Why Can't America Have Nice Things?

Michurinskiy Prospekt Moscow Metro Station
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. 

Here is a sample of some of the attacks used by Tucker haters and responses to them. 

Better To Live Free In Moscow, Idaho

Moscow Isn't Russia

Russia Is Poorer Than America

Russia Is Probably Spending Too Much On Its Subways

Tucker Is Up To Something Nefarious

Moscow Subways Are All Thanks To Stalin

This Is About America, Not Russia

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". 

Ironically, Asness himself had pointed out earlier this week how Americans don't get their tax money's worth when it comes to government competence. 

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. 

In Case You Missed It

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):

 

why cant america have nice things

*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