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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 26, 2026

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Nobody in S America could ever convince me that Democracy is better than Fascism. You see huge swaths of Brazil vote on ethnic lines. Brazil at this point probably at a minimum needs to be broken into different countries. I don’t see why White Europeans should be governed by a corrupt commie because a bunch of negros voted for it.

In trading sometimes you are better lucky than good. I bought some Brazilian stuff after prediction markets were good for Bolsonaro but before the first round and I’m quite happy today that I dumped them on the big rip after the first round. Now everything I bought is 10% lower than my first buy and I’m wandering if Brazil is cheap enough to buy even with Lulu.

In trading sometimes you are better lucky than good. I bought some Brazilian stuff after prediction markets were good for Bolsonaro and I’m quite happy today that I dumped them on the big rip after the first round

I bought $PAGS which I was also up bigly on, but am now down. I wasn't gambling on the election, I just like the stock.

It's very, very tempting to day trade this. We have to bounce, right? 25% is unreal.

Edit: F it. I put $150k$230k into EWZ. Undervalued index anyway.

Edit: And... I'm out. Cleared 2.85%. Beats working.

Some reason INTR became my brazillian crack. In around 5 pre-first election out at like 6.7 and keeps going to 7.5.

Now it’s 4.5? Is the difference between Lula and Bolsonaro that Brazillian stocks are either all zeroes or infinity? If I am trading a company with its own fundamentals then falling 7.5 to 4.5 seems like a lot. The stock price moves imply a difference of like Mao and Reagan.

One thing on buying (or selling) after events is it’s almost always better to wait 3 days unless you need to do huge institutional size. I sold my Brazilian shit first day after the first round election because it was up 30% but if I waited 3 days would have gotten 50%. Usually today is not the day to buy.

The stock price moves imply a difference of like Mao and Reagan.

Yeah, because it basically is. In recent decades, avowed socialists in Latin America who come to power “democratically” have a proven track record of ignoring property rights (esp. of foreigners), nationalizing businesses, and redistributing wealth to political insiders. The market is pricing in the (very reasonable, imo) likelihood that Lula will turn out to be another iteration of Chavez or Morales.

But... Lula has been president before. Why would we compare Lula to Chavez/Morales rather than Lula's previous terms? I do appreciate the irony of my question as a US citizen since Trump's first term did not really predict his second term, but still.

I think the steelman is that lula has been bad but he simply hasn't had time to really wreck the macroeconomic environment(even Chavez took a while).

But shouldn't we view Chavez as a dictator first and socialist second?

It's not actually clear Chavez was a dictator. Democracies can have terrible economic policies, and he was legitimately elected over and over again. Maduro, on the other hand...

In that case, would you say that Putin has also been legitimately elected multiple times?