The Capitalist Investor

Boiling Over! Inflation / DRIP / SPR / Tipping / Browns Season, Ep. #203

November 16, 2023 Strategic Wealth Partners
The Capitalist Investor
Boiling Over! Inflation / DRIP / SPR / Tipping / Browns Season, Ep. #203
Show Notes Transcript

Welcome to the Capitalist Investor podcast! Join hosts Derek, Tony, and Luke as they dive into relevant topics such as inflation, dividend reinvestment programs (DRIP), the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, tipping culture, and NFL updates. They also share their perspective on the economy and market reactions to the recent inflation report.

Tipping Culture: Tony, Derek, and Luke had an engaging discussion on tipping culture in America, bringing about multiple perspectives to the table. While all agreed about generously tipping: hairdressers, bartenders, and restaurant servers, Luke suggested that tipping should always be a personal choice and not a mandatory expectation.

Inflation Report and Its Consequences: The hosts delved deep into the upcoming inflation report, showing a 40% difference between small businesses' perceptions and official data. They discussed Home Depot's prediction of the worst of inflation being over, and concerns about the potential fallout if it reaches 10%.

Dividends Reinvestment and Wash Sales: The conversation took a financial turn as the hosts discussed the risks and drawbacks of Dividend Reinvestment Programs (DRIPs). They also brought forth the concept of wash sales, explaining what they are and the tax strategies to avoid them.

21:05 Government Economics and the Strategic Petroleum Reserve: A riveting discussion followed about government economics and the time it would take to restore the depleted Strategic Petroleum Reserve. The hosts expressed their criticisms and shared their predictions about high US oil production filling the economic gap.

35:20 NFL Games and Betting Odds: The hosts definitely showcased their love for the NFL in this episode. Talking about delineating betting odds for the Browns game, injury updates for players like Deshaun Watson and Nick Chubb, and predictions for the Steelers against the Browns made for an interesting conversation for all the football lovers tuning into this episode.

Hello and welcome to this week's episode of the Capitalist Investor. As always, you have me, Diamond Hands D. We got the whole crew here today. Tony the tiger. Cool hands Luke. What's up, guys? How we doing? Tony's on fire, dude. He's heated up today. I don't know. I think we need sound effects when we get our intros down. Hey, Chris, our engineer, can you get like a roaring tiger when he introduces cool hand Luke? Like, what that sound like? I don't know. I'm thinking about me and not you. Selfish Tony. Hey, man, you got to come with the heat, man. I usually try to. Yeah, I usually get flak for it. Everyone's like, calm the frick down. Isn't a cool hand Luke. Isn't that like the sound effect? Yeah, play. Okay, that's the one. All right. It's past before my time, but is what it is. I don't know. Well, it's definitely. We'll have our. Came out in like the 60s, I'm pretty sure. Yeah, way before my time. You guys are boomers, so you guys are fine. All right, what do we got today? All right, today we got inflation report. So that was the big news yesterday and today. So that's two days ago. By the time this is out, we got a nice email from a listener. So we'll talk a little drip and wash rule. So that'll be a good one to talk about. Strategic Petroleum Reserve some action there. So we'll touch on that. And then the fourth topic, I think we'll go talk about tipping and if there's any inflation going on, when you're supposed to tip and how much and how annoying it's getting. And then lastly, we'll talk a little NFL, maybe just the. Some bad news came down as soon as we sat down. It's just bad news. It could be bad news. All right. It's good news for me. Yeah. All right, we'll get to that later. All right, first number one, inflation report. All right, yesterday was what, CPI and Core, and then today was another like PPI. Yeah, it's all coming out. The big news of the day is essentially a flock to crap. Essentially everything that has a lot of debt in the market that is being financed and never has been profitable rallied hard this week on Tuesday. And including today, it's continuing the rally. Small caps had their best day, 5% maybe ever in a very long time. 5% rally. I mean, that's unheard of. So it was a flock to those stocks that completely got beaten down because of higher interest rates because inflation comes down, rates can go lower. Right. So I just don't believe what the government puts out for inflation data anymore. I have a point I want to talk about, but I want to hear your thoughts first before I bring out my points. I'm ready to go. You go first. I'm ready to rip. Yes. So I'm new car shopping. Well, it's not as fun as it used to be. I think we might need to add. A couple of minutes to this section, long story short. So I got my lease in 2020. Thought that was a bad time back then with inventory and stuff, but now it's bad. So essentially stay in the same car. It's a 67% price increase from what I was in 2020. And I've been saying that everything's up. Call it 20% to 60% depending on what you're buying from two years ago. It's insane. And how long was your lease? Like three. Yeah, three years. Is your salary up? 64. 