Moscow Metro's Michurinskiy Prospekt station, one of ten new stations opened in 2021 (Moskva Agency).
Why Can't America Have Nice Things?
Reactions to Tucker Carlson's short Moscow videos (particularly the subway comparison below) continued to pour in on Thursday, from everyone from U.S. Senators to billionaire hedge fund managers. I spent some time engaging with them on X via my personal account, and while many attacked Tucker and Russia, none could explain why Moscow can have clean and safe public transportation while no large city in the U.S. can.
Most people’s reactions are probably going to be wonder that we have worse cities than statistically poorer countries.
This isn’t really different from @Chris_arnade’s recent invidious comparison of New York to Sofia, except Arnade offered a politically correct theory to…
A journalist should do that, but in the meantime, don’t you wonder why New York’s subways can’t be nicer than those of a middle income country like Russia? https://t.co/TQeWMzQXiP
Russia Is Probably Spending Too Much On Its Subways
Probably less than New York’s MTA does, but whatever they spend, it’s worth it. The funny thing to me about Adam’s reaction is how it’s just pointing and sputtering.
Ironically, the only attempted apologia for America’s subway squalor I’ve seen comes from a Russian. https://t.co/juOMR67YoC
A dodge of what? You think Tucker is a traitor for pointing out that Moscow is clean and safe and offers an enviable quality of life for its residents? Is he a traitor for saying the same about Tokyo and Singapore, as he did earlier this week?
When Stalin died in 1953, the Moscow Metro had 40 stations and 4 lines. Today, it has 258 stations, and 14 lines, some of which were built only a few years ago, and they're beautiful too. https://t.co/mmX9AKhZct
Many commenters seemed to forget that Tucker's reporting was ultimately about America, not Russia. One example of this was billionaire hedge fund manager Clifford Asness attacking Tucker as a "sick, dictator-lover".
Hopefully, after the dust settles, instead of calling their fellow Americans "useful idiots", American elites will be shamed enough to the example of Moscow to give their constituents a better quality of life.
Why can’t Americans have nice things, Senator? It’s a reasonable question.
The ones who sound like Soviets today are the Americans trying to minimize the miracle (from our perspective) of clean and safe public spaces in Moscow.
In our Top Names post last night, in addition to sharing our current top ten names, we posted the performance of our top ten names from six months ago,
Over the next six months, our top ten names were up 35.94% on average, versus up 13.26% for SPY.
That was the 23rd top names cohort of 33 since we started this Substack that beat the market.
We also posted our personal performance in our core strategy so far:
Our Core Strategy
Our core strategy is to buy equal dollar amounts of the Portfolio Armor web app’s top ten names, put trailing stops of 10%-15% on them, and replace them with names from the current week’s top ten when we get stopped out of a position.
A Personal Performance Update
Here’s how the current names in my version of our core strategy are doing since I bought them so far (these are ranked alphabetically by stock symbol, the order they appear in my account):
*Return as of last Tuesday, when I got stopped out. I was going to replace Fabrinet (FN 0.00%↑) with one of last week’s top names, Marathon Digital (MARA -0.50%↓), but it ran up before I bought it.
As a reminder, you can find our current top ten names on our website or our Substack at the links below.
If You Want To Stay In Touch
You can scan for optimal hedges for individual securities, find our current top ten names, and create hedged portfolios on our website. You can also follow Portfolio Armor on Twitter here, or become a free subscriber to our trading Substack using the link below (we're using that for our occasional emails now).
Authored by Portfolio Armor via ZeroHedge February 16th 2024
