At the time, I quoted Sam Brinton’s own self-description from “their” website:
Whether they are walking the halls of MIT discussing the differences in advanced nuclear reactors or belting out their favorite tunes with the Gay Men’s Chorus of Washington, DC, it is hard to miss Sam Brinton’s passion for changing the world – and potentially their stilettos.
Sam Brinton
When some questioned whether it was appropriate to put this person in charge of America’s nuclear waste, a common reply from soi-disant open-minded commenters was that Brinton had a degree in nuclear engineering from MIT, and his/their private life wasn’t relevant. Fast forward to now and it turns out that Mr. Brinton is on leave after having been charged with felony theft for stealing a woman’s $2,325 Vera Bradley suitcase from the baggage carrousel at Minneapolis St. Paul Airport.
Bizarrely, Brinton hadn’t even checked a bag on his flight when he stole this bag; he went to the baggage carrousel to “shop”.
A Leftwing Culture War Defeat
Someone on Twitter dismissed the headlines about Brinton as a “Right wing culture war thing”, but if anything, his appointment by the Biden administration was a salvo in the Left’s culture war. He was obviously appointed in part to troll conservatives and to demonstrate that having a bizarre paraphilia doesn’t preclude trustworthiness. And then he gets charged with a crazy felony. Take the L, lefties.
Revisiting My February Market Note
In my initial post about Brinton in February, I concluded with a market note. Let me quote it here and we can see what I got right and what I got wrong:
In Case You Missed It
In our previous post (How To Not Get Crushed), we wrote about how to prepare for the inevitable Fed rate hikes it will take to rein in inflation, and the bear market that they will likely cause.
Looks like we got the part about the Fed rate hikes causing a bear market right.
These were our top ten names on Thursday, January 27th.
I felt fairly confident about this batch when our system generated it. Tesla (TSLA), Nvidia (NVDA), and Google parent Alphabet (GOOGL) are of course all dominant companies in their industries, and all have generated strong returns when they appeared in our top names in the past. Antero Resources Corp (AR) and the Direxion Daily S&P Oil & Gas Exp. & Prod. Bull 2x Shares (GUSH) seemed to make sense given the bull market in oil, and we’d done well with the iPath Series B Bloomberg Coffee Subindex Total Return ETN (JO), given the coffee shortages over the past year.
Excerpt from our February 10, 2022 post
But we didn’t consider the impact that rate hikes would have on high multiple tech companies specifically. Here’s how our top ten names from January 27th did over the next six months:
Overall, our top ten names were +7.39%, on average, while the market-tracking SPDR S&P 500 Trust (SPY) was -6.32% over the same period. But the gains were led by our energy names, AR and GUSH; Tesla was down fractionally, while Google and Nvidia were both down double digits.
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