67% to keep up with that. All right. The Costco bills every week, you just see them going up and up and up and up. So, yeah, what Luke said, it's hard when you feel the inflation every single day. It's hard to get excited for these reports that come out and say that inflation is quote unquote, cooling. When I think what the core number was under by a 10th of a percent from what they were predicting, and who knows what's going into these numbers. But the market sure liked it. All right, so there was ten basis points, 0.1% better than expected, and the market rallied 2%. And then today, same store sales came out year over year. They're down. So for retailers, expect to have some sales during Santa Claus season and Christmas, things like that. But we're in a. Again, here's this word that inflation is still going up. It's not going up as high, and we're in a disinflation environment. The economy is slowing down. I know that the last GDP ripped, it was over almost 5%. But the Atlanta Fed keeps on driving down the next quarter, and we're almost at one. And I'd like to remind everyone that the world is experiencing negative GDP. Saudis felt it last week or two ago, they were down like three or 4%. Japan just reported they're down 3%. And it's not good around us and worth. Now our GDP is also going down. Right now it's still positive, but we'll see a lot of things can change between now and the next reading. But at the end of the day, the Fed wants a recession rather than a spike in inflation because if they take their foot off, the gas inflation will spike again if they don't get this. The, the what? The market rejoiced because there was a possible. With inflation coming down, the chances of a rate hike have gone from 30% to zero on a ten basis point move in inflation. You saw bonds. Yeah. You saw bonds go from 5% on a 30 year to like 4.6% in about one of the biggest moves ever. In one day, or like two days on a decline in the last like two weeks. Yeah, it went from like 4.85 to 4.6 in a day. So that bond rally, essentially lower rates are great for those high duration technology, no profitability stocks, which you saw yesterday. I wanted to hit on real quick. The mark tweeted, retweeted on Twitter, or I should say X now about health insurance costs. One of the inputs of the report inflation report is that health insurance costs was down 34% year over year. Do you guys feel like your health insurance costs are down 34%? No, I'm pretty sure I got the recalibration of ours and it's up like 5%. Yeah, I don't know what anyone's talking about. So that's 40% swing between what the inflation report is compared to what small businesses are feeling. How true is that inflation report, guys? I'll take that to my health insurance. Yeah, right. But I mean, we went from cuts at the end of this year, which didn't happen. Now we're going from rate cuts in June. Now they're down to March, all because of yesterday's report. It's Unbelievable. It's wild. It really is. And you heard it here first. Home Depot said inflation. The worst is behind us. I hope so. Visionaries. I mean, I hope the worst is behind us. The Fed messes it up. Well, the question is, we're not going to get back, probably back to 10% inflation year over year anytime soon. But do we stay at four or 5%? Knock on some wood, dude. Yeah, man. I'm not going to 10%. I don't think if we go to 10% inflation. Oh, you were there. Oh, my gosh, guys. Yeah, it's not good. I think they'll get ready. They will completely wreck the economy. To make sure that that doesn't go get that parachute. You're going to be coming in hot. All right. Anything else on inflation, guys? Because that's a fun topic. I think our time is up. I think you just got to go walk down Main street of Cleveland, Ohio, and ask people if they're hurting with inflation. And I think you get your answer. Yeah, everybody. I think government and Wall street need to stop living their fairytale worlds. All right, we did have a listener come in with a question saying, what was it saying about a drip program? So that's a dividend reinvestment program is what it stands for. So if you're a stealth investor, you own stocks, and that stock pays a dividend, like maybe like Coca Cola or whatever, it'll take the dividends and reinvest them. Kind of like a mutual fund would, right? But the question was, hey, guys, one topic I thought you'd like to tackle is the DrIP program dividend reinvestment. And I generally do this. However, I recently screwed myself by selling a position for a loss, not realizing the week before I paid a dividend that was also reinvested, walking me into a wash sale. Now I'm thinking about just turning