Trump Wins, Penny Walks, Tesla Soars
The day before the election, in our trading Substack, we entered an options trade betting on Tesla (TSLA) shares hitting $350 by the end of next year. Tesla hit $350 the next week. That might have been the first indication of the extent of the vibe shift created by Trump's remarkable victory.
The following week, we doubled down on Tesla, this time betting that it would hit $395 by the end of this year.
Tesla hit $400 today, the day after Daniel Penny was acquitted of all charges in his politically-motivated trial.
⚡️Meet The ADA Prosecuting Daniel Penny⚡️@captivedreamer7, the mystery man who brought the plight of Springfield, Ohio to light a couple of months ago, uncovers another eye-opening video. https://t.co/AEJjCJF3D7
— Portfolio Armor (@PortfolioArmor) December 5, 2024
As with Tesla hitting $400, Daniel Penny walking free was downstream of Trump's election victory: it's hard to imagine either happening had Kamala won instead. In today's guest post, our friend Kevin Dolan writes about what else might be possible in our new, better timeline. Before we get to that, two brief investing notes:
- Another consequence of Trump's election victory is the increased likelihood of China implementing massive stimulus. We had a nice exit on one of our trades anticipating that this week, QIFU Technologies ( QFIN 2.17%↑). We bought calls on it at $2.15 on 10/1/2024, and sold (half) at $6.45 on 12/9/2024, for a profit of 200%. If you'd like a heads up when we place our next trade, you can subscribe to our trading Substack/occasional email list here.
If you are concerned about downside risk, as a reminder, you can download our iPhone hedging app by aiming your iPhone camera at the QR code below (or by tapping here, if you're reading this on your phone).
Now on to Kevin's excellent guest post.
The Weight of the Boot
Donald Trump is the President-elect.
Bitcoin cracks $100K. Daniel Penny acquitted on all charges. Republican resistance to Trump’s appointees is collapsing. Comcast is selling MSNBC. Ubisoft is being dismantled to avert a hostile takeover.
The New York Times is well on its way to becoming a mobile mini-game company. Sarah Silverman says she’s not going to talk politics anymore because “no one wants to hear from celebrities.”
Black Lives Matter says that All Lives Matter.
It seems like everywhere we push back against America’s domestic enemies, they crumble like a rotten log.
What if we seized this moment, and won victories that were more than rear-guard actions against inevitable entropy?
What if, having routed our enemies, we took the strategic heights they control, opening frontiers for greater and more comprehensive victories?
It seems like they’d let us. It almost seems like they want us to.
The upside of a society long stultified by resentment and envy is that we have no idea what might be possible when those forces are defeated.
The US Government draws in $5 trillion every year — most of which is squandered or deployed to actively malicious and destructive ends.
But what if that unimaginable wealth were back in American hands, serving American interests?
And that’s only the money that is directly stolen.
There are tens of trillions of dollars in real estate distortion as Americans build sterile refugee camps to evade the consequences of the Civil Rights Act.
The light industrial and service businesses that lifted your ancestors from rural poverty to the middle class are illegal to run at sustainable margins thanks to American labor law, so they are largely cash operations run by immigrants who enslave their illegal cousins.
Everything else is provided by globocorps, because global scale allows them to evade reams of American regulation by building overseas and selling the finished product once the dirty work is done.
The American worker is more than twice as productive as fifty years ago, but can’t support a family on a single income.
What, exactly, is the weight of the boot on our necks?
And who would we be — what might we build — if the boot were lifted?
President Trump wants to build new “freedom cities” on federally-owned land — including the memetically delicious Presidio National Park (in the middle of San Francisco), and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
These cities would provide an escape from the suffocating political capture of America’s existing urban centers — a clean slate for sane regulation, and affordable, family-friendly housing.
Of course, to prevent these new cities from immediately going the way of the old, President Trump would have to restore freedom of association and repeal the 1964 Constitution — which may be too much to hope (though I believe, if he really meant it, he would have all the support he would need.)
But we can get a lot done with (just) post-deportation home prices, cheap energy, capital flight into crypto, and a deregulated boom economy — if we position ourselves to act.
We can build the new industries, the networks, and the families that will fully replace the old regime.
Managerial systems are failing because of their managerial character — their inability to keep faith, to exercise judgment, to care about the future.
So, of necessity, the future of government will be human — predicated on trust, loyalty, and friendship between human beings. (Fortified with crypto, drones, & other decentralizing technologies — more on this later.)
This means that some people, somewhere, will have to recover the habit, custom, and means of ruling. As in the collapse of the Soviet Union, the new regime will be those who acted while everyone else was waiting for orders.
As honorary EXIT man James Kirkpatrick said, “The point isn’t to remain ‘Dissident’ forever. It’s to simply become the Right. And then the Regime itself.”
EXIT News
On last week’s full-group call (December 3rd), we discussed elite education with an EXIT man who taught at some of the most prestigious boarding schools in Europe.
On tonight’s full group call (December 10th), we will conduct a year-end review and introduce our plans for 2025.
Dallas monthly dinner for EXIT men & families on December 16th. (details in RocketChat.)
Business Incubator and Ham Radio Licensing Groups are ongoing.
Quarterly file leader meeting last night — discussed NatalCon, Coronation Ball, and clubhouse projects in Austin and Salt Lake.
Members, please upload your resume to the EXITbot directory. Feel free to redact as appropriate — the tool is ready to use.
EXIT has secured a table at the Coronation Ball on January 19th at the Watergate Hotel in Washington, DC, and I will be speaking. If you requested a seat, I will be in touch shortly.
Natal Conference tickets are now on sale. Use offer code NATALISM for 10% off.
2025 Meetup Schedule coming soon.
