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Weekly Finance Thread - 2026-08-08

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

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I’m up about $800 on my NFLX bet. Nothing to write home about, but maybe I’ll write about it in this thread.

My confidence has not yet been vindicated (I don’t plan to exit until 2028), but to extremely briefly explain my gut feeling: I doubted Netflix the first time it puked in 2022. Its subscriber growth slowed, and competition was closing in from all sides (remember CNN+?). I thought maybe it’s the end of an era. Since then, Netflix has remained profitable, and other streamers learned that it’s a tough business. Netflix also realizes that live sports have a future in internet streaming.

So, seeing the price back at levels observed in 2021, I don’t expect investors to allow the price back into its 2022 bear market. Neither do I expect them to replicate their 2023-2025 performance. However, if it at least rhymes I should do okay.

If you are going to explain a trade you should do better. If I am being honest your explanation is basically stupid. That you don’t have the cash. But from what I can tell you seem to have the assets in other things to cover a loss. You own the stock so your risks is substantial.

You can just buy stocks on margin. It’s easy to set-up. A good explanation would explain why a synthetic long was cheaper than buying on margin. In general it’s a negative because you probably getting some slippage execution in the option market which is greater than buying the stock directly. But retail margin accounts are sometimes high. So by doing it synthetically you’re probably getting the financing cheaper from market participants.

A good posts on a trade would go thru all the mechanics of why you structured the trade this way. Other than that you just like the stock but haven’t gone thru the analysis of negative alphas of using leverage in a retail account. I’ve owned Netflix lately. Mostly out of it now.

Ouch!

I’d love to hear what you’re up to.

Not much. The memory trade left a lot of other quality stocks forgotten a few months ago. So pretty much crushed owning a variety of stocks that got cheap - Amzn, CME, NFLX a bunch more. Out of all that now. Now long 50% Tlt and 20% cash. This market should give other opportunities so I feel fine sitting out for now. Hoping rates fall some and I get a spec gain on Tlt. It wouldn’t be awful for me if Tlt crashes and causes a stock market correction.