Spekulatius

It sounds like Texas prefers to pay $5-10B every decade or so, while also sitting in the cold for a week or so, rather than investing $8B once and be done with it.

I like koyfin, but like tikr.com much more so. Tikr.com gets its data from Capital IQ. You also may be able to get access to capital IQ directly from your library. For example, the Boston Library gives access to Capital IQ remotely for the duration of the pandemic. I am not sure how long it last, but for the time being, I have used Capital IQ through my Boston library account remotely for a few times.

You should not generalize across Europe. In Lithuania anyone above 70 can get vaccine already and possibly even above 65. To be fair, Lithuania is still way behind US. There is a difference between “you can sign up to get the vaccine” and actually getting it. My dad is in the highest priority group due to age, yet can’t effectively get the vaccine at this point. The reasons are simple, lack of vaccine and lack of effective distribution. I probably could manage this for him if I were around, but from a distance across the ocean and not being intimately familiar with the process there, I can’t help him much. The mistake that the state bureaucracy does (imo) is not allow the primary physicians to give a vaccine shots. They could easily do it, but the bureaucracy has decided that a centralized distribution via mass vac sites is fairer, except for the fact that older people without internet and car effectively can’t get it done. The whole village were I grew up (1100 people, pretty rural) is full of old people and very few of them are vaccinated. Of course every country is different but that’s the situation on the ground in Germany pertaining to my dad.

Maybe we should avoid to politicize this thread and just stick to the topic of this poll and avoid an epidemic of sh1tposts. Just got back from my CVS appointment and all went well so far. Picking the second shot first to play their booking system caused a bit of an issue at registration but that was fixable and medically speaking the shots are the same. While my state has an elaborate prioritization for who gets the vaccine first, my casual observation of the demographics in the waiting line is that we are already in the "free for all phase", regardless of what the local state rules claim. Or perhaps my small sample size of ~15 people wasn't representative - I was by far the oldest in the line and ahead of my were a bunch of ~20 year old girls who seemed to know each other well (soccer team?).

For me, getting vaccinated for COVID-19 is a decision with a wide margin of safety: 1) risk of serious side effects after vaccination: few ppm (1/ millions) 2) chance of having serious side effects (ICU visit, death) after infection a few percent or ~10,000 ppm Now we need to put in the distributions for moderate side effects after vaccination or getting infected but i think those skew in favor of the vaccine too. Than, last there is a risk of getting infected, which i think over time is going to be very high, almost approaching one. Those are just the individual health benefits not the societal ones which are suppressing the infection to unvaccinated, easier travel etc. Anyways that's how I look at. Due to the nature of the disease (stealthy due to asymptomatic infection and time lag) as well as the high R0 rate it is unlikely that we eradicate COVID-19 ever. I think COVID will become endemic. I also believe we will get an vaccine update probably next year to enhance the profile against the troublesome mutant variants.

Interesting, my wife is a nurse too (frontline workers and deals a lot with COVID-19 patients) but that got my nothing. It is probably because she works at various hospitals as a contractor. The strange thing is that many nurses refuse to take the vaccine themselves (~30-40% in my wife's group).

There is the old adage that there are either more idiots than paper (=bull market) or more paper than idiots (=bear market). I guess right now we have the latter in SPAC land.

I would be interested to know what makes all of your eligible to get the vaccine. I thought I am one of the older guys here being in my mid fifties. Are hedge fund managers and financial advisors now a preferred group? I haven't seen anything on that regard in my state. ;D I became eligible just a few days ago because I work in the medical supply chain (CO2 filters for respirators etc.). I booked an appointment for today and had to work the system at CVS because I was unable to simultaneously book a first and second appointment because there were no second ones available. So I signed up for my second shot in the system to get going. I think this was mentioned upstream as a workaround. Hopefully it works out. The system in MA here sucks, but what really sucks is Europe. My parents are 79 and 84 and no visibility on when to get the vaccine. That's one thing that Trump's Warp speed team did largely right, they bet on the right vaccines and ordered quite a bit of them. Maybe not quite enough and could have been done better but also could have been a whole lot worse. Compared to Europe, we are in great shape as far as vaccine's are concerned.

Could be a good trade, but I think the acquisition is overpriced. 2 Comps: 1) ADSK, much more moats business and higher growth, same valuation in terms of EV/ EBITDA. Seems to be better deal. 2) QLYS (mentioned before here), similar growth next business quality, EV/EBITDA ~23x compared to CCC ~30. So accounting all these SPAC shenanigans (warrants etc) it looks like a straight buy of QLYS is a much better deal. I can see this being a good trade setup, buy at ~$10, sell at $10.8 or whatever a week later hopefully. I don’t think I want to hold anything like this post deal though. I think the way to look for the SPAC is going to be in 1-2 years when they trade for less than $10 and many are orphaned.

I bought some pre-deal KVSA(Koshla Ventures) @ $10, already slightly under water. Seems like those folks should have good deal flow and I like that there are no warrants. Either it pops or it doesn’t. No post deal SPACS for me.

Well you are either cutting edge or low cost, TSMC is both together in one package and Intel is neither one and that doesn’t tend to work well. Global foundries tried to keep up with TSMC with leading edge product and they couldn’t do it and lost a lot of money along the way. Now they are trailing one generation behind which is way cheaper and they reduced cost and doing much better.

