The Supreme
I had dinner plans scheduled for tonight.
But the person’s work schedule (unsurprisingly, because of the new year) hampered the timing, so here I am, writing.
I was away from NYC for two weeks at the end of 2025, which “sounds like fun(!).”
It was, mainly, without going into any more detail.
But I missed seeing Marty Supreme in the theater, as critics and early audiences did.
One issue with the audio quality at the Regal Battery Park in lower Manhattan is that, depending on where you sit and the movie genre, the sound mixing can obscure a film’s dialogue.
For example, I did hear Timothée Chalamet’s character say this:
I have a purpose. If you think that it’s some kind of blessing, it’s not. It means I have an obligation to see a very specific thing through.
But at some point, probably toward the end, I did NOT hear Kevin O’Leary’s character (who was very good!) say this:
I was born in 1601. I’m a vampire. I’ve been around forever. I’ve met many Marty Mausers over the centuries. Some of them crossed me, some of them weren’t straight. They weren’t honest. And those are the ones that are still here. You go out and win that game, you’re gonna be here forever, too. And you’ll never be happy. You will never be happy.
Around the time (or exactly) when I turned 30 years old, I realized I didn’t want “a normal job” anymore, i.e., a reason to wake up after New Year’s Day to work 9 to 5+ and sit at a desk to… do stuff.
Despite possessing a New York Public Library card as a child, I hadn’t used or thought about it throughout my 20s. That decade went by pretty quickly!
So, one day, after quitting my job, I went to the library on 5th Avenue, across the street from the massive building you are probably picturing right now, and renewed my membership.
Surprisingly, thinking back now, one of my early reads was Jim Cramer’s “Confessions of a Street Addict,” the investor’s most autobiographical book:
With what was left with my paycheck, I decided that the time had come to try my hand again at the game I had given up years before: stocks. I bought shares in some of the companies I had visited in Silicon Valley a few months before. I only had enough money to buy five shares at a clip, and sometimes the commissions were as expensive as the stocks! But that didn’t deter me. I remember those first trades like yesterday. I piled into seven shares of Bobbie Brooks, the dressmaker, after Forbes gave it a nice write-up. I snared ten shares of American Agronomics, the orange juice company, also a Forbes write-up. Then I bought twenty shares of Bob Evans Farms, a Midwestern restaurateur. Magazines, such as Forbes, then as now, are chock-full of good ideas that you can turn into profits. I got the old ledger out from the 1960s and put in new names, with real hard dollars, not play money. I matched ideas from Business Week and Forbes with the miserly stock research then available publicly through the New York Public Library. Even though we were still in the tail end of the 1970s bear market, my selections worked. It was just like the old days back in the Philadelphia suburbs. Nothing had changed my ability to splice the headlines of the day with stock prices to derive some serious winners. With the winnings, always taken off the table, I plowed into SPS Technologies, an airplane fastener company, catching an aerospace cycle move for a quick doubling of my money.
Was it, or is it the best or “most impactful” book on money, stocks, and investing I have ever read? No.
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Did I need to read it at that specific point in my life? Yes.
There was a line in the book where Cramer proclaims that he was put on this Earth to do one thing: to trade stocks.
An excerpt from a Motley Fool review of the book from 20 years ago:
Cramer’s passion for stocks resonates through every page. It’s almost contagious. Unfortunately for Cramer, that enormous passion is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it had him driving to the office at 5 a.m. everyday and enabled him to crush the market for years. On the other hand, he often sacrificed friends and family to it in order to succeed. Cramer recounts talking stocks moments after his mother passed away. Was he avoiding the pain, he wonders, or had investing taken over his life?
As a middle-schooler, a random Charles Schwab workshop led me, for the first time, to research stocks in the New York Public Library’s newspapers. The volunteer employees also screened us a G-rated Wall Street, a welcome escape from class time.
As an adult, the digital age gave me immediate access to hundreds of investing books through the New York Public Library’s OverDrive collection and its Libby app. I would also rewatch Wall Street in its original form many times, especially this scene:
It’s all about bucks, kid. The rest is conversation.
As a kid, I remember my parents working hard in the stereotypical blue-collar settings and circumstances that most first-generation American children eventually reflect on.
My father, at some point, put money “into the markets” through his bank’s financial advisor, but not enough of the cash went into the S&P 500 ($SPX) or the early equivalent index fund.
My mother, on the other hand, would only talk about gold and ask about its latest price throughout my childhood and into adulthood because of how she viewed the economy before I was born and before they “had real money.”
A summary from ChatGPT on maybe why:
By the late 1970s, U.S. inflation had accelerated to the point where it routinely outpaced wage growth, bond yields, and equity returns, producing negative real returns across much of the financial system. The S&P 500 struggled to protect purchasing power because high inflation eroded corporate profits, increased uncertainty around costs and regulation, and compressed valuation multiples, so even periods of nominal stock gains often translated into losses after inflation. In that environment, investors turned to gold not for income or growth, but for price protection: as confidence in the dollar and in policymakers’ ability to contain inflation weakened toward the end of the decade, gold’s price rose sharply because it was seen as a store of value that did not depend on earnings, dividends, or stable real interest rates.
My mother passed away in early November after battling cancer for the second time.
She beat a different type of cancer the first time around 15 years ago, but this time the new cancer affected her pancreas and liver, and then spread through more of her body.
Melina Bonini was 87 years old, lived a happy, fulfilling life despite Nazi troops patrolling her neighborhood in southern Italy in the early 1940s, and became a fantastic mother to her only child, nurturing me with unconditional love, confidence, and complete independence in my educational, personal, and professional life decisions.
Had my mom lived to the end of 2025, she probably would have liked to see how the gold market overperformed, up over 64%!
But she probably would’ve liked grandchildren more.
Anyway, I will miss her every day. Forever.