them all off to avoid a repeat long story. The short answer is, yeah, I would turn that off. Especially because if you're not diligently watching every single thing that's happening, because if you own multiple stocks that are doing, they're all paying the dividends at the different times and who knows what you're doing? Like, hey, I want to sell this stock and get into this one because it's ripping or whatever. You just never know. So I think that at the end of this is having that active management and being on top of it, whether you do that on your own or you hire a money manager, but putting things on automatic, it's hard to remember that stuff. There's so much stuff going on in day to day. If you're taking a Warren Buffett style view of investing and going to buy a stock for 30 freaking years and hold it and just say, I'm, no matter what, going to hold this stock and never sell it till the day I retire. Turn it on then. Turn it on because you'll collect your dividends, it'll do. Not going to ever create a wash sale because you're never going to sell it. But if you are being active with that, getting that dividends in your cash account to deploy, boy, with new investments and ideas that come up over time and valuations, as you start to see some discrepancies up in the marketplace and valuations, things like that, then it makes sense to deploy some of that cash and not reinvest in just the stocks because you might sell tomorrow if the stock rallies that you own, that you like, rallies 40%. You might be like, hey, I'm going to take some money off the table. There's no point in your diamond hands good if your paper hands not good. But just to give some people some insight, a wash sale is, for example, you have a $500 loss in ABC stock and you bought it for $40, and you want to sell it at 25 to experience that $15 per share loss. And then about 15 days later, you hear some good news about ABC stock after you sold it, and you want to buy back those 500 shares or whatever at $30. Even though you experienced a loss of $15, you're not allowed to claim that loss since it was within 30 days. So in addition, since you have the wash, you have to readjust the cost basis of that new purchase by adding $15 a share, resulting in a new, lower cost basis, or actually, I'm sorry, a cost basis of$45. Now, here's a tax planning tip, Though. It's like one of the things that we take a look at sometimes is if we still like a security and we're down a little bit, we want to do some tax loss harvesting at the end of the year, we can sell a security and buy something very similar. Just that with a different ticker and different ETF or something like that. That is something a little bit different, but basically the same thing. And then that way you get away from the wash sale rule. What example? You had Exxon, you sold it, and then you buy Chevron or something, right? Yeah. Okay. So, yeah, if you're an active, again, at the end of the day, if you're an active trader, just turn these automatic things off and just remind yourself. Maybe put a calendar reminder on once a week to see what dividends have been paid and you can rebuy them on your. Got anything? I'm not sure what else I can add to that fire, Tony. Just making the wash sale rule come alive. That was perfect. Making it sound fun and sexy. I like it. All right, so here's a topic I mentioned this last week, the Strategic Petroleum reserve. Okay, so it maxed out. The Max you can put in this thing is like 714,000,000 barrels. That's the max. We're at about 351. So President Biden has sold well over 200 million barrels over the course of the last year, year and a half or so. So we're down to about 50%. I mentioned last week. I'm like, hey, oil is below $80, and I think their range was like high sixty S to mid seventy s. And we got there. So the government has gone out and renegotiate or put a bid in to buy 1.2 billion barrels at$77 a barrel. And then they also let me add to this because then it makes it even more dramatic. They're going to buy 3 million more barrels in December and 3 million more in January for a Grand total of 7 million barrels. That is 1% of the entire thing. Good job, guys. I'm done. You guys would like to add to that now? I'm just pissed off. You're going to add 7 million barrels like you depleted it by 200? Yeah. Get out of here, man. Government economics, it's going to take a long time to fill that bad boy back up. It's going to take a long time, especially with that math that you just walked through there. Yeah, it goes along with the point you made last week about us being the highest oil production, though, in history, too. So, I mean, instead of buying it from outside the mean we can start really just hammering it here in the US and hopefully fill it out. But you just won't hear about it from the Biden administration because it goes against their green. Have a, I have a friend on Facebook that posted something along the lines of, he posted the recent gas prices around Cleveland and most of the gas prices are somewhere