NorthSideSox72

Focusing on stories we'll see around camp that have some relationship to the farm and/or prospects, here is the FutureSox preview of Spring Training. Enjoy.

Also, if you want a list with a few head-scratchers, here is 2080 Ball's Sox list. Basabe is at 3rd, and they have Collins not in the Top 10.

Up through about 17, very similar to the FS list. We didn't consider Narvaez eligible for ours. Nice to see someone stake Schnurbusch like that. I had him at 28 on my personal T30 but he ended up just outside our list in the end. Funny that I was higher than most on him when I had written an article tempering expectations on him specifically, but I do think there's something there. Bummer is a guy we knew a couple years ago had intrigue, but I am surprised at the helium he's been getting this spring. Sox gave him an NRI, one of the other lists mentioned him as an also-ran, and now this high on BA's list. Hard for me to justify that kind of ranking for him with him missing that much time and having two different elbow surgeries, but he could definitely make a big leap this year if he's 100% healthy.

Here's the thought that, sometimes literally, keeps me up at night. Trump is at the very least incredibly self-involved, and very possible an actual narcissist. He thinks he can go into office and make sweeping changes to fix everything. As everyone who has known him that isn't in his inner circle has explained, he has a real need for adoration. He goes into office on a high, and quickly realizes that he can't get much actually done. He gets bored (which we are already hearing), and frustrated (see: Twitter). He's an executive and a control freak, so he looks for what he actually can control. What can the President do, pretty much unfettered by other branches of government? Military action. Not an all-out war, but a quick action that falls under his CinC authorities. I would bet a small fortune that he's mentally scanning the world right now for an excuse to swing the bat with that big military, in order to look tough and in control without having to deal with that messy thing called running a Republic. Literally, he's looking for a reason to kill a bunch of people in order to soothe his enormous and wounded ego. What if he chooses Iran? Or North Korea? And what spiral into a world war occurs when he does it?

QUOTE (greg775 @ Feb 14, 2017 -> 02:23 AM) If that's true and they are impeachable offenses I'm all for impeachment. If?

QUOTE (StrangeSox @ Feb 13, 2017 -> 01:43 PM) Gallup stopped polling the Presidential election after 2012. The LA Times tracking poll had Trump winning the popular vote by a wide margin, which he did not. They did not do state-by-state polling so they were wrong by a big amount on the one thing they tried to evaluate. Also, election polls are a different animal because they make assumptions about who will actually vote. Approval polls are just asking people how they feel about something. They aren't predictive of a behavior.

QUOTE (brett05 @ Feb 13, 2017 -> 01:25 PM) You failed remedial math, didn't you. Be brave and admit it. With his 53% approval rating, most people are coal miners if I am wrong. Or 44%, the lowest of any President at this stage of their Presidency in... well, since those polls began, call it maybe modern times. Only one with more disapproval than approval too. Far less popular than Obama or Bush or any predecessor at this point in time. There is one outlier poll at 52% (Rasmussen), the rest are below half, some as low as 40% approval. The disapproval rates dwarf all other contestants at this stage. How do you reconcile that with the idea that he's supposedly gotten so much done that the people wanted?

QUOTE (StrangeSox @ Feb 13, 2017 -> 11:19 AM) Stephen Miller’s authoritarian declaration: Trump’s national security actions ‘will not be questioned’ "Will not be questioned." That is an incredible claim to executive authority -- and one we can expect to hear plenty more about. Trump has beaten around this bush plenty, yes. But Miller just came out and said it: that the White House doesn't recognize judges' authority to review things such as his travel ban. Miller and Bannon are scarier than Trump himself, and they obviously have Trump's ear. I mean, Miller was this/close to just calling him Supreme Leader. It's insane.

QUOTE (brett05 @ Feb 10, 2017 -> 12:21 PM) Enlighten if you would Google is your friend Different terms are sometimes used. It's related to rules of cloture.

QUOTE (Quinarvy @ Feb 10, 2017 -> 12:15 PM) Cause constitution. It's actually not directly related to the Constitution. It's a Senate procedural rule, and an accident of history, really.

QUOTE (brett05 @ Feb 10, 2017 -> 12:12 PM) Why are 60 votes needed for repeal and replace? why not just a simple majority? I can't tell if you actually don't know about the procedural filibuster (which is admittedly not as widely known as it should be), or you're trying to make some sort of point.