I think my holdings of $LMT and $NOC have a quicker solution, but the crew would have to leave the ship first.

Why get inoculated for polio or hepatitis? Because the cost/benefit ratio is extraordinary. This can get ugly fast so let's not make quick judgement. Hopefully he makes an informed decision and that's it. It still his decision. Valuearb, I think asking why never is not an option is totally fair. In my age range, there have been 5485 deaths over the past year (per CDC). Whats more is that a lot of the people who die from Covid either have pre-existing conditions such as obesity, high blood pressure etc which I don't have. The average vaccine takes years to pass between different stages of the approval process. This one got approved in less than a year. Furthermore, in the US you have no legal recourse if there are long term effects from the vaccine. If you are eager to get the vaccine that's your choice, if I choose not to that's mine. I agree choosing not to should be an option in a poll. The goal of a poll is to find out how people think, not to lead the outcome or to judge. We can do the latter in the commentary ;D

Related to this, the FT commentary is a good high level read. The take at the end is that Intel's chance of success are rather low. Taiwanese chipmaker TSMC: the most important company few people have heard of https://www.ft.com/content/05206915-fd73-4a3a-92a5-6760ce965bd9 Some industry experts are sceptical. “I would say this is difficult because Intel tried this before a few years ago, and they could not make it work even though they still had the best process technology at the time,” says Sebastian Hou, head of technology research at CLSA, a brokerage. TSMC will not yield easily. With its huge capital investment plans for this year, the company has already signaled that it is determined to hold on to its lead. A “significant portion” of TSMC’s projected capital expenditure will go into extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography machines, equipment that is indispensable in cutting-edge fabrication units, says an executive at a semiconductor tool vendor. ASML, the Dutch company which dominates the EUV market, said on its most recent earnings call that its capacity falls short of demand. Industry insiders therefore believe that every order placed now by TSMC will help it keep any potential competitor at arm’s length. “For sure, the longer Intel takes to tackle their difficulties, the wider the gap will open,” says the semiconductor equipment company executive. “TSMC will remain unassailable for the time being.” Intel does not use deep UV (EUV) and hence ASML lithography machines. They stuck with conventional longer wavelength equipment from Nikon (I believe) which most likely is contributing to of their manufacturing issues. In other words, they decided to take what appears now the wrong technical fork at the road some time ago and at least for the present cutting edge nodes, they are likely stuck with it and need to grind it out. On the positive side, ASML delivery constraints should not be an issue for Intel. I would think that for future nodes, they are also going to use (EUV) either from ASML or Nikon, if Nikon can bring a competitive product to market.

^ jemn- great first and second post and your sleuthing is pretty valuable if one considers investing here. Welcome to this board!

I get the sense that a lot of SPAC’s are going to break $10; the market is getting flooded with their things. Some of the better ones may be interesting, I guess Sponsor quality will matter a lot going forward.

FWIW, Bronte is short. Probably means nothing.

The well behaved kids get the nicest toys.

Do they need to buy in the open market to make it happen? I thought that their existing ownership already enables them to do it if they want. They just need to continue to do what they are doing -paying themselves with shares and issuing IOU's and PDH will be private over time.

Ticker Symbol is RYSAS. Down 10% today. If the situation in Turkey continues and Pabrai doesn´t sell, I will start a position. My strategy is to clone Pabrai here because there are no annual reports or financial statements in English, is all in Turkish Language Is this the one that shipped painted rocks instead of copper to Asia last month? Down another 6% in Turkey today. In addition to the inherent volatility, you also have currency swings - the Turkish Lira alone has swung by almost 20% back and forth in a just a few month. Too bad the WSB crowd can’t trade this , I imagine it would be fun ???

Not a bad idea Imo. It’s a pretty cheap stock with decent growth potential going forward and pays a nice dividend as well. Ping An also should befit from higher interest rates - since the Yuan is coupled to the USD, I expect the Internet rated in China to go up as well.

Ticker Symbol is RYSAS. Down 10% today. If the situation in Turkey continues and Pabrai doesn´t sell, I will start a position. My strategy is to clone Pabrai here because there are no annual reports or financial statements in English, is all in Turkish Language This was $0.75 in 2016, $0.65 in May 2019, $12.75 in Jan 2020, and $6.75 today. Is this a cryptocurrency? I guess you are supposed to scream "Allahu Akbar" when you push the buy button for this security.

What value is there to unlock?

It doesn’t really look like the price of spectrum as measured in MHZ/ pop has increased over the last 30 years. https://www.fiercewireless.com/regulatory/lessons-from-spectrum-auctions-entner Price per MHZ/pop isn’t quite a fair metric, because lower frequency bands are more valuable than higher frequency band (due to more reach and building penetration) but it is a close as we can get. I also think that larger blocks nationwide (let say 50MHZ at the same frequency across the entire USA) would be worth more than let’s say 5x 10 MHZ slices at different frequency’s across different locations covering the same. It works really like real estate in a sense.

In principle, JPM and peers could turn down deposits? Now that would be interesting - we have enough money, we don’t want yours, take it somewhere else ?