Spekulatius

I very much enjoyed this podcast from Jolly Swagman hosting Marc Cohodes: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-jolly-swagman-podcast/id1236553683?i=1000443953331 I had to tone it down at home due the use of colorful aphorisms by Marc Cohodes. :o This podcast is best enjoyed with the one with John Hampton as these guys know each other well.

While a great return, it seems like they sell a great business, but can’t get rid of the dogs with fleas. RFP, Stelco, BB etc. is what they need to sell. Rebuilding an insurance business in India will take a lot of time.

Zerohedge and Mike Sherlock - you need better sources.

So is he now going to fall in a ditch and play dead? https://twitter.com/time/status/1169694244111601666?s=21

Hopefully we don’t get side tracked in a Medicare for all discussion. The risk of intervention in drug pricing has been around forever and is just something that an investor in drug stocks has to live with. Cigarbutt, thanks for the link about JNJ’s robotic research. I knew that JNJ plans an entry in this field, but didn’t now about the collaboration with GOOG, a large holding of mine. It clear that drug pricing is out of line in the US with the rest of the world. If prices were to come down, I believe reducing expenses and in particular marketing would be a necessity. I also think that clinical trial costs could be reduced since the FDA has become overzealous in their requirements for trials, especially biological and biological generics. Besides that, JNJ is a diversified health care company and better diversified than virtually any other company in this business.

Yes, I see it the same way. JNJ sells at ~13x forward earnings, which seems like a decent value. I believe the decline to the product recall today was overdone? I have to do more work on this, but based on. Y initial assessment, I felt it worthwhile to start a position. I feel thwt the device sector in particular could have some upside potential. In particular the Auris acquisition points to an effort to become a player in advanced robotics for surgery. https://www.massdevice.com/jj-to-enter-the-robotic-surgery-market-with-3-4b-auris-health-buy/

Bought a bit of JNJ today. I also added some FRFHF.

Congrats to this trade!

So your trades, which executed at 11.04 were not logged. This sounds like your order went on a different exchange that isn’t shown in the yahoo or your Brokers data feed. I would look at your trade ticket to see in what exchange your trade executed and see if there is something unusual. FWIW, I had GTC order execute outside the bid ask spread in some cases (it was below, so no complaint). I think this can occur due to the fragmented nature of the current stock exchanges.

I agree that $250M in Capex is too low. In the long run, this company has way higher earnings power. The reason is simple, CTVA currently pays $800M in Royalties for seed traits to Monsanto, a number that is supposed to go up to ~1B in 2022. The patents for these traits expire in 2022 and this means that royalties will start to go down. If Roundup get banned or used less before, it may mean that those roundup ready traits may become less dominant and perhaps royalties go down before. 2022. While this is a few years away, there seems to be a clear Lt catalyst to much higher earnings for CTVA. I believe the Morningstar stock reports discuss this to some extend. Disclosure: no position, but would br a buyer again at $25.

^ These Artko folks have balls, that’s for sure. So far, it seems to be working out for them.

As BG2008 noted, many malls better located malls can probably survive which a lot of square footage being repurposed for different uses, like mixed living, offices, restaurant, community centers. The problem that I see with this is that it’s not clear to me that the rents the owner is getting after that conversion is higher than what the malls are getting right now. It may still make sense to do the conversion, when the owner can convert a 8-9% cap rate asset with a murky future into a 5-7% cap rate asset with a supposedly safe future, if you look at NAV and even including the cost of conversion. However, the owner will not see an increase in FFO from this, despite investing more Capital (or increasing the debt load) although NAV May increase. This is a bit what we are see8ng with all these REITs, their FFO is decreasing, their debt is often flat or increasing too, while they are shedding assets and their NAV supposedly increases. In most cases, Mr Market isn’t given any credit for this, right or wrong. Essentially, these Retail REITs have to paddle hard just to stay put. Sooner or later, the dividends will need to be cut to account for the higher capital needs and lower cap rates.

Same here. I suspect the pot. SEC action may scare some investors away from dark stocks and cause some selling. I am happy to oblige and provide liquidity if the price is right.