around $3. And he's a left sided person. So he's like a Democrat. Hardcore, actually. He'll even come out and tell you, like, man, I'm just so left, it's not even funny. And he said, man, Biden's really cranking on this economy. Look at these gas prices, man. I'm trying to control myself and I'm like, man, do I point out a few things to them or do I just let it go? What do you guys think? I hope you taught them a few things. All right. You know what? I'm starting to slowly learn in my young years that sometimes it's better just. To shut the know. Most of the. Got. If they got Tony today, though, you would have told him. You would put him in place. Tony today, I read this early morning. Maybe it's what caused me to be so fired up today. I don't know. What were you saying? D. I'm sorry. Let's take a poll. Should I do it? Should I blow this dude up? No, I got a bunch of the siding factor. Chris, our engineer. Should I blow this dude up? No. God, because you're a Democrat. No. You will respond and he'll respond. He'll respond, someone else respond. And now you just wasted an hour of your life teaching somebody that's worthless that they're not going to care about. You're never going to change your mind, right? So what is the point? Maybe I just make a post and I just say so and so's name and just say, time's too valuable. You're just wasting time arguing. Here's whaT. Me and my friends ever change their mind? God, I have a couple of friends that are too far gone. We just make jokes to each other. That's how we handle it. We subtly just are sarcastically joking. We don't necessarily try to convince each other. Hey, you're wrong. Actually. It's just like we just send memes to each other about Biden stubbling on his words or Trump saying something ridiculous. Right? So I think that's really the solution when it comes to friend groups because we still love our friends even though they're too far gone. But there's no really way of addressing or convincing them. Like Chris said, it is what it is. I don't know if I'm going to stop here. I'm going to ask some other people. All right, moving on. All right, let's continue knowing Tony doesn't even have the time to think about. I don't, but this one's got me. All you do is work all day. This one's got me. All right, anything else? Guys, get down. I don't see it. You won. I can't with you. That's how you know in today's world, they delete social media posts. You won or lost a snapshot of it. All right, go ahead. I'm sorry, guys. All right, well, I think the timer just rang there. So the last topic, tip fllation. So basically, this is just from a news article we found. But seven in ten adults, 72%, say tipping is expected in more places today than it was five years ago. How many? 72%. 72% of who? Adults. Adults? Yeah. Whoever they surveyed, basically. Are they just taking this from the people that are in the service industry. And saying, oh, no, it's like every. No, they're asking everyone in general, like, are you expected to tip more? Oh, wow. And 72% of people are saying yes. So what do you guys tip? Let's start off with this. When you go to a restaurant or even a coffee shop now and just order a black coffee, they're expecting you to tip. What do you guys typically do you change it up or do you tip the same? No matter what? Do you not tip at all? In some instances. Let's start with restaurants. When you go out to a restaurant, what do you tip? Like a sit down restaurant? Yeah. 20%. 2020? Yeah. I'm 18 to 20 in that range. Maybe I round up. Maybe I round down. Exactly. Depending on the service, I do the quick match. Who has good service? Then they get maybe higher than 20 by a couple of percentage points. Okay, so we're on the same page here. Let's say you do go to a coffee shop. All right? And you just order a black coffee. You don't sit down or you go to Starbucks, even something like that. Do you tip? So I don't really go to Starbucks anymore. You make your coffee at home. You have a French press. You're making your own. Right. You know, I have the Nespresso, and that actually works really nice. If you want a know latte or something like, you know, just the regular Keurig with Starbucks coffee. So it's not like I'm boycotting them. Or so I'm a Dunkin's guy, and I normally, because the lines are so damn long, I order it on my phone and I just run in and I run out. So there is no opportunity for me to tip. I mean, I guess I can run over there and throw a dollar. They still ask you, though, on the app, though, right? No, not on the Duncan app. Not that I believe. I think they just put my thing in and I'm going to pick it up and off we go. However, if I have to walk in and do it, if I have, like, a dollar or two in my pocket, I'll do that. What about if you're ordering out, you put an order in and you're going to go to the restaurant and pick it up. They give you the receipt. Where? Here's the I don'tip. You don'tip? And they sometimes make me feel bad about it. Yeah, I put a dollar or two or three, depending on how big the order is, because