Today in Newfoundland…I ask this question,
“How would like to wake to the sound of a waterfall in your back yard?”
February 12, 2022
Develop A Peaceful Core
To be effective in the world, you have to carry within you a core of untroubled calm, a sense of inner peace that is content in who you are, with all your best intentions and all your imperfections. When you maintain that peaceful core within you, you can weather whatever storms are happening on the outside.
- It takes vigilance and constant effort to stay positive. Tend the garden of your thoughts. Check in with your inner dialog. Pay attention to what you’re paying attention to. When you find critical, resentful, blaming, worrying, or complaining thoughts starting to sprout, yank them out and toss them over your shoulder.
- Don’t let yourself react to problems with panic or anxiety. Stay possibility-focused. Most problems are really just situations waiting for your measured response.
- Be quick to forgive and even quicker to apologize. Grudges only get worse with time. Let go of the garbage.
- Be conscious of how much negativity you’re letting into your brain, from television, newspapers, gossip, and so forth. Manage your exposure. Do what you need to do to stay positive, and be protective of your peaceful core.
ACTION STEP
Identify what action you can take every day, or at least every few days, that keeps you calm and connects you with your peaceful core. Write it down. Now write it into your calendar. Don’t leave it in limbo. Make it a regular habit to schedule time for that activity. It may be the most important appointment you have.
February 12, 2021
Good morning.
2021 is shaping up to be the year of the gamma squeeze. After moving on from heavily-shorted names like GameStop (GME), traders have turned to the pot stocks. The marijuana stocks have seen massive moves higher in recent days, largely as options trading has exploded.
With a big drop on Thursday, no doubt many of the professional players in the space have taken some profits and are looking to move on. What’s next for traders? Commodity-related plays have been performing strongly and are ripe for a squeeze (see our Unusual Options Activity trade of the day below). And Special Purpose Acquisition Companies, or SPACs have made the IPO market even hotter by being positioned as a pre-IPO trade.
Now here’s the rest of the news:
One-third of Small Businesses Say They Won’t Survive Without More COVID Aid –Megan Henney
Six months into the pandemic, debt mounted and business owners plowed their personal savings into their firms to keep them afloat. And they’re even more fragile now…
February 12, 2020
Good morning.
It’s important to be mindful of the fact that the stock market and the economy are two different things. As often as they’re in agreement, they’re just as often not.
Case in point: The Baltic Dry Index. A rough measure of global trade — at least in physical goods — the index continues to hit new lows on global economic uncertainty. Set against a back-drop of near-record-high stock prices, it’s a stark contrast. It’s also a good reminder that the current market could see further, seemingly unsuspected, drops ahead.
Annie Lowrey: February 7, 2020 [Staff writer at The Atlantic]
In the 2010s, the national unemployment rate dropped from a high of 9.9% to its current rate of just 3.5 percent. The economy expanded each and every year. Wages picked up for high-income workers as soon as the Great Recession ended, and picked up for lower-income workers in the second half of the decade. Americans’ confidence in the economy hit its highest point since 2000, right before the dot-com bubble burst. The headline economic numbers looked good, if not great.
But beyond the headline economic numbers, a multifarious and strangely invisible economic crisis metastasized: Let’s call it the Great Afford-ability Crisis. This crisis involved not just what families earned but the other half of the ledger, too — how they spent their earnings. In one of the best decades the American economy has ever recorded, families were bled dry by landlords, hospital administrators, university bursars, and child-care centers. For millions, a roaring economy felt precarious or downright terrible.
Viewing the economy through a cost-of-living paradigm helps explain why roughly two in five American adults would struggle to come up with $400 in an emergency so many years after the Great Recession ended. It helps explain why one in five adults is unable to pay the current month’s bills in full. It demonstrates why a surprise furnace-repair bill, parking ticket, court fee, or medical expense remains ruinous for so many American families, despite all the wealth this country has generated. Fully one in three households is classified as “financially fragile.”
Along with the rise of inequality, the slowdown in productivity growth, and the shrinking of the middle class, the spiraling cost of living has become a central facet of American economic life. It is a crisis amenable to policy solutions at the state, local, and federal levels — with all of the 2020 candidates, President Donald Trump included, teasing or pushing sweeping solutions for the problem. But absent those solutions, it looks certain to get worse for the foreseeable future — leaving households fragile, exacerbating the country’s inequality, slowing down growth, smothering productivity, and putting families’ dreams of security out of reach.
“Is there anything that can be done?” … 😉
February 12, 2019
My day in the shade! 😎
By investing the time and energy to get clear on our values and life purpose, by defining and articulating what we really want from all areas of our life, and then consistently acting on our objectives, we will live a successful life. This kind of work isn’t easy. It requires deep thinking and honest soul-searching. It’s not something you do in an afternoon. It demands constant focus and attention. Unless you are the architect of your life, you are at the effect of everything and everyone you encounter. It’s something with which we all need help.
