Spekulatius

100% I'm concerned with it, but at the same time both Europe and Japan are worse than the U.S. in that regard and nothing bad has happened yet which emboldens policy makers to continue making unsustainable decisions. When will it stop? When it can't continue. Europe are not worse in terms of deficits. Germany actually runs a surplus and even Italy’s deficit is 2.1% if GDP vs US at roughly 4.5%.

Sold PRSP. Seems fully valued.

Thinking about the whole things with the Spheres, the fact that there don’t appear to be real return projections, it seems to me a Dolan vanity project. I guess since Dolan itself is an aspiring artist (thanks fo Foreign Truffet for the video clip), he probably really likes the idea of creating something unique of such scale. The economics with a $1.7B cost ($500M above internal projections) on leased land, with a cost plus project where the land owner gets a cut of the profits above a certain threshold look pretty bad to me. Looks like the MSG has delayed the project and tries to figure out how to get the cost into control. They have sunk $100M so far in this. That said, I don’t think Dolan is totally stupid and any losses would come from his own pocket foremost, since he holds most shares. I feel that is a good chance that this gets scaled back or cancelled altogether. $100M in losses wouldn’t break the investment thesis.

The real difference between good schools and bad schools aren’t the teachers, it’s the parents of the kids attending the schools. http://freakonomics.com/2007/10/04/more-evidence-on-the-lack-of-impact-of-school-choice/

Oh man...was just looking at the press release. Anytime you get management talking about "smelling" something, I think investors are in for a rough time. “We’re going to be taking people places where they’ve never gone before, both experiencing it visually as well as feeling it, smelling it and hearing it,” MSG president Andrew Lustgarten said in response to a pointed question about returns. Oh oh Yeah, the strongest smell is typically coming from the restroom area.

A 20% FCF yield with a 13.5% decline in operating profit isn’t necessarily a good deal. I have heuristically come to the concluding that most of these type of value situations don’t work, and even if they do, they cause much more grief then they are worth (averaging does trading around ). Others may come to different conclusions and better results, but those are mine. FWIW, I think the whole cable / TV sector is a bit spooked by subscriber losses, but MSGN are definitely the worst I have seen.

Stock is now at $3.67. So yeah, it literally had ~1 month in the sun last year. 1 month in the sun is more than enough to cash in.

Yes, it looks interesting. I joined the cheap seats here with a starter position.

I have a neighbor who bought a house with a Solarcity installation on his roof ( done before he bought the house), which is now leaking. He suspects the installation being the issue, since the roof is not that old. I don’t know what comes out of this, and it may be a one off, but also sounds like a pot. liability Tesla. I would be careful buying a house with solar cells on the roof.

^ I passed on this because it is a cigarbutt ( albeit with a lot of life left) in a sense that it will be worth far less once the contract with MSG ( the sister co) is up. It rather deal with the foibles of MSG, as sports team valuations have tail winds.

Thanks for the answers, movys. I live in MA and the response to legalization of cannabis is definitely muted. I know that a permit for a marijuana grower in my town was voted down. There seem to be plenty of folks in Lowell downtown to get hold of the stuff, LOL. Of course, ai do wonder if over the longer run, more wholesale licenses will be granted. I do not see reason why not. Perhaps there is a limited time window when pricing will be great. CA was a different situation because there were already a lot of illegal marijuana growers competing before this was legalized for recreational use. I do believe that MA is further behind because there weren’t many illegal grows that went legit on day one.

Won’t cannabis prices collapse, like they did in California, after it gets legalized? I don’t think they will remain with limited competition for long. In the end, I regard cannabis as an agriculture business and more or less commodity. It remains to be seen, if the players can get price premiums via branding. These projections look good, but don’t they always for SPACS? The success base rate for SPACS is just awful.

I'm curious why you DON'T like the Territory Partner model? That seems to me one of the strengths of deepening their moat. They will most likely to do terrible with online conversions until more people are educated about pet insurance (which may or may not ever happen). Advertising right now too has limited IRR in most markets. So why not take advantage of building relationships with Vets and vets having those relationships with the pet parents? I believe having basically a 3rd party salesforce has risk in terms of getting the message diluted. Generally, I don’t like business models, where the cost of marketing is so high. I see evidence of their growth (see above link) slowing down, higher customer acquisition costs and there is the issue with valuation, where you need 7-10 years of current growth rates to justify the valuation. FWIW, scuttleblurb has a decent primer on TRUP: https://www.scuttleblurb.com/trup/

Mexico has 8% interest rates. Doesn’t count, I guess.