I just feel like that person is probably making close to minimum wage. And they're usually a young person, like high school, young college, whatever that might be. And I wish somebody would have done that when I was younger. Right? Like, when I was in those kind. Of made you work harder because you didn't. Right. To achieve where you're at now. You know what I mean? My lawn guy, I have somebody that cuts My grass, and he sends me the bill through into it. So, like, whatever. The Quickbooks. Quickbooks, yeah. And there's an opportunity for me to tip on that. And I'm like, you already raised the fee on me this year. That one irks me. Haircuts. Do you tip haircuts? Absolutely. I do too. Have you seen this flow? 30%, sometimes even haircuts. My quick. So getting on all the data points we kind of just touched on, I think my philosophy is it should be up to you. Right. It should never be expected. And really, America is one of the only societies culturally to where tipping is almost expected. It's actually frowned upon a lot of other societies and countries, and also it's not expected in a lot of countries. They're the ones that's not frowned upon. So America is one of the only countries where it's like you need a tip no matter what you do, essentially. I mean, just imagine a financial advisor asking for a tip or something. This is the world we're heading into. Is everyone is kind of expecting something else, something more, because we're greedy, we're a culture of greed. I think it should be up to the individual to choose, hey, maybe a haircut looks really good today. I'm going to tip because I think he did a really good job. It should be on performance. Well, all right, well, if we're going to stick on hair, I've been going to the same hair person for over ten years, so she gets me in. When I ever ask, like, hey, are you open at this time? Yes. It's never. No. Right. But I also tipper over 25%. So I don't know, I get better service from the same person because I take care of them. 100% agree with that. If you're going to show your face more than once or twice at a place. Yeah, you definitely better tip pretty well because they'll remember that, like my local spot that I go to for dinner a lot and maybe a beer every. Once in while a. I don't know how much more time we have on this topic, but this is an entertaining. Topic to me because I remember talk about this. I didn't. But here's what I used to do in college. So aCtually, Mark and I used to do this. We would go to our frequent hangout bar, restaurant, whatever, for our Thursday, Friday night shenanigans, whatever. And if there was ever a new bartender, we would always tip the bartender well. But if there was ever a new one, and let's say the bill was $50, we would leave them like $25 tip. Maybe more like something so over the top that they're not going to forget who I am. So that when I come in the following week, my drinks are either stronger, I might get a free one. So there's an angle there, too. But you can't just do it. And it's something where it's like you go there a lot. Well, this is the philosophy of business in general. You spend money to make money. Right? Or you spend money to get some sort of benefit down the road. That's how business works in general. Capitalism. Capitalism, baby. Tip to get better drinks. Exactly. All right, good topic, good topic. Just dropping knowledge on everyone here. All right. Anyway, well, so Derek doesn't drink, so. We can't talk about beer. Yep. Now we've talked that we're not tipping. Anyone, but he does get that haircut. How you do that? Oh, yeah. No, I used to go to a lady who was right by my house in Legacy Village when I lived over there. And she has since moved out to Chesterland, basically. So I drive all the way out there to see her still. Oh, wow. Yeah. So it's not too far. It's probably 22, 23 minutes from the office. But, yeah, same thing. If you do a good job, I'm going to want to tip you. It's the people that just flip the iPad around and expect a 20% tip for handing me my food. That's getting real annoying. Yeah. All right, well, let's wrap it up with canceled. So I guess the Browns season is officially canceled. Deshaun Watson out for the full season. That is breaking news as of when we hopped on recording this. So tomorrow it'll be old news, but I even called him Mr. Glass in the last couple of weeks. Like, man, this dude falls down and he's limping, getting up, like, what the heck is going on? I don't know, man. I guess the Browns just can't have nice things. And guess who you have coming up this week? Steelers. This quarterback sucks, too. Oh, yeah, Pickett's rough. All right, so Luke's. He's a Steelers fan. I'm a Browns fan. What are you today, Derek? I've always been a Bills fan, so I always support the local team, but I'm a Bills fan. Well, I am, too. I mean, that's why I'm a Steelers fan. I grew up 45 minutes away from Pittsburgh. So in Ohio Valley, good old Southeast Ohio. It's going to be a good game, guys. I think the Browns right now, the money line is. -200 