The Stock Market is Going to Burn

My daughter is feeding the high tech lawnmower we rented out nearby our state of the art weightlifting equipment and water filter. Yesterday a duck was pecking at my leg, hoping I would give him another piece of bread from the refrigerator. A cat purred contentedly next to me as two puppies played in the background. My nine year old was imploring me to take a break and play barbies with her. I was in another place, listening to the CEO of Southwest Airlines talk.

My life always seems to be some type of background of controlled chaos. My dayjob, as it were, is as an editor/publisher of reports from publicly traded companies on the stock market. It’s a simple job really. I plug in headphones and listen to the heads of these companies talk, as I read a transcript and check to make sure that what they said matches what is printed on the page. It can be done from anywhere in the world with an Internet connection. I've never met in person any of my bosses, most of whom are based in New York City. I have been doing this for fourteen years and have worked my way up to tier 1 publishes. Generally I get calls from companies most people have actually heard of, though on occasion it will be for a diodes or semiconductor manufacturer that people haven’t heard of, but whose materials are actually used in everything we use in our high tech world.

I take calls for pharmaceutical giants such as Pfizer whose “vaccines” I in no way agree with. Some might find that morally inconsistent, but to me it is not at all. My highest duty on these calls is making sure that what is written is factually accurate to what is said and I take that imperative very seriously. I would never consider putting words in someone’s mouth or sensationalizing the written word. I’m very just the facts about it. I’m pretty sure the only reason I can get away with a technical job such as editor is due to my Virgo rising, which at least allows me to appear sane and detail oriented. I certainly didn’t get it from my Pisces sun or Scorpio moon.

Calling it a day job is a bit of a misnomer. I want to take these calls. There have been so many changes in my personal life that Factset is the only consistent, grounding reality that I have had. Over the years I have worked on these calls at airports (Hong Kong and Tokyo come to mind), hospitals and from a Buddhist temple during a funeral vigil. I turned in an earnings call for Starbucks while on my laptop in a Starbucks. My joke in Las Vegas before I set up internet at my parents house was that I worked at Starbucks. Yet I've never been a barista.

My job is under constant threat from both outsourcing and automation, though both have serious limitations. Some years ago the company CFO had the idea to send all the editing positions to lower paid folks in Mumbai. The documents coming out of there were abysmal. In one example I remember publishing for Planet Fitness, they were unveiling a new advertising campaign which was written throughout the transcript as "A Juggle Free Zone." It was "A Judgement Free Zone," by the way. I don't think Planet Fitness discriminates against clowns, and I doubt they would have appreciated their multimillion dollar advertising campaign being mislabeled in this manner.. Weird things were also marked on calls as indiscernible like when the CEO of Owens Corning ended a call saying "Go Bucks!" Now I can understand why a guy in India doesn't know what that means. But if you grew up in Ohio, on the other hand, you probably do.

They tried to give me and a lot of other editors the pink slip on 2016 as part of corporate cost cutting measures. I managed to keep my position by sheer luck. A friend asked me if I knew who the boss boss was. That wouldn't be the lady who was handing out edits and was firing us. I only knew who this person was because he had to send a letter to the US Embassy in Bangkok verifying my employment when I was making my husband Oh's visa to come to America. I reached out to him and explained that I thought these cost cutting measures would hurt the integrity of the company. People in India might understand English very well, but they would lack a cultural or linguistic framework to easily make sense of a corporate head who grew up in Ann Arbor. I didn't mind if people in India took calls for companies in that area. I don't know the nicknames for cricket teams.

The guy was an American living in New York. He understood my concerns, agreed with me, and started giving me tier one publishes. For the last two years, however, work has dried up, this time due to AI. Obviously computers can transcribe these things in no time. They can get rid of more labor costs.

I still get publishes but only for a few weeks during the busiest earnings season, as it is now. During the past two days I have been buried in calls. I've taken publishes and edits for Pinterest, Harley Davidson, PayPal, Cheesecake Factory, and Southwest Airlines among others. There were a lot of earnings misses and a lot of share buybacks. It's starting to feel like catching a falling knife.

During the past two years these corporate heads have gone all in on the Covidcon just like almost everyone else. I miss the good old days when these types stayed totally in their lane, staying far away from anything political. I don't think I ever heard the word "vaccine" on an earnings call prior to 2020 unless it was for an actual vaccine maker.

They are mostly still on the jabs are good narrative, with the CEO of Cheesecake Factory saying that he has encouraged all staff to get vaccinated, but I am noticing a hesitation. One thing that AI is very poor at is editing out filler words, like uh, right, you know, yeah and the like. Half of these transcripts were filler words, indicating a profound hesitation before speaking. These guys are choosing their words very carefully now. Vaccines didn't come up at all most of the time. A year ago everybody was lauding them as a miracle and the way out of the pandemic.

The most direct pushback of the new normal came on the call for Southwest Airlines. The CEO came out and said directly that he was very happy that the facemask order had been lifted as it had placed an undue burden on staff. He said that masks were optional for employees now. A flurry of had to be verified who they are reporters came on the call, one of course asking what percentage of people were cancelling their flights due to the optional masking policy. The CEO did not give a percentage, but his amused tone indicated to me that it was not a very large number. I think most people have realized these things are garbage.

The analysts on the call were very curious about Southwest raising its hiring target from 8000 to 10000. Several asked about this in slightly different ways. The execs hedged incredibly. Did a lot of people quit, perhaps because of their prior vaccine mandate? Or were some injured by safe and effective jabs and unable to fly ever again? They refused to talk directly about it. The execs mentioned a lack of flight instructors for training new pilots and said they might have to take some people out of retirement. If that pilot retired because he refused the conjab, I'd rather have him flying the airplane. They are walking themselves back like it's kryptonite.

This con is running out of legs where's a war to distract us with? This dam is about to burst in more ways than one. I started working for Factset in 2008 when the market went into freefall. I can tell things from the tone of their voices. I don't think this is the time to buy the dip.

There's an economic reality about depopulation that few seem to understand. Less useless eaters mean less demand for everything. When your family members die and leave you things, you don't need to buy those things anymore. Less kids means less kids to buy a house, or a car, or get on a flight somewhere. Aladdin might try to eat the world, but it will really be eating all of us, from the begger in Bangalore to the CFO in Chicago.

I still think I beat out the alternatives. My English is very good!