Party & Bullsh*t

Some stuff I came across this week…

The CEO of American Airlines, Doug Parker (CNBC):

“I don’t think we’re ever going to lose money again. The old world was darkness, but now it’s light. I know I sound like an evangelist talking about this.”

Hold onto that one.

Jason Calcanis, a venture capitalist on a mission to show mom and pop investors how they can be just like him (New York Times):

“Most of you are screwed,” he writes in “Angel,” arguing that a coming revolution in robotics and artificial intelligence will eliminate millions of jobs and destroy the old ways of getting ahead in America.

“In my mind, candidly, we’ve got a 70 percent chance of figuring out this massive sea change without starting a full-on revolution in the streets, like we saw in Greece or Egypt, or any other place where unemployment among young adults breaks 20 percent,”

But don’t worry, there’s a solution and it’s Jason’s book:

His book is intended as a guide for getting into the business of investing in very young tech companies at their earliest stages, known as “angel investing.” Mr. Calacanis is peddling a kind of populist movement for investing — he wants doctors, lawyers and other wealthy people, and even some in the middle class, to bet on start-ups, which he says is the best way to prepare financially for tech change.

So if everyone takes a one in a million shot, a few hundred ordinary people can become VC gods too. Got it.

Blackstone’s veteran market watcher Byron Wein has some thoughts about how much farther the market has to run, based on anecdotes with a sprinkling of data on top of some gut feeling – the way we did things in the Old Timey days (Barron’s):

Another important warning signal is the Leading Indicator Index, which has been climbing steadily since 2016. Recent data shows the possibility of a growth slowdown but a continuation of the expansion. The slowdown, if it comes, may trigger a correction in the equity market, but the present steep slope of this indicator suggests nothing more serious than that. Based on this data, even when the Index tops out, we would still have as long as two years for the market to work its way higher before the downturn begins.

In summation, the good old days of never losing money are here to stay, for probably at least two years, until of course there is revolution in the streets because the robots decimate everyone who isn’t a venture capitalist.

Got it.