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birb_cromble  1mo ago (text post)   713 thread views

Weekly Finance Thread - 2026-07-11

A weekly thread to discuss financial matters - from personal all the way up to global.

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I finally sold some of my INTC holdings a while ago at 136/share up from about a 37/share cost basis. Sold off about 1/3rd of my stake and decided to let the rest ride. That's worked out pretty well.

Finally cut MSFT loose too. This latest round of layoffs with H1B applications just makes clear the looters at the top are wholy dedicated to converting the entire market cap into H1B's. Product quality be damned. I was holding on for a while since line kept going up, but I'm out now. Still walked away up 100%.

What is your rationale for keeping 2/3rds of it? Do you see more upside?

Well, I know its a bad way of thinking about it, but its "house money" now. I've already recouped my investment, saved for taxes, and rotated it into a mutual fund. And like I said, I still think the CEO is going to sell the company. So maybe the buyout price has more upside.

Nice one on INTC. You got fairly close to the recent top.

I’m in at about $23. Not sure when you entered or why, but it was so beat up last summer it was irresistible. Combined with headlines at the time about concern over US-made semiconductors, I figured something would change. I just had no idea how right I’d be.

And I can tell you it was luck and not conviction, because I’m only exposed to 100 shares. I haven’t closed it yet, though, so I should keep bragging to a minimum.

I'm terrible at picking entry prices. I just kept loading up after Pat Gelsinger was back in as CEO because I thought someone would realize Intel is an indispensable American company with Taiwan off the coast of an increasingly belligerent China. I believed in his vision for Intel and the turn around of their foundries. I bought from $60 when he first got in, and loaded up pretty heavily down in the 20's and 30's too.

I no longer have that thesis for Intel. I'm almost certain the new CEO is a hatchet man, who's only brought in to generate some headlines and goose the share price ahead of pieces of the company, or the entire company, being sold off for the best price they can manage. I cannot imagine after all the layoffs and devastated morale that the company still has the institutional knowledge to capitalize on the tepid fruits of Pat Gelsinger's plans anymore. So I took some profit where I could, protected my original investment, and I'm curious to see where the rest goes. Maybe Intel will get sold to Nvidia, or the US Government, or who knows who, at $160/share or something.

What are your opinions on covered call funds, like JEPI, vs traditional income investments like bonds or dividend stocks? If you have a shorter time horizon than would be appropriate for something like a whole market fund, they seem to sit at a nice risk/return point. On the other hand, their returns seem to come in the form of ordinary income, which isn't ideal for taxation.

No. You still have downside and weird exposures to volatility. A better move is to change your equity allocation to a lower amount. Retail quant investment strategies just work worse than holding a cheap index fund. It’s more trading in those vehicles and the funds themselves don’t have any alpha.

Now if you personally have a correct view on volatility they would outperform holding spy I guess, but if you have alpha in predicting volatility then you should be running a volatility fund and be quite wealthy. And you would generally be running your own trading execution at a smaller fund size then the retail products and avoid some slippage. There is nothing wrong with being a trader and many people make money doing the job but the retail products in general are going to be worse performing than a simpler asset allocation with lower fees and less slippage.

What would you recommend for a situation like mine? I'm making a fairly large purchase at some unknown future point. The fuzzy timeline means I can handle some volatility, but not "I can ignore it for a decade until things pick up again" volatility. I've been using ultra short term treasuries and other bonds to beat HYSA yields at the cost of some risk, but not so much as equities. This money is very explicitly in its own sleeve - my emergency fund, retirement, and general investments iny taxable account are all set up differently.

Probably fine with current plan. But depends on more specific time horizon. Personally I like owning long term US rates here so maybe you could go 20-30% there. If it’s a couple years you might be able to do something like 30% equity, 30% mbs/tlt, 30% t-bill type things, maybe 10% REIT/listed private credit.

PC maybe a small amount here because of the high yields and discounts to NAV. Small equity + Fixed income I much prefer to try to get some returns instead of doing a listed covered call etf

If I wanted to self-direct without using index funds, I don't know how I could cope with all the choices out there. JEPI has a crazy yield, but looks range-bound (I mean it in a good way). Then you have SCHD, yielding about the same as a HYSA, but investors expect the fund's value itself to increase over time, so a constant yield with an increasing denominator implies growing dividends.

What do you think of JEPI mr cromble? Has it found a home in your account? I myself can't quite stomach selling upside for a few bucks, even if in my head I should expect premiums on calls to be overpriced on average. As a result I only sell calls on positions I want to be rid of.

I'm in a weird place right now where I intend to relocate and buy a house at some unknown future date. I'm building a... I guess you could call it a "risk ladder" for that money.

Most of it is in an ultra short term Treasury ETF. The next tier is state specific municipal bonds and AAA CLOs. After that it's BINC and JSI.

I'm about ready to move up a risk tier, and I'm plotting out what the next steps are.

I think my immediate next tier between JSI and SCHD is something that involves equities rather than debt. Something like JEPI or SPYI seems to fit the bill fairly well. I'm also looking at PFF, but I don't love the Oracle exposure.

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