Spekulatius

Uncle Warren will backstop this, but it’s going to be expensive. 8% preferred with equity kicker?

He bought a lot of bank stocks, but hasn’t touched the trust banks. I don’t think he has got much love for them.

So what’s the case, to buy this vs. Brenntag BNTGY / BNR. DE? I bought some BNTGY today. The business is surprisingly resilient, even during a time of economic distress like 2008/2009.

..and if it starts to smell, sell.

On overall basis, I do, actually. The question is if this is warranted, or I'm naive. Perhaps it's not only about the Danish legal system, but also about that I live a place, where we have some kind of a "dual legal" system - the legal system and The Law of Jante. Parts of the Danish press practise The Law of Jante zealously. Here is a hilarious example. ["You can't speed up a Tesla when it's standing still" and "I haven't filed a police report for violence against me by the officers because they were two against one." [ : - D]] The real problem is that I may be severely biased here because I forget about such cases [related to equality for the law] in the long run - simply because I don't give a damn about them [like example above], and because I haven't really seen some appalling evidence that there exist exemptions from equality for the Law. There is a risk that the casuality in this line of thinking may be logically flawed. So, thank you for asking, wachtwoord. Home bias for sure, but having lived in both the US and Germany, I would trust the legal system in Nordic countries, Germany, France and UK more so than in the US. I believe the jury system, quality of the defending lawyer and prosecutor as well as location can make the outcome of a trial quite unpredictable. A conviction for the same crime can have vastly different outcomes which is much less the case Europe. However, I am not a legal expert nor have I run into legal issues anywhere.

You could buy MGA instead, which is much less depends on powertrain and is cheap as well, and has shown a lot of resilience in margins. They are also family led by Frank Stronach, who is quite and interesting character by himself. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Stronach It seems to me that MGA better prepared for the automotive future than Linamar, regardless of the adoption of EV.

How do you 10% FCF yield for KAR? Adding back $60M in amortization annually only gets you to ~$1.65 in FCF/ share, which is far short of 10%. I dont see net income+amort as FCF. However, I just looked on BB that consensus FCFE is ~500 mUSD the next 2 years. Thaths even more than 10% FCFE yield but didnt bother calculating much. But I see now that BB may not have reflected the IAA spinoff yet, which is quite sad given the super high cost of BB subscription I don’t use Bloomberg, but I can attest that many datasets for spinoffs are incorrect month after a spinoff occurs. You always have to go back to the filings and those are a mess itself.

Water is an interesting field, but it’s hard to invest in. In the end, who owns the water and who can do what with it is determined by politics. There is and industry around water (irrigation, desalination, filtration, pumps), but it’s actually not growing that fast and I don’t think there are any huge moats there either.

It trades similar to other distributor companies like AVT, ARW or AXE. Either they are all cheap, or none is. I would tend to believe they are all a bit cheap.

Likely sectors are chemicals (maybe DuPont, or LYB) or aerospace. They have already toeholds in both, so there would be a knowledge base in the company about what to buy. Both are durable business that will not go away. Buffet sold of PSX, so I don’t think he will venture in the refinery sector.

Most of their powertrain business will go away. They will have to completely change their product portfolio, which is one of the reasons why Linamar should be trading at a discount. Other car suppliers like Lear don’t have that issue, since future cars still will have seats and Electronics, just to name one example.

How do you 10% FCF yield for KAR? Adding back $60M in amortization annually only gets you to ~$1.65 in FCF/ share, which is far short of 10%.

I believe that 75% of the EBITDA comes from Fox News (Morningstar?, forgot the source), so that gives us an idea how much an NFL deal could impact earnings, as it only would impact Fox sports. I am sure they would find mitigating factors. Fox is less affected by cord cutting, they lost 1% of their subscribers YoY (I think this was mentioned in the CC), which less than peers (3% loss average). I agree on Lachlan being a concern.

perhaps the market doesn't like the consumer credit deal? maybe this is m&a drift despite supposed synergies? It’s possible, although the deal quite small. They also seem like they want to rebuild their content production (after they sold of their film Studio to Disney) even though before they have claimed they are happy to be just part owner of the content that it created specifically for their channel. I think the Market sense style drift. The downdraft in the stock occurred after the earnings release, not after the news release of the acquisition (which was a bit before). I sense a negative brokerage report or something like this.

Yes, their revenues have been rising. Now is this because their business is indispensable or is it because Boring and Airbus let them live? I think it is the latter, because Boring went capital light years ago and outsourced parts the business as extended work benches for low margin work. I think WAIR distribution is just that, aerostructures is another example of low margin high working capital business, that the big guys like to outsource, because it allows them to increase their return on assets.

Just present facts without any judgment. You researched this individual online and found out these violations. I wouldn’t even call him a swindler (which is a judgement) and you don’t know the terms of the annuity , so I wouldn’t even comment on that. Then if the customer is interested, offer further help to investigate or look at the annuity contract. It‘s then up to the customer to take action and work with you or somebody else. That’s what I would do, but then again, I am not an investment advisor.

Sold REZI after the earnings report. I had reduced my position before the CC, but sold out after. While they made the revenue and earnings number, it was a very low quality report. Gross margin does and the pro forma # excludes the indemnity payment to HON (capped at $140M/ year). This payment is represented on the balance sheet as a $580M liability , but I think it will cost more. Anyway, thy have about $1.1B in debt (costing ~$70M in interest) and don’t seem to be able to generate any FCF currently. I misjudged this, it’