Recession? When?!?? – 1500 Days to Freedom

A couple of weeks ago, I was talking to a local friend who is a building inspector. We had an interesting conversation:

Me: Is work busy?
Him: Well, it was. But not now. A lot of builders I deal with were booked two years out as recently as 6 months ago. But many of the projects have been canceled. So now they’re looking for work.
Me: Wow, why?
Him: Dunno. Uncertainty about the economy?

In my head:

Table of Contents

AHHHHHH RECESSION!!!!!!

And then this came across my feed:

And then I read that the Air Force and Space Force met their recruiting goals months early. Some think this is a bad sign for the economy. The thought is that when jobs are scarce, people sign up for the military.

On the flipside, the betting markets aren’t as pessimistic:

What to do?

Don’t ask me! I play with plastic dinosaurs. Why are you even reading this?

OK, you want to know what I’m doing with my money? I’ll tell you.

I really dislike cash on the sidelines. It’s like when you hire an hourly worker and you catch them sitting in their truck looking at their phone when they’re supposed to be doing whatever you hired them to do. GRRRRRRR!!! Same with money:

No sitting on the sidelines little dollars. You will get to work for me IMMEDIATELY. Don’t dare utter the phrase dollar cost averaging in our house!

I’m a harsh boss. At least when it comes to money. And I just came into a lot of it.

I’m a fan of private lending and one of my borrowers just paid me back, so I had $362,000 dollars to deploy. Most of it went to two index funds:

VTI (ETF version of VTSAX): $212,175
QQQ (NASDAQ 100): $99,726

But I still like to play a little, so:

Folks are down and out on Google. It has a PE of 20, less than the S&P 500’s PE of 26 (!!!). Investors think Google is cooked:

ChatGTP is coming for Google’s lunch!

While Google was certainly caught off guard by ChatGPT, it has a lot going for it:

Google is very good at AI. Its efforts haven’t been as public facing as some of the others, but Google is going to be OK.
Waymo has completed 10,000,000 paid rides. 10,000,000!!! Tesla fanboys like to point out all of the issues with Waymo’s approach, but Tesla’s FSD has yet to do even one paid ride without a safety driver. Tesla may still eat Waymo’s lunch, but I have my doubts. FSD is very good, but still not nearly good enough for driverless autonomy. 2026? 2027?? Who knows. I don’t!
Quantum computing is the Next Big Thing. And I think it will be a Very Big Next Big Thing. And Google isn’t messing around. Check out this quote from Google’s blog:

Willow performed a standard benchmark computation in under five minutes that would take one of today’s fastest supercomputers 10 septillion (that is, 10²⁵) years — a number that vastly exceeds the age of the Universe.

Whaaaaaat?!????? I can’t even find my underwear in under 5 minutes.

But I digress…

What About That Recession?

A recession is coming. A recession is always coming. Like most things, markets are cyclical. A black swan will flap its wings and send Mr. Market crashing down. But then he’ll pick himself back up. It could start next month or next year. The only thing I know is that I don’t know. Trying to chase the timing is a silly errand for the long-term investor. Over decades, it just won’t matter. Tomorrow’s calamity will be a tiny blip 10 years from now.

I’m all-in all-the-time.