The 4 corners high is going to park until the middle of next week.

The 3 great pianists lions saw in person.

Emanuel Ax 1990:

He played a 7' mahogany Steinway.  Figured it was the only piano they could find, but in reality he was recording on 7" Steinways.  It was sold out.  They brought in more seats for the stage.  A professional cassette tape recording was being made.  

He had a very tight, rigid finger formation while playing Schubert variations & a Haydn sonata.  You could barely see his fingers move.  It was like the keys were too small & he was a macbook repairman trying to squeeze a screwdriver into a tiny space.  It was a very clear, accurate reading but very quiet.  Lions wondered how anyone in the back heard anything.

The Liszt sonata was very accurate but bland.  He hummed & moved his entire body when playing the octave passages but they were clear.  Much like the Schubert, his paws didn't move when playing the octaves.  The last note was a loud staccato he moved his whole body to play.  

Van Cliburn 1994:

The Tchaikovsky concerto wasn't nearly as clear & accurate as the recordings.  It was loud but bland & tired.  It was the 1st time lions ever saw his flat finger technique & it was shocking that he could have gotten the tone quality in the recordings from that technique.  He played just like Horowitz.  After the concerto, he got the flower treatment from the movies & waved at the audience.  He was more interested in waving at the audience than playing.  

Louis Lortie 200x:

He was bald & a lot older than the CD cover he was famous for, 20 years earlier.  Like Van Cliburn, it was a bland performance.  Construction outside made a constant noise.  There was hardly anyone in the audience.  The glory days were long gone.

Emanuel Ax was the only one who played just as well live as in the recordings.  For the most part, recordings are movie magic.  No-one plays in reality like they do in recordings.  All 3 got famous by winning competitions, but how long the fame lasted was highly dependent on what happened later.

The lion kingdom still believes the stonk market is most of the way to the bottom, if it's still heading towards the bottom.  The longer it goes sideways, the higher the bottom becomes.  It's already rewound 2 years & it's trying to find the fair market price to be after the final rate hike.  In the past, it's more accurately predicted the fed's decisions than the talking heads.

For so many years, animals wait for a chance to get in when it's not overpriced.  Making a donation is always going to be a part of the process.  In the short term, it won't beat inflation but in the long term it will.

The object of the game is building positions which are supposed to pay the rent, 20 years from now.  What lions didn't realize 20 years ago is you're not supposed to ever sell or trade those positions until it's time to pay the rent, even if the stonk market has a huge run & feels like it's given you more than you deserve.  The process of creating positions is all of the game when you're still generating income.  Only in rare cases is it necessary to sell positions, like garbage stonks with terrible fundamentals.

When generating income, the stonk market is going to be manely overpriced & you're just going to accumulate cash.  Positions are going to be created in the very short instances where the stonk market is underpriced.  This method is going to lose a lot of upside between the times when the stonk market is underpriced, but lions don't believe you can be 100% in stonks.  Sometimes bonds are going to outperform & sometimes you're going to need cash.  

The cash positions have to grow during the overpriced phases & shrink during the underpriced phases but you can't be 100% in stonks or cash.  The bond returns of 40 years ago are gone for good.  Productivity is just too high & knowledge is growing too fast for the government to report persistent structural inflation like before.  There's never going to be enough interest anymore for perpetual income.

The current downturn is a lot different than the past because it's so much easier to change jobs.  Most jobs don't require moving anymore or learning how to win at a different commute.  The need to migrate to Calif* to have a job & the large population tied to houses in the flyover states was what dragged the last recession on.