows that is where the power lies. Trump needs to ingratiate himself with big tech to create conditions favorable for his sons after he is ineligible to run again. The battle also comes down to high vs. low human capital. Richard Hanania is right about high human capital winning out. A high-net-worth person is worth much more in terms of influence than many low/middle status dissidents.