QUOTE (bmags @ Feb 10, 2017 -> 10:41 AM) Right but I think where I can see it happening is they are all doing this because they want the big tax reform bill to pass. If that doesn't pass, there is no reason for them to support the circus. I think this gets at the main deal here. Congress wants to play Trump's game in order to get their priorities addressed. After they have gotten the bulk of them - or if they discover they will never get them - they will turn hard away from him prior to the 2018 Congressional elections.

QUOTE (brett05 @ Feb 10, 2017 -> 08:55 AM) deny truth all you wish. I mean, I could find instances where Bush and other Presidents also mentioned those countries together in a speech or even a policy, but that has zero to do with the point. Neither Obama nor anyone other than Trump suggested blocking everyone from those countries (not to mention adding the exception for non-Muslims). The relationship you are trying to draw doesn't have any logical footing.

Since our last farm update, we've had SoxFest, a bunch of top prospect lists, a handful of signings, and assorted other bits of news. You can catch up on all of it right here. Next stop - Camelback Ranch!

QUOTE (illinilaw08 @ Feb 9, 2017 -> 04:11 PM) SSK, NSS, and other investment guys, this is on topic with all the discussion about "suitability" and "fiduciary" standards with respect to retirement, as well as the financial system generally. Unless you work for the State in some capacity, companies that offer pensions are very difficult to find. Thus, more people need to rely on the market to save for retirement. Most IRAs are index funds in some capacity. Because of that societal reliance on the market for retirement, and the positive societal benefit to having people retire eventually, should the feds carry a greater burden in regulating investment behavior? Should investment professionals managing money specifically designated for retirement (ie, can't touch it without penalty until 59.5) be subject to stricter scrutiny? Curious to hear your thoughts. I would break your target audience into a few categories... 1. A scarily large portion of people aren't investing at all, or at least not meaningfully. This can be due to income levels, or just ignorance or bad choices. For this swath of people, the best bet all around is education. 2. Then there's the crowd who invest in 401k's, IRA's, classic brokerage accounts and other investment vehicles at the consumer level. The great majority of those are not using an advisor - for them, the answer is providing information. The providers of those instruments actually provide a LOT of this info now. It can be a little intimidating at times because it's a lot to take in, but many of those firms offer free seminars and the like too. Not sure how you can regulate those who don't use advisors, and it's again more about education. What you CAN do is make sure the information provided is not fraudulent - and this is already highly regulated. 3. Now there is the crowd who uses a financial advisor, but is not in #4 below, and are investing for general financial improvement and/or retirement. While education is also key here, you do have the folks who are relying heavily on the advice of these advisors. This is the target crowd for your points, really. How far do regulations go on advisors, where they protect investors but don't make the advisor's job unmanageably expensive? Part of this is covered by existing regulations to make sure certain data is always available, and that the published data is not untrue or misleading. But what about the soft advice? Financial advisors are already overseen by certification groups, much as say, psychologists are. But how can you regulate what is best for the consumer? The answer is that you can't do it in detail - that's the key. The cheapest load fund is not always the best one. Each investor is unique in their precise needs and wants. What you should focus on is profit-related fraud by the advisor. That means, stick to how the advisor gets paid, not their every interaction. I don't pretend to know in great detail exactly what to be done around that, as I am not an advisor and don't use one. But I do know that already, in many cases, advisors make money as a percentage of invested assets. For non-insurance instruments, that means it is in the best interest of the advisor to have the customer make money anyway. Insurance has it's own regulations that are labyrinthine. I would need to know more about pay structures for advisors, is what I am saying - but I feel confident that dialing into each interaction and trying to harden what is by nature subjective isn't the right approach. 4. Finally, the "rich" sophisticated investor who does things with a wealth management firm, or hedge funds, etc. These folks by nature, you just need to protect against per se fraud.

QUOTE (brett05 @ Feb 9, 2017 -> 10:44 AM) Except it's not a ban on Muslims. There is no Muslim Ban, just a way to partisan by liberals. I can't figure out if you are trolling, or living in denial, or just being super-pedantic because the ExO doesn't use the words "Muslim Ban". --The President has called it a ban, basically every time he discusses it. --The President had specifically asked advisors previously how to enact a ban --The President's press secretary has called it a ban repeatedly --The ExO specifically targets Muslim-majority nations and gives exceptions (in the pre-period) or favorability (in the post-period) to religious minorities, which mathematically means not Muslims. So functionally, de facto, it's a Muslim ban It's a Muslim ban. Stop pretending, to yourself or others, whichever way this is working for you.

