Attention Spans And OPRTunity March 20, 2025March 21, 2025 Human Intelligence Is Sharply Declining, reports this piece (feel free to supply your own joke), in part because our attention spans are getting shorter. Arguably, we all have attention deficit disorder. Which is why you might not actually sit still long enough to read Chris Hayes’s The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource but perhaps should. (I read it with my ears, walking.) I say “perhaps” because, although Hayes does a masterful and engaging job of describing the problem, the only sensible solution he comes up with at the end — albeit an important one — is to ban smart phones in schools (and perhaps require some sort of age verification as we do with alcohol). And then there is the correlation of on-line social connection with loneliness, depression, and lack of real social c0nnection. Much in the book to ponder — though I, for one, would not give up my smart phone for anything. It is a miracle for which I am endlessly grateful. Speaking of short attention spans . . . Glenn P.: “NATO leaked a memo sent to them by the State Department. It advised that a briefing for Trump should: Be a max of three pages long Should be mostly pictures Should praise Trump regularly or he wouldn’t read it. This was in preparation for a vital summit on the security of the Western world.” Dan M.: “One of my cousins, who briefed Trump daily during his first term, said much the same: Trump almost never read anything, regardless of how short. To get/keep his attention one needed to use the name ‘Trump’ as frequently as possible. To brief him on the size of the islands China is building in the South China Sea, for example, they used a scale model of the Trump Tower.” As long-time readers know, I’ve been suggesting OPRT for quite some time. The company offers no-credit borrowers a high-interest alternative (28%-36%) to the 300%-600% effective rate pay-day lenders charge. OPRT went public at $15 before I had ever heard of it (thankfully) and quickly rose to $26; then quickly mucked things up. Even so, management recently announced a return to profitability and projected 2025 earnings in the range of $1.10-$1.30. The company’s largest shareholder today released this letter, arguing that earnings on the order of $3.75-$4.75 would be possible if one more board seat could be flipped. Either way — at $1.10 per share or $3.75 — the stock seems awfully cheap at $6.20. I just bought more — though only with money (needless to say by now?) I can truly afford to lose. And speaking of losing money: I worry that the Trump/Musk/Putin demolition of democracy and the post-War world order may not turn out as well for the American stock market as all of us would all like. (Warren Buffett has apparently been shifting some of his focus to places like Japan.) The potential success of most of the speculations I suggest here from time to time is not tightly correlated to the market (e.g., if PRKR wins its lawsuits or ANIX’s cancer treatments prove effective or HYMC is seen mainly as a leveraged way to buy gold). Even so, in a really bad market, few names are spared. Including fine companies like Home Depot (HD), suggested here a decade ago at $91, climbing over time to a high of $435 before Trump took office, with dividends along the way. Selling long-held stocks like that in a taxable account guarantees a “loss” of the tax due. Instead of selling, you could write short-term calls against them if you know what you’re doing, rolling them over every month or two as they expire (or as you buy them back so as not to have your stock called away from you). If you don’t want to hassle with that . . . let alone with every stock you own . . . but prefer to hedge against a collapse of the market as a whole, you might consider — definitely with money you can afford to lose because no one wants a market collapse! — something like puts on the Dow (DIA) or the S&P (SPY) or NASDAQ (QQQ). As I type, one DIA December 18, 2026 DIA 430 put costs about $3,000. It gives you the right to “put” 1 “share” of the Dow to someone at $43,000 any time between now and the end of 2026. So with the Dow at 42,000, the right to do that has an “intrinsic” value of $1,000. The extra $2,000 that you’re paying is the cost of “insurance,” as it were. If the Dow just climbs from here, albeit with customary ups and downs, but never really looks back, you will have lost the full $3,000. (Just as you “lose” your insurance premium if your house doesn’t burn down.) Then again, if in a panic the Dow plunged to 26,000, you’d have a gain of $14,000. Not that it would be easy to know when to cash in. At 26,000 you might think the Dow had yet further to fall (it’s a panic, after all!) and hold on, only to see it rise . . . so now you think it really has further to fall so you hold on some more . . . and then it keeps rising — and maybe by the time it expires it’s worthless without your even having sold. Not a terrible outcome — you collected nothing on your “insurance” because your house did not burn down. Knowing what to do isn’t easy — and (in my view) we wouldn’t have to be thinking about any of it if we had elected a normal president in 2024. Instead, Putin and the Proud Boys won, and we are in really serious trouble. Join Indivisible! Spread DIS-disinformation! Give time or money to Wisconsin! BONUS Introducing: The Musk Watch DOGE Tracker . . . as described here: New tool reveals Musk has overstated verified DOGE savings by at least 92%.