LC

Interesting theory, but let me add that sometimes being overly obsessed is not a good thing to achieve the best outcome. Missing the forest for the trees kind of thing.

I think Amazon could do a great job with auto parts. A piece of my car fender broke a few months back. Step 1 was to find the part # from the manufacturer's website, Step 2 was to go on Amazon and see what prices looked like. Much cheaper to get the part from Amazon and have a body shop (or yourself) install it. I remember my father used to do this, he would bring the car to the body shop, get the part # he needed from the mechanic, and went to the auto parts distributor to buy the part and bring back to the mechanic. Saved the giant markup from the body shop (who were just ordering the part and adding a markup). Online manuals/Amazon (or Ebay) make this a lot easier.

What is the market like for this business? Why don't other medical groups offer this? If I'm a hospital or medical group why wouldn't I just set this up for myself...It could be used to reduce the volatility of work, especially during slow hours. Perhaps the real business is selling the software/setup to hospitals/clinics/medical groups and whatnot?

In the risk space the women I work with are very good. I would say better on average than the men I work with (myself probably included!) In terms of investing, I have yet to see how gender matters. Anyone who can read Ben Graham has a shot, IMHO.

I haven't seen any comparative tests, and really I'm not sure how you would even do it. I could see comparing the materials, but in terms of which one "feels" better? That seems very subjective. I would second themattressunderground.com for all things mattress related. Also, apparently this company makes the mattresses for the royal family: https://www.hypnosbeds.com/international I can't comment on price or value, though.

Do you have name, model etc? Please do tell if it's available. Thanks in advance. That's what I've been consistently hearing that the confusion between $200, and $1000 and $4,000 mattress is so great that it makes buying one a pain in the butt. Sure, I bought 2 of these: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00GTCL3SQ/ref=oh_aui_search_detailpage?ie=UTF8&psc=1

i bought a cheap $200 queen-size mattress from amazon. i really can't tell the difference between a $4000 mattress, $1000 mattress, and $200 mattress. plus its much easier to replace (knowing it was so cheap) if for whatever reason i need to do that.

Happy Canada day folks!

Earnings out: https://seekingalpha.com/article/4085009-nikes-nke-ceo-mark-parker-q4-2017-results-earnings-call-transcript?part=single NIKE, Inc. revenues grew 6% to $34.4 billion on a reported basis. On a currency neutral basis, NIKE, Inc. revenues grew 8%. Gross margin declined 160 basis points to 44.6%. Earnings per share rose 16% to $2.51 and we delivered ROIC of nearly 35%. Also they announced a pilot program with Amazon. The market seemed to like it, but I am not so sure. There is always a tug-of-war for power in the relationship between manufacturer/distributer. Is moving to Amazon a sign of weakness? Will Amazon begin to squeeze them like they have a reputation of doing? Or is it simply responding to where their customers shop? It is a small pilot and it sounds like they will have a lot of control over how the products are presented, which is obviously important for their brand and also to maintain their negotiating position vs. Amazon.

Agreed. Same situation - mortgage, car payment, refi'd student loans, and any other loan i can get below 4%. We have the entire world to invest in, and the hurdle is 4%. Well, you won't go broke doing this, but when we actually hit a serious downturn, I can say from experience that it really feels shitty to be in the situation with your equity decimated and all these loans hanging over your head. It does work out in the long term (assuming you haven't done something really catastrophic on your investments) but it doesn't feel good at all. Fair point!

Agreed. Same situation - mortgage, car payment, refi'd student loans, and any other loan i can get below 4%. We have the entire world to invest in, and the hurdle is 4%.

http://newsroom.bankofamerica.com/press-releases/corporate-and-financial-news/bank-america-announces-increases-quarterly-common-stock- Bank of America today announced that the company’s Board of Directors plans to increase its quarterly common stock dividend by 60 percent to $0.12 per share, beginning in the third quarter of 2017. Also, the Board authorized the repurchase of $12 billion in common stock from July 1, 2017 through June 30, 2018, plus repurchases to offset shares awarded under equity-based compensation plans during the same period, estimated to be approximately $0.9 billion.

Thanks Viking. Bought shared in C two days ago. Wish I bought more! $19B capital return plan or 10.5%

Bought Compass Minerals and a weee bit of Ethereum

LOL savage...do you still work in the models space? That's where I am.

Compare the cost of the mortgage with the cost of (IB loan + put to protect from margin call).

my favorite was the piece on whether to hold cash or not.

One criticism is the paper takes a "worst-case" perspective: we will live longer lives with lower expected returns. In that world, wouldn't inflation also be lower? Technology will continue to advance, making it cheaper to simply live. Better medical care. Take a look at retirees now vs. 40 years ago, when rates were higher. Who has the better standard of living?

Most sketchy story/product/person/deal you worked with? :D

Yeah, but how valuable can that real estate be if it's next to a latex factory? You guys are forgetting the hidden cash cow - bottle collection and transport to Michigan for that 10cent recycling windfall. $$$

Can you talk more about your thoughts on capital allocation? My understanding is (aside from the capex) their only major move recently was the brazil expansion, which is responsible for the debt load. So the two issues you mention seem tied at the hip. On the Produquímica acquisition, they paid in total about $575M. Produquímica did about $370M in sales and $60M in EBITDA in their prior year (jun15-jun16), so a little under 10x ebitda. Expensive, but Produquímica has doubled sales and ebitda from 2011 to 2015, so there is some future growth in there.