QUOTE (StrangeSox @ Feb 9, 2017 -> 11:56 AM) California's been getting a ton of rain lately, and drought conditions in the state have drastically improved. Not just Cali either, this is also happening in AZ and NM at least. Not sure about other states. That said, this needs to be sustained for a while for it to really get to a reset level.

QUOTE (caulfield12 @ Feb 8, 2017 -> 04:49 PM) http://www.cnn.com/2017/02/08/politics/gor...eets/index.html Gorsuch says Trump judicial tweets are "demoralizing and disheartening"...hope there's audio/video proof here, or Blumenthal and CNN are going to be blasted. Gorsuch's PR/Comm guy confirmed it.

QUOTE (illinilaw08 @ Feb 7, 2017 -> 05:16 PM) That's not really an apt analogy though. Financial professionals and asset managers don't hold themselves out as salesmen. They hold themselves out as professionals who will take care of and invest your money. Financial professionals are closer to lawyers in my mind. I'm a professional providing services to my clients and I have a duty of care that goes along with that - a standard that I have to be held to. I'm selling a service in that I'm billed an hourly rate and paid accordingly, but if I don't fulfill my duty, I can be sued. If you want financial planners, asset managers, and other financial professionals to be held to the same standard as a car salesman, they should probably just be called salesmen. Kind of answered here... QUOTE (Chisoxfn @ Feb 7, 2017 -> 05:49 PM) They are still held to a suitability rule...it just is a lower bar then "fiduciary". I've seen a lot of stuff misrepresented by the media / radio talk shows regarding what is and isn't being impacted by the DOL rule. I do agree with you that they are not the equivalent of a car salesman and I think the quotes from the official white house people were awful regarding why they were doing what they were doing (and missed the point on the real reason there should be stay in the requirements around the DOL rule). Please note, that I am not lumping Dodd Frank into this, even though I have heard a lot of people who seem to think Dodd Frank has anything to do with the DOL Fiduciary rule. My analogy was a little sloppy, but the key point really is that there are already standards in place. QUOTE (StrangeSox @ Feb 7, 2017 -> 05:16 PM) Even if we instantly implemented a "financial education" course and requirement today, though, you've still got tens of millions of people in this country who are already out of high school and may not have enough financial literacy to be aware of these issues and that their "adviser" they're trusting their life savings with may not have their best interests in mind. It's a common enough issue that some financial services firms even have commercials where people ask someone "how does your adviser get paid?" and the person sits there with a blank look on their face. There are already people that are held to the fiduciary standard, so I guess I'm struggling to see why this couldn't be implemented to people who now only have to meet a "suitable" standard. I wasn't suggesting that financial education was a sole fix of course. But I do think it would go a long way as time went on if it were done. There are a few things going on here, and the change in bar for standard to be fiduciary causes multiple issues. For one thing, the advisors aren't custodians - they don't hold the accounts. Those are held by prime brokers or clearing firms. So you've already created a major disconnect where you are expecting that reporting and oversight to go with the role aren't actually possible. And what can be reported of course adds substantial costs, will inevitably be transferred to the customer. But it's not just the level of the bar here, it's the legislation setting an expectation for every interaction meet a standard that goes beyond even fiduciary duty and into something more like power of attorney. You can't force people's decisions, otherwise you aren't an advisor at all. By saying every interaction has to be demonstrably the best decision available for the client is not a reasonable standard for the role.

QUOTE (Dick Allen @ Feb 8, 2017 -> 08:00 AM) The DHS says the riskier boarder is the Canadian border. Trump may have to have Canada build us another wall. I've spent some time in the Boundary Waters / Quetico area, where Minnesota and Ontario meet. That who section from Lake Superior to Lake of the Woods is 90% wilderness, and the border is on water. Before 9/11 ever happened, I remember remarking to people when we'd canoe across the border that if you really wanted to sneak someone or something into or out of the US, that's where you'd do it. Just need a boat, really. Unlike the desert, there's plenty of drinkable water to be had, and zero border patrol. I've probably been in BWCA/Quetico a dozen times in my life for usually a week at a shot, and I think I maybe talked to a Ranger once. And we went out of our way to talk to them.