what did this? Man, I wish I would have known what the line movement was. The Browns are favored. Oh, yeah. That was of yesterday. I checked it. What was the line yesterday it was. Like -200 to the Browns. They were very favored pretty well. So 200 is typically like 64. I do remember the Browns were minus four, I believe, and I think that equates to a 200 point. Someone looked that up. So draft Kings. Let's check that out. Brown rods. I can't believe. Oh, my God. Oh, wow. The line movement moved. Yeah. Minus what? To minus two. It's two points, but they're still favored. Which I think was five to minus two. Something like it's going to be a close game because what do they always say? Like, the home team gets minus three points anyway just for being the home team. Over. Under, though, 34 and a half points. It went to 34. Yeah. Oh, man. I don't know what it was. I'm taking the over on that, baby. I think it was probably. Wow. I actually saw the lowest college football game line last week. It was like, wasn't it Rutgers? It was like 28 or something. Yeah, it was Rutgers and Iowa. Iowa. Yeah. Iowa. 28 points and they still went under. It was 22 to nothing. Iowa. Holy cow. I think the Steelers are going to pull this off, guys. I'm sorry. That's my prediction. I'm going to take a nice little stand of, let's call it the over. I think the over is going to happen. Let's go. 20, 117. Steelers. There's got to be some kind of conspiracy, man. His shoulder has been ailing forever. I don't remember him taking a serious hit where his shoulder was all jacked up during that game. What the heck happened? Are they so dumb? There's so many things I'm so pissed off about. First of all, why didn't they get a quarterback before the trade deadline? Obviously, Dobbs is lighting it up in Miami or Minnesota. Yeah, they obviously know stuff that they're not telling the public. So if he's just out for the season right now, I assumed it was going to be his ankle because the ankle was his most recent. And then I saw his shoulder. It's like, well, what has been going on this whole entire time? Obviously way more than you're letting on or he's just kind of not super into it. And that's what it looks like. It looks like he's not into playing. Yeah, that's one thing. And I blame the owner. Isn't this the yearly talks of Brown fan? I hear the same thing every single not. It's. Sundays are just not fun. I mean, this last Sunday was. This. The whole culture around Cleveland this year has been better than I've seen since I've been up in like, I feel like the hype around Browns is better than ever. Maybe not anymore, but it'll still be fine. But I mean, I don't know. They had the trade deadline. I feel like they can still go get somebody. I've seen this before. Some other trade or something will happen. Like, I thought the trade line, trade deadline was over, but I feel like they can still go do something if they needed to. But maybe I'm wrong. Bring back Brissette. Bring back the slow coke, brisket. Okay, so you guys taking the over under a money line of who. I don't touch Browns game. It's bad juju. I never win, but I can't bet against them and I hate betting with them. Go ahead, Derek. I would take the Steelers. For know, it's pretty evident when the Browns locker room gives up. And I think with Watson being down for the year, I think they're going to mail it. So I take the Steelers. Do you think they're going to mail it? Browns? Oh, yeah. Really? They're six and three. They had one of their biggest wIns. They had a quarterback. I don't know. There was a lot of hype. Maybe because you're not a Browns fan. My Twitter feed, like, dude, they were going crazy in the locker game. Yeah, last week. Yeah, I do remember. Yeah, it was great. No Deshaun Watson and what happened? Well, we shouldn't have even bothered to show up. That was Stefanski's fault. Well, actually it was Deshaun's fault. He didn't let him know he wasn't playing until

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00 and they had no game plan for the rookie quarterback. But we do have PJ Walker. Woof. So I don't know, man. He's got more interceptions than touchdowns on a career. Staff Chubb just gone forever. Or is he like, coming back next year? He had his second surgery yesterday or something like that. They said he'll be back next year, but that could be like week ten. Who knows? Well, guys, that was a fun one. Tony, come in hot. More like that. I like Tony. Hot Tony. I feel like I'm rude when I'm hot. It takes the pressure off of me to be hot. All right, guys, well, thanks for joining us this week. If you have any questions, comments, hit us up at info@swpconnect.com and we'll talk to you next week. The opinions expressed in the podcast are for general informational purposes only and are not intended to provide specific advice or recommendations for any investment, legal, financial, or tax strategy. It is only intended to provide education about the financial industry. Please consult a qualified professional about your individual needs.