You might’ve able to determine Phytogens performance from CTVA‘s filings ,since they are the majority owner.

Yes, but this also makes him a defacto market timer. Nothing wrong with this, but many here are a bit inconsistent in terms of stating that market timing does not work, yet giving Buffet a free pass on it (sort of). Another way to look at is that Buffet doesn’t buy relative value. I guess he has internalized value metrics and does not bend the, when Mr Market does not collaborate. I personally see this a bit different and in a way, I buy relative value within reason and most here do so as well, in my opinion.

Based on my understanding of the rule change, the proposed changes would only affect “no info” stocks, not “limited info” stocks like LAACZ.

When looking at the drawdown during the GFC, keep in mind that VNO was trading at or above NAV back then (they have a nice chart on this in their annual report) and now they are trading at a 35% discount. Same issue than with BRK trading at around 2x book in 2007. Valuations matter!

I like the Penn station development. I think office and retail space will do very well there because it’s very accessible for commuters and there is enormous foot traffic. This area really needs it too. Disclosure: no position.

To invert this, with CVET doing poorly, it seems that HSIC (from which CVET was spun off) dodged a bullet and ought to be a better business now. It seems reasonably valued too. I put it on my watch list together with CVET. I would be more inclined to buy HSIC here than CVET.

CBI is a good reminder what can happen if a company spends negative working capital from customers as if it’s theirs.

There are three sort of posts that I appreciate the most 1) Posts that present a new idea or view to the community 2) Posts that lead me to change my mind 3) Posts that Save me a lot of Time I think packer16 Post on CTO is angriest example of #3 http://www.cornerofberkshireandfairfax.ca/forum/general-discussion/any-reit-experts-here/msg384761/#msg384761 It’s a very short but succinct analysis of the pros and cons of CTO, presented in a former post from Gregmal. A good example of 2) was this in the SPOT thread where griezemann23 pointed out a huge error that Aswath made (and didn’t catch it): http://www.cornerofberkshireandfairfax.ca/forum/investment-ideas/spot-spotify/msg383561/#msg383561 A great example (for me) Of 1) was John ‘s post about ODET. I was just researching music labels and knew that Bollore had a stake in this business. I had ODET on my research list and this post reminded me to look again: http://www.cornerofberkshireandfairfax.ca/forum/investment-ideas/odet-pa-financiere-de-l'odet-se/ I am the first to omit they I post mostly for my own benefit. That sometimes leads to “throwing something on the wall and see if it sticks”. The result are some times obvious errors. Despite that, I do hope that some of the stuff on the wall is beneficial to other board members too.

^Thanks for posting @Spekulatius. Gee, there are a lot of moving parts to this company. After Merkel's 8th point discussing the article my mind started to drift. I think I'll take a pass on this one. Nice work on buying & selling for a profit. I change my opinion rather quickly, if I feel that like I overlooked something or new information comes up. I typically avoid battleground stocks between bears and bulls, especially when I think the the bears have done their homework better than the bulls. The small gain was pure luck,mit could have gone just as well the other way. David Merkel knows insurance, he has worked as an actuary for an insurance corporation before and goes into the regulatory filings . However, the key question is if GTS holding co has guaranteed the debt of the property insurance sub and there is no clear answer. If not, then I believe GTS is a buy.

Met him at the Sidoti conference. He has ADHD and couldn't stop looking at his phone. He literally would stop our conversation to make a call. He's either a visionary or a wacko. He does not live in middle ground. Thanks for the color on Singh. After listening to the podcast, I thought he might have ADHD, but didn’t want to overextend. This doesn’t mean that he isn’t successful, but if you combine this with the sloppy IR presentation, I think it elevates the risk that things may go wrong.

I guess Mr Market doesn’t like the newest acquisition. Inquiring minds may want to know why they are expanding in new geographic area, it only makes sense, if they do more deals there or start to develop. With their smallish size, it seems to make more sense to stay closer to home and add bulk to the areas, where they have already a presences (PA, CT). In any case, we can take it a s sign that they have no plans of selling out soon.