Blognuson – Page 10 – Bits and pieces from the mind of Charles Magnuson

💡👍 How I View the Stock Market – May 6th 2023

I do not have a strong sense of what I’m doing when it comes to investing in stocks, but I’ve dabbled in the subject, find it interesting, and loosely follow what’s happening to the market. I focus on the S&P 500 while occasionally looking at a specific stock. While I would never advise someone to follow my perspective on the market, I figured I would document my thoughts right now so that I can look back on them in 6-12 months to see how correct my thinking was.

Back in November/December I mentioned to a colleague at work that I thought the market had bottomed. This perspective was based on the information-sphere (internet, media, news, etc.) being over-saturated with negative market outlooks. When I begin to see certain types of doom-titled articles about the market, in the past I’ve found that those moments mark the bottom of the downtrend. There’s no one left to sell and that’s when the buyers resume control of the market. So far my prediction from last year has turned out to be correct.

The S&P has been in an intermediate uptrend since October last year. Indicators have generally been positive and just this week price bounced off the 50 day moving average. People in general still seem quite pessimistic about financial conditions though. I don’t have high hopes of this uptrend extending significantly further in the near future. It will likely take more time for financial attitudes to lighten enough for the market to grow.

While looking at the weekly chart above is interesting, things get even more interesting when looking at the weekly chart for the S&P:

The rosiness of the daily bar chart disappears to some degree when looking at the weekly chart. Price action has been struggling to break above a cloud since the beginning of the year and there’s clearly strong resistance at 4200. However, price action keeps testing that resistance. If it keeps doing what it’s doing now, eventually the price will breakout higher with the next significant resistance being at 4600 and 4200 becoming support. I am optimistic that we will see that happen by late summer, barring any major catastrophic world events.

So that’s the basic summary of what I see when I look at the stock market right now. Just to provide some background, I thought I’d elaborate a bit about the tools I used to stay informed and follow the market:

I do not follow any specific sources of news to inform my investing perspective. I absorb what makes its way to me through Reddit, YouTube, and a couple news email newsletters. For the most part, my investing follows the technical analysis approach which dictates that all of the information I need to know about a stock is represented in it’s price action. It is impossible for me as an amateur, hobbyist, individual investor to know more than what the market already knows. The only way for me to make money is to ride the trends and waves of the market. Given these circumstances, I believe in following the price action of the market and that’s why following price action is the only research I do.

I use a great service called StockCharts.com. It’s a super powerful set of tools that can do much more than I need to do. The service provides excellent charting features and even a mobile app to view my charts on-the-go. I have not found a better way to view detailed, customized bar charts. I don’t think I would want anything to do with investing if StockCharts.com did not exist. I definitely recommend giving it a try.

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🖼️👍 Magnuson Heavy Industries

Images, Recommendations

I use Charityvest to manage a donor advised fund where I do all of my charitable giving. If you give money to charity at all, you absolutely must give Charityvest a try. There are only benefits to using the service without a single downside. It’s simplified my charitable giving in so many ways. I love Charityvest.

Once you open a donor advised fund with Charityvest, they give you the opportunity to name your fund. This fund name can then be shared with any organization you donate to. Because “Charles’ Charity Fund” is a boring name, I decided to have some fund and create “Magnuson Heavy Industries”.

To go along with the silly name, I had some fun creating a simple logo. Here are a couple versions in light and dark themes:

Originally I tried to find an outline of a factory that I could manipulate into the shape on a capital M. That effort did not go so well, which forced me to think about other heavy things. Elephants immediately came to mind. Oddly, I associate elephants with my family because my parents read me Babar the Elephant books as a kid, so the connection here works nicely.

The versions with the rectangle behind the text gives me vague GTA 2 logo vibes. Overall I’m happy with the outcome of about 30 minutes of effort. I’ve registered MagnusonHeavyIndustries.com, so all that’s left now is to put together a simple landing page. Might setup email on the domain too, but those efforts will be saved for another night.

