German Stock Market Quotes

Trump only cares how the covid-19 pandemic affects him, his bank account, and his chances of getting re-elected.

This, today, right now, will seem like the good old days in 2 weeks. Things are about to get a hell of a lot worse.

By 1996 Apple’s share of the market had fallen to 4% from a high of 16% in the late 1980s. Michael Spindler, the German-born chief of Apple’s European operations who had replaced Sculley as CEO in 1993, tried to sell the company to Sun, IBM, and Hewlett-Packard. That failed, and he was ousted in February 1996 and replaced by Gil Amelio, a research engineer who was CEO of National Semiconductor. During his first year the company lost $1 billion, and the stock price, which had been $70 in 1991, fell to $14, even as the tech bubble was pushing other stocks into the stratosphere.

Which meant, if somehow GameStop did start to go up, the people who had shorted the company would begin to feel pressure to buy; the more the stock went up, the heavier that pressure became. As the shorts began to cover, buying shares to return them to their lenders, the stock would rise even higher. In financial parlance, this was something called a 'short squeeze.' It didn't happen often, but when it did, it could be spectacular. Most famously, in 2008, a surprise takeover attempt of the German automaker Volkswagen by rival Porsche drove Volkswagen's stock price up by a factor of 5 — briefly making it the most valuable company in the world — in two quick days of trading, as short selling funds struggled to cover their positions. Similarly, a battle between two hedge fund titans — Bill Ackman, of Pershing Square Capital Management, and Carl Icahn — led to a squeeze involving supplement maker — and alleged pyramid marketer — Herbalife, which cost Ackman a reported $1 billion. And perhaps the first widely reported short squeeze dated back a century, to 1923, when grocery magnate Clarence Saunders successfully decimated short sellers who had targeted his nascent chain of Piggly Wiggly grocery stores.

And I’m not kidding when I say “craziness.” The University of St. Gallen, Switzerland, has come out with a study that compares traders with psychopaths. The study reviewed the results from an existing study comparing 24 psychopaths in German high-security hospitals with a control group of 27 “normal” people. The funny thing is, this control group of “normal” people turned out to be traders. Stock guys, currency and commodity traders, and derivative types happened to be the normal control group that was stacked up against the high-security, barbed-wire-enclosed psychopaths. In the end, the performance of the trading group was actually worse than that of the psychopaths. The study indicated that traders, “Have a penchant for immense destruction,” and that their mindset would lead them to the logical conclusion of “beating one of the neighbor’s expensive cars with a baseball bat with the sole objective of owning the most beautiful car in the neighborhood.” In other words, traders are nuts. Indeed if you look up the textbook definition of a psychopath, here are some of the tidbits you’ll uncover: antisocial behavior, poor judgment and failure to learn from experience, inability to see oneself as others do, inexplicable impulsiveness … sounds like a typical trader who is struggling against the market and can’t figure out why.

We want to build up a new state! That is why the others hate us so much today. They have often said as much. They said: “Yes, their social experiment is very dangerous! If it takes hold, and our own workers come to see this too, then this will be highly disquieting. It costs billions and does not bring any results. It cannot be expressed in terms of profit, nor of dividends. What is the point?! We are not interested in such a development. We welcome everything which serves the material progress of mankind insofar as this progress translates into economic profit. But social experiments, all they are doing there, this can only lead to the awakening of greed in the masses. Then we will have to descend from our pedestal. They cannot expect this of us.” And we were seen as setting a bad example. Any institution we conceived was rejected, as it served social purposes. They already regarded this as a concession on the way to social legislation and thereby to the type of social development these states loathe. They are, after all, plutocracies in which a tiny clique of capitalists dominate the masses, and this, naturally, in close cooperation with international Jews and Freemasons. If they do not find a reasonable solution, the states with unresolved social problems will, sooner or later, arrive at an insane solution. National Socialism has prevented this in the German Volk. They are now aware of our objectives. They know how persistently and decisively we defend and will reach this goal. Hence the hatred of all the international plutocrats, the Jewish newspapers, the world stock markets, and hence the sympathy for these democrats in all the countries of a like cast of mind. Because we, however, know that what is at stake in this war is the entire social structure of our Volk, and that this war is being waged against the substance of our life, we must, time and time again in this war of ideals, avow these ideals. And, in this sense, the Winterhilfswerk, this greatest social relief fund there is on this earth, is a mighty demonstration of this spirit. Adolf Hitler - speech at the Berlin Sportpalast on the opening of the Kriegswinterhilfswerk September 4, 1940