Added some too, but it didn’t sell off on earnings as I first thought. It was the news about the MSG Sphere project cost increase (from $1.2b assumed to $1.7B proposed) and the delayed spinofff do the sports assets that caused the drop, in my opinion. I do agree that earnings shouldn’t matter.

The plans and cost estimates for these spheres are indeed concerning - $1.7B for the on in Las Vegas and then plan for a second one in London is not exactly small change.

Dolan is an idiot is basically the discount rationale. Collections of assets will trade at a discount to fair value most of the time, whether they are run by an idiot or not. FWIW, I just bought more MSG just now.

TRUP is really get hammered now, is this just due to the short article in seekingalpha? It seems there must be more too it. I am following the company and had a few shares for a bit, but sold. I don’t like the way their financial look and how they market their product with an independent sales force. I know that some value/ growth investors are in it, including Rob Vinall, who takes a lot of time to look at companies he invests in.

The 80’s were only great in retrospect. I was investing (little money, since I was student) and it wasn’t all peachy and little did we know that valuation multiples would go up as much as they did. Also keep in mind that inflation and real interest rates were much higher - you could still buy 8% treasury bonds in 1990, with corporate bonds yielding much higher. It was a great time, but it did not always seem so. In 2009, you could smell the fear and desperation. I have seen nothing like this before and likely never will. Yes, if there ever was a time for no- brainer buys, it was at about the time when Sanjeev posted it. It literally was the best time to put money to work since I started investing (which was early 1980’s). I would have much rather started in the early 80s. You had S&P 500 returns for over 17% for around 1981-1999/2000 time frame. I don't think the returns from 2009-2029 will earn anywhere close to 17%. I'd also say that there was much, much higher risk in 2009 than in the early 80s. There wasn't much talk about a Great Depression. There was a very real chance we could have gone through a second Grand Depression in 2009.

An interesting observation...but what amount of debt does the company have? Yahoo! has it listed as about $8mm? As for Alluvial, I believe that most of their positions are thinly traded to downright illiquid. If they had to unwind their positions relatively quickly...they would probably have to take a mark down. I am also going to guess that if there is a market correction, some of their positions might be getting hit hard? How much are the royalties on the home services truly worth? Hard to say...but I would think lower rather than higher. The interweb division may through off some decent money in the upcoming 12 months...but what will it be worth 1 year or so from now? Then the remaining asset is Mt. Melrose. Not surprised if they take another hit there. SYTE hit a 52 week low today. I would not be surprised if we see that repeat multiple times in the upcoming 12 months. The presentation lists the debt at ~$1.07M. Most of the debt was attached to Mt. Melrose and is now gone after they de-consolidated it. It’s unlikely an attic ist has a chance to get control since Steven Kiel owns so many shares (684k shares, directly and indirectly via his fund.

GE Aerospace is not gushing cash because the cash flows are backloaded in their aircraft engine business relative to profits (from service contracts), while earnings tends to get booked more upfront. Same with Rolls Royce, which has the same issues (and others) that the FCF < Earnings. (I own some RR.L for full disclosure, purchased recently). The aircraft engine business is quite frankly not as great of a business than some make it to be, but it’s not a bad business either, it’s just that cash flows and earnings can have huge multi year cyclical offsets relative to each other. Of course this all assumes that accounting is kosher, which often when accrual accounting is used, tends to be an optimistic view.

I am not sure why this deserves a post here. If yourself not a subscriber, you can’t read/ listen to it, and if you are, you get a notification anyways.

One concern is that ARM is not doing well (value ~ 10- of their market cap). Their revenue growth has stalled stalled and their earnings have shrunk dramatically. I think it may be worth far less than what they paid for. Also, they seemed to have segregated their Chinese business in a separate company. I guess that means that they can welcome the CCP to their management team. However, with a LTV of 19%, they should be OK, as long as Alibaba does OK.

What odds do you put on Trump Network launching in 2021 or 2025? And might that steal many conservative viewers? Who knows what Trump will do. Anyways, has he had any success outside real estate so far? Then, he will be 77 in 2021. Maybe he starts another airline ;D.

Yes, if there ever was a time for no- brainer buys, it was at about the time when Sanjeev posted it. It literally was the best time to put money to work since I started investing (which was early 1980’s).