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Monday morning started off really rough.
I woke up at about 4 a.m., and the last I had seen of the markets, the /ES, /NQ, and /CL were all red. I didn’t look at my iPad, but I figured that, on the heels of the big rally on Friday, maybe we’d get a day when the good guys would win.
Well, I got into my home office and saw every single stock and futures market was bright green. There was chatter about Trump reneging on another campaign promise (tariffs) which was goosing markets higher. I also had the gloom of losing Coda still hanging over me, which has affected me FAR more than any human death in my life, including my parents.
And then, just to turn things from bad to awful, this email was waiting for me in my inbox.
RS Notices are like telegrams from the 1940s. They’re always bad news. I have signed up to get an email any time the darlings at the IRS have sent me something in the mail.
I will pause here and make clear that, although no one likes taxes, and not that many people are crazy about the goings-on in D.C., nobody here – – nobody – – has the level of contempt for government that I do. I won’t get into it, because if I really expressed the level of my hatred for the government, I’d probably lose a good chunk of my followers here. So, we’ll all just pretend that my feelings aren’t especially strong, because I don’t want Timothy Knight to get conflated with Timothy McVeigh.
Having said that, I was horrified at seeing that email, because the IRS basically has one function: to terrorize the middle class (while letting the elites pay almost no taxes at all). So, I was thinking to myself the LAST thing I need to be dealing with now, besides my sad feelings and this goddamned stupid market, is for the goddamned IRS to be attacking me for some reason or another.
Once I finally logged into their site and got past the security protocol, there was the notification waiting for me. Was it an audit? A huge bill? Nope. These numb-nuts were just sending me a PDF to remind me to fill out Form 8936 since I had bought an electric vehicle that year. Jesus H. Christ.
Thanks, clowns. I appreciate you giving me a jump-scare while telling me something I didn’t have to be told. And I’m so grateful to have sent you millions of dollars throughout my life and having received absolutely ZERO. The government has never provided me one single penny of value in my entire life.
Don’t get me wrong. I love the VALUES this nation was ostensibly built upon. But I despise the government more than my eloquent words could ever express. It isn’t contempt. It’s WAY beyond that. And, like I said, I’m not going to even try to express it, because you would be shocked beyond imagination.
The curious thing is what a surge of joy I felt at………….well…………..nothing! I had braced myself for some kind of shitty news, and then having witnessed the utterly retarded reason those clowns were contacting me, I was suddenly in a much better mood than even before I saw the aforementioned notice.
In a curious way, this steeled my trading, because instead of running scared, closing out positions, and generally freaking out, I actually strapped on a bar and not only didn’t ditch positions, but I INCREASED those I felt worthy of it. It’s like the idiots at the IRS had inadvertently giving me a big old pint of Brave Juice that I slammed back.
Thus, although the /ES and /NQ did indeed climb during the day, their closing figures were a fraction of where they were at early in the morning………….
The bottom line to all this is that was started out as a miserable, awful, horrible feeling wound up, at day’s end, to a really good sensation and a nice gain in my portfolio.
Sometimes we just have to tough it out. I am normally supremely bad at that kind of thing, but when I manage to do so…………….it’s an awfully nice feeling.