Oil crashed because demand is much lower due to Covid19. OPEC tried to agree on production cuts, but Russia refused, to crash the US economy. Russia just popped America's debt bubble. This is the big one.

What could be the next steps in travel for Amazon? Very likely, acquisitions. Expedia stock value dropped from over 150$ to 110$ in one year and, with 1:14 stock ratio (Amazon stock reached an astonishing 1,400$), the acquisition would give Bezos the technology and know-how necessary to forcefully enter the travel landscape and compete with Google. trivago is another possible choice: last June the German metasearch engine was worth over 20$ a share, over 3 times the current value (6$). And what about TripAdvisor? It may have found a new youth with the new feed-based design, but it is still worth half of what it used to be 4 years ago. All those investments would be possible for Amazon, a company with a capitalization of over 1,000 billion dollars

When you are familiar with something, you have a distorted perception of it. Fans of a sports team think their team has a higher chance of winning than nonfans of the team. Likewise, investors look favorably on investments they are familiar with, believing they will deliver higher returns and have less risk than unfamiliar investments. For example, Americans believe the U.S. stock market will perform better than the German stock market; meanwhile, Germans believe their stock market will perform better.26 Similarly, employees believe the stock of their employer is a safer investment than a diversified stock portfolio.27

In the 1990, there was a rock band in Russia called Bakhyt-Kompot, and they had a song that was musically terrible but an important expression of punk philosophy that articulated one of my own main preoccupations. The chorus went like this: "How come the Czechs have cracked it, but Russia hasn't hacked it? How come the Poles have cracked it, but Russia hasn't hacked it? How come the Germans have cracked it, but Russia hasn't hacked it?" All the countries of the Soviet bloc and the Baltic republics were managing to "crack it," but not us. We had the oil, the gas, the ores and timber, infrastructure of sorts, and industry. We had a lot of highly educated people but it didn't help. I'm not talking about "like in America"; it wasn't even like in Poland. According to current official statistics, 13 percent of people were living below the poverty line; in terms of the average wage, we had been overtaken by China, Lebanon, and Panama. Someday I believe it will all work out and everything will be fine, but we have to face the fact that from the early 1990s to the 2020s, the life of the nation has been wasted moronically, a time of degeneration and failing to keep up. There is good reason why people like me, and those five or ten years older, are called a cursed and lost generation. We are the people who should have been the main beneficiaries of market and political freedom. We could have adapted readily to a new world in a way that was beyond the ability of most earlier generations. Fifteen percent of us should have become entrepreneurs, "like in America." But Russia didn't crack it. No one doubts we are living better now than we were in 1990, but, excuse me, thirty years have passed. Even in North Korea people are living better now than they did then. Scientific and technological progress, whole new branches of the economy, communications, the internet, ATMs, computers . . . Those who claim the rise in living standards relative to the 1990s is due to the exertions and achievements of the Putin regime re like stock joke characters saying, "Thank heaven for Putin! Under his rule the speed of computers has increased a millionfold." The comparison should not be between us as we were in 1990 and us as we are now, but between how we are now and how we could have been if we had grown at just the average global growth rate. We would easily have achieved what we watched in Czechoslovakia, East Germany, China, and South Korea achieve. That is a comparison about which we can only feel sad. This is not some abstract exercise, but thirty years of our lives. And God knows how many more such lost and stolen years lie ahead. For as long as Putin's group is in power, we will count the missed opportunities and be noticing how other countries have overtaken us in per capita GDP, and how those we have always looked down as little better than beggars have overtaken us in terms of their national average income.