Evening Pages: December 21st, 2020
Due to the coronavirus pandemic, I've been locking myself down until I think it's safe to go out again. To alleviate fear and stress, my writer's group has put together a daily "morning pages" get-together on Zoom in order to touch base before starting the day. Here's some of my brief thoughts.
His head is so big!!
I think this is why cats are so cute. They're just the right proportions. I guess when you select for cuteness over multiple generations, you get a big bundle of cute.
The $LAZR investment is shaving some amount of time off my lifespan, because a few days ago it was -$1300 and today it's +$1300. It just swings wildly back and forth and you're kind of just on for the ride. I think my decision to buy into $LAZR more when it dipped below my initial price was a good call in general, even though it makes me more sensitive to these gigantic price fluctuations. I think I learned my lesson though in terms of letting go; the shadow of $ZM hangs over me like a dark cloud. Also $T kind of sucks in terms of performance; even with dividend income I've lost a good deal of my principal. I guess it's a bad idea to buy a property like DirecTV for $25B and then drive away all the customers through monopolistic practices before a major life event like a pandemic causes customers to churn and go to streaming.
So I think here's my strat:
- Figure out which tech companies are up and coming and buy into them during IPOs or near IPOs (strong founders, good market position, recent deals, etc.)
- If the price dips below my initial price, just buy more stocks, absolutely DO NOT SELL
- Let inflation or time do the work (also people working)
- Hang on for dear life
I'm also dumping some cash into this app called WealthSimple, which invests in stocks and fixed-income + commodities for you. I think it varies by around +/-5%
Then if it grows, see whether you can take out a line of credit using the financial value of stocks as principal (plus maybe a bit of a cash buffer, like 20%), and hope the stocks grow enough to cover that line of credit.
The ghost of $ZM looms. IT LOOMS.
Sigh. So I think I mentioned this before, but I'm planning on staying in D.C. by myself for both Christmas and New Year's. I didn't feel comfortable asking my parents to make the drive down to Virginia. One, because everybody else is traveling during Christmas and who knows what traffic occurs during the rest stops along the way. Two, my cough still hadn't gotten better and I was worried that the negative COVID test was only for whatever sickness I had gotten before I had taken the test. Three, if there was a traffic accident there's no more hospitals in order to accept patients.
I think this is the first Christmas I'm spending by myself, so I'm thinking maybe I should do something special. I'm thinking about maybe buying a 1 lb. Japanese A5 Wagyu steak and reverse searing it on Christmas. Maybe getting some trimmings to go along with it, like mashed potatoes and gravy or some shit like that. That'd be pretty neat. Crack open some wine and put on some House M.D.
I think I should make a plan for how to relax properly. I think it's easy for my time to just disappear and to not get a whole lot out of it, so it'll be nice in order to plan things out and make sure I don't just stay in bed and browse Reddit.