Money Monster

I recently saw this movie.  I give it a 6 out of 10.  It was a decent movie but I was disappointed with how simple the storyline was.  The previews tell you everything.  Random guy loses money on a stock and holds a tv host hostage.  That's about it.  The only thing that was slightly interesting about the story was how you slowly figure out who the "bad guy" is.  There were several neat details placed in the movie but the pic below is around 85% of what you will see.

White House Spokesman Made Foolish Market Prediction

Back on March 18, 2014, someone made a horrible prediction of the Russian stock market. 
“I wouldn’t, if I were you, invest in Russian equities right now—unless you’re going short,”
President Barack Obama’s chief spokesman, Jay Carney.  Obama was being pressured by Putin and I guess "unofficially" it was ok for anyone to say bad things about Russia's future just because our leader was generally-kinda-negative-ish towards Putin.  Groupthink?  Maybe.....probably.

Stupid prediction!

First of all, you can't predict stuff and you should not give investment advice if that is not even your role.  This dude did both.  When he made that comment, Russia's MICEX market index was almost 35% off its previous high after the 2008 recession.  Sounds like a time to buy to me.  I start buying around 30% off.  That's when things are on sale.  Their market was fairly volatile for a few years leading up to that point.  Price was bouncing around in a pretty flat but wide channel.  So I would have strongly disagreed with Jay Carney at the time.  Then to make him look really bad, MICEX never went lower and eventually reached all new highs as of this week.  That would have been a nice 2 year trade for me.  I would have bought around 1300, sold around 1800.  Today, MICEX is at 1977 and its knockin on resistance.

The Nice Port

Imagine this: 

There is a country which will not be able to pay its debts and his hoping for a bailout from a larger country or a bankruptcy type of restructuring to spread things out.

fiscal management is considered a disaster

the country is small and is being compared to Detroit.

a politician from this country now authorizes a budget which takes money away from things such as education and not only overfunds public pensions (to pay your friends) but gives the President's wife a $2.5 million incidental allowance so she can 'get by' and pay for 'necessities'?

Surprise!  Its all true.  Puerto Rico is the winner....yay....

Class of 2016-18 - Earning an MBA is never a bad idea :)

Great Advice

Most investing advice that is available is either too elementary or pointless/random.  The Motley Fool has some people who really know how to trade.  They tend to profess what i already do:

It's common knowledge that the point of investing is to buy low and sell high, but selling because your stocks went down is the exact opposite of that. Of course, if your stocks go down because of any of the reasons listed here, such as a fundamental change in the business, by all means go ahead and sell. However, if the price drop has little to do with the company itself, a price drop should be looked at as a buying opportunity, not a reason to panic.

Nintendo

So a bunch of people bought Nintendo stock since they heard that Pokemon Go had become very popular around the world.  Now those same people are learning that Nintendo does not even own the game.  People thought Pokemon Go would make Nintendo suddenly take over the gaming world or something along those lines.  Somehow they thought this would happen just from one popular game people play on their phones.  Nintendo only receives a sliver of the profit due to licensing fees.  The stock price exploded, then crashed.  The thing is, it crashed due to people being so excited they didn't realize who owned the game.  Normally a crash would be because popularity ended.  Interesting.
The stock price was around 18, then it shot up to around 38, then it crashed and is currently around 27.  It is still popular and may get even more popular.  If people weren't so ignorant and impulsive, the stock price would have quickly bumped up to the 20-22 range.

This is kind of funny.  People look stupid when they are wandering around together looking for pokemon with their phones.  It makes sense for people to look stupid for attempting to 'invest' in Pokémon.  From what I see, people are having fun looking for the pokemon but no one is actually playing the game where you make your pocket monsters fight each other.  That will probably describe the wane of popularity overall when it happens.