QUOTE (Balta1701 @ Feb 7, 2017 -> 03:03 PM) But if they do meet with one...that advisor is going to do all they can to sell that person on the idea that they should invest in the products they sell rather than a few mutual funds. Well yeah. Do you expect a car dealer to tell people to go buy a bicycle? It's only a problem if the car dealer sells them a car that he can easily discern they can't afford (and even that is more on the finance guys than the dealer/salesman). Beyond that, the consumer needs to bear a burden of understanding. Which is why, as you've seen me say before, I am 100% on the idea that no one in this country should graduate high school without a course in basic finances to include not just balancing a checkbook, but understanding what mortgages, car loans, credit cards and plain vanilla investment vehicles are and how the work at a high level. It should be a basic proficiency standard, tested the same way reading, writing and arithmetic are.

QUOTE (farmteam @ Feb 4, 2017 -> 01:50 PM) I went to New Trier. Doesn't surprise me there's some of these idiots in the district. That said, the school itself is pretty inclusive, at least in a traditional sense. That one guy quoted mentioned that he didn't think the area was racist. He's not necessarily wrong -- the North Shore is much more classist than it is out and out racist. I also went to New Trier. Classism is rampant, not surprising given the generally high income levels. Racism is there too, or at least was, no doubt. But it's an odd thing - NTHS has lots of representation from certain minorities (religious ones like Jewish families, racial/national ones like south asians, far east asians), but there are virtually no African Americans and only slightly more than that of Hispanics. More than anything what I saw was a lot of ignorance - people who just had spent their life in such a wealthy, lilly white bubble, that they were scared of the unknown. The fact that parents are saying there is no racism in the district is laughable, these are the bubble people that are common there. The idea that civil rights discussions is some sort of left versus right thing is scary, in that what they're doing is making it seem that the pursuit of equal rights is somehow the world of the left. Which calls themselves out as being not fans of those rights - what does that tell you?

QUOTE (caulfield12 @ Feb 7, 2017 -> 09:23 AM) How would the fees be higher compared with current practices such as churning accounts for trade commissions and convincing unsuspecting clients that paying upfront loads for mutual funds will consstently lead to a higher ROI compared to index-tracking no load funds? Essentially the model of The Mutual Fund Store, where they only make money if you make money...whatever split they charge, something like 1.5% of nav at the end of year. Most typical middle class investors don't need hedge funds...or to get involved in puts, calls, warrants, etc. Because when you impose lots of layers of regs that are overlapping in purpose, doing all that paperwork and documentation takes time, and therefore costs money. It's also less time doing what customers want them to do - analysis and guidance. That's not to say you should have no regs, but instead that you make sure you make the burden as low as possible to still achieve the ends. And let's be frank, if all people want to do is pick a few mutual funds, they really don't need an advisor to begin with.

QUOTE (Soxy @ Feb 6, 2017 -> 07:26 PM) I felt called to come back to Soxtalk, and what do I see, but a mention of a politician I still pine for. Blast from the past!

QUOTE (caulfield12 @ Feb 6, 2017 -> 08:48 PM) Have the financial advisors reformed since then in largely a positive way, that encourages more competition and less portfolio churning (going to a fee for % of asset increases on a yearly basis, for example, so the interests are aligned mutually)? Many companies are keeping the changes they've made even with the rule removal. Finally, we know that almost no active manager can beat the market, that load funds generally have a hard time making back their upfront losses, that having index funds that represent bonds and stocks weighted according to your age, a mixture of international/emerging markets, value/growth, small/med/large cap, no more than 10% in any one company...all are logical boilerplate, yet how many active advisors follow this strategy if it earns them 25-50% less money in commissions? For the majority of investors under $500,000, they only need 3-4 Vanguard Index funds to capture a market return and mitigate their risk. Even if you're skeptical it was costing investors $17 billion per year (Obama admin numbers), the idea that going back to the old system will benefit the majority of small and even medium wealth investors is hard to fathom. Whether or not someone should even use a financial advisor is a philisophical question, not one for law. And while it certainly seems like a good idea to make sure advisors are acting in their clients' best interests, bear in mind that A) there are already rules to provide for that, and B) the new rule was not practically workable and would result in increased fees to the very customers they are looking to protect. Again, well-intentioned, poorly executed.