Update

It’s live! → https://magnusonheavyindustries.com/

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💡 Solving Trouble with Monitor Arrangement on MacOS

Advice

I recently upgraded to a new MacBook Pro and for an unknown reason, the same monitors I was using on my 2019 MacBook Pro experience trouble with their arrangement on this new 2023 MBP. Specifically, each time I wake the computer from sleep the position of the two external monitors will be swapped. To fix the problem, I either need to put the computer back to sleep for several minutes or manually rearrange the position of the monitors in MacOS. To say the least, this is tremendously annoying.

While I have not been able to completely solve this problem, I’ve improved the situation and wanted to share my solution with others in case the information is helpful.

My Monitors

I am using a pair of identical monitors called “Packed Pixels“. I really like the small footprint of these monitors. For being independently produced, they’re very well made. However, there is obviously a problem with the monitors in this situation and my first question became, “Are the computer monitors the culprit of the issue or is the culprit MacOS?”

My searching led to an April 2022 post on an Apple forum about this issue occurring with Samsung monitors. In this post, someone who clearly knows a thing or two recommends entering the following line in Terminal:

  ioreg -l | grep EDID

This code asks the computer to provide Extended Display Identification Data (EDID). EDID is information that describes a display’s capabilities to a video source. After running this code in Terminal, I get the following:

Comparing the results for the two monitors connected to my laptop reveals that they are identical in every way except for the ‘port ID’.

What appears to be happening is that MacOS sees these two monitors as identical in every discernable way. When the computer wakes up from sleep, it has a process where it looks at the external monitors attached, tries to identify them, and then uses the identities found to consult a record of where those monitors are supposed to be arranged in relation to each other and the primary display. Because MacOS sees these two monitors as identical, this process ends up swapping the two.

What I cannot account for is why MacOS consistently swaps the monitors every time the computer wakes from sleep. It would make more sense if this problem occurred randomly or intermittently.

Whose Fault Is This?

Well, there’s probably a shared responsibility here.

Packed Pixels should have distinguished the EDID of their monitors. Each monitor should not have the same serial number. I don’t know if it’s possible for me to edit the EDID on my monitors. I suspect it is not. I have reached out to the maker of the Packed Pixels about this issue and have not heard back yet.

While Packed Pixels could have distinguished their monitors, MacOS is clearly doing something odd here too and could do more to handle failure conditions like this one. MacOS should not make the assumption that the user is swapping the ports the monitors are plugged into each time the computer is woken from sleep. In the EDID above, the monitors each have a unique ‘port ID’ which is the USB-C ports they are plugged into. MacOS should be smart enough to realize that these ports correspond with unique monitors that are not being re-positioned. It would also be quite helpful if MacOS would let me manually identify identical monitors so that from then forward they could be considered unique.

Is There a Solution?

I have not found a complete solution to this problem outside of purchasing a new monitor. However, I have found a piece of software that serves as a band-aid solution until I can figure out something better.

SwitchResX is an app that gives fine control over the display settings used when specific configurations of monitors are plugged into a machine. After installing the app, opening the ‘Display Sets’ settings tab reveals options to create display new display sets.

My display sets are creatively titled:

For the first display set, I gave it the hotkey of Ctrl-Option-Cmd-1 and saved the current arrangement of the monitors:

Then for the second display set, I first needed to rearrange the position of the monitors using the Display panel in System Settings. Once re-positioned, I created a new display set, gave it the hotkey Ctrl-Option-Cmd-2, and ensured the ‘Placed at’ X-axis values were reversed relative to set 1:

Now I have the ability to slap one of these keyboard shortcuts to immediately rearrange the position of my external monitors. If I wanted to get real fancy, I might be able to sort out an AppleScript that automatically switched between these two display sets.

However, I fear that this solution is not going to last forever as looking at SwitchResX’s website reveals that it’s very old. The fact that it hasn’t been updated in a long time indicates that this software probably won’t be supported on new Macs for a whole lot longer. I’ve seen many instances of this in the past with other Mac software and learned that I cannot rely too heavily on band-aid solutions from random 3rd party developers. Nevertheless, I’m thankful that I at least have a solution to work with for the time being.