Has anyone taken a look at this? I could not find a topic on it. Compass was formed, well around 1990 when a bunch of salt mines were aquired and combined. This entity was picked up by Apollo Mgmt in 2001 and IPO'd in 2004 as Compass Minerals. http://www.compassminerals.com/who-we-are/our-history/ Compass operates in a few divisions: Salt and Magnesium Chloride http://www.compassminerals.com/what-we-do/salt/ Various types of salts and magnesium chloride are sold to governments/businesses/municipalities/homeowners as de-icing tools for snow and ice on roads/walkways/etc. Salts are additionally sold as water conditioning/softeners, to ranchers for livestock, as pool salts, in food-grade form, and in industrial-grade form (for things like dyes, leather tannings, etc.) Plant Nutrition http://www.compassminerals.com/what-we-do/plant-nutrients/ CMP sells mineral plant feeds (various brands with things like potassium, phosphorous, potash, nitrogen, magnesium chloride, etc. etc.) DeepStore http://www.compassminerals.com/what-we-do/sustainable-storage/ Finally they have this weird division that provides underground storage services in the United Kingdom. I guess when they get close to exhausting a mine they can use it for secure storage. They store things like legal/contract documents, artifacts, etc. Apparently they have 1000+ clients. Revenue split is: 41% Plant Nutrition / 36% Highway De-Icing / 23% Commercial&Industrial The company uses a few techniques to mine/refine these minerals: -Mining - using explosives to blast out salt rock, or steel cutting into the rockface -Solar evaporation (Utah/Great Lakes) - essentially letting the sun evaporate salt-rich waters -Mechanical evaporation - two different techniques (ion exchange, glaserite) that I don't know much about They set up mines that pretty much use one of the above techniques. Here's a handy fact sheet: http://phx.corporate-ir.net/External.File?item=UGFyZW50SUQ9NjY2MDYwfENoaWxkSUQ9MzczOTI5fFR5cGU9MQ==&t=1 You can see the layout of their mines globally - mostly located in the upper-midwest of the US and Canada, and Brazil. De-icing sales are obviously weather dependent. Plant nutrition sales and sales/ton are both growing. October 2016 they took out a $450M loan (libor+2) and acquired the rest of a plant nutrition company in Brazil hence their operations down there (they already owned 35% for a little over $100M prior). Their prior large acquisition was 2014 where they acquired Wolf Trax brand of plant nutrition powder. Investor presentations here: http://phx.corporate-ir.net/phoenix.zhtml?c=148615&p=irol-presentations The company does around 1.0-1.2 billion in sales/year Gross margins are quite variable, but generally around 25-30% Net margins around 15% The negatives are... Capex as you can imagine outpaces depreciation and is pretty bumpy and eats up a lot of FCF. This is my real concern...my guess in these slower, capital heavy, industries is that over time the glut just builds up in the company until they burst, get put together by a PE firm, and re-IPO'd. They've gone thru 2 CFO's in the last year or so. One dude went to another company, the other left due to an "unforseen personal issue". So what initially attracted me to the company is a few things: Relatively stable business (compared to the rest of the mining space - these guys sell salt pretty much). Decent valuation on a relative basis vs the S&P as a whole. Trades at like 13.5x last year's earnings. Pay about a 4% dividend that has been continuous and growing since the company was initially listed in 2004. I haven't purchased any shares, not even sure if I will, but I figured I would toss it out to the board since some of these businesses have been around for ages and I couldn't find a topic on it here.

Ok thanks - just read thru this thread....very interesting stuff....more for me to read... :D

So (correct me if am wrong) the technology is a distributed ledger? To simplify, it's pretty much bittorrent for transactions (or even more generally, any records in general)? The value is that, if party A makes a transaction with party B, and then both party A and B sends a signed receipt to everyone else in the world...well nobody can come by later and say "well no, party A still has not transacted with party B". I can see how this adds another level of security, for sure. So my thoughts are, the technology and the coin aspect are two distinct things. The technology is just a record keeping platform, which is stronger the more people use it. You can't generate profit from it, correct? The coin aspect is only as valuable as people make it. So, the more people who transfer their wealth into bitcoins, the more valuable bitcoins are. Until of course, the last marginal person converts their dollars into bitcoin. So to value the coin aspect, you have to have an understanding on how and why people will move their wealth into bitcoins. What drives this behavior? Is it security (i.e. people fearing the bank holding their money)? Is it ease-of-use (i.e. a completely digital society where everything is bought/paid for digitally?). Some other reason? Curious to your two cents on these thoughts, particularly the last one...

That's fair...I presume you say that because bitcoin is a better technology overall. I still don't quite get what real world applications these things have. All I see are digital currency (is it that hard to send money via Venmo?) and "smart-contracts". Not sure how much $ there is in smart contracts. Or what a smart contract even is. I'm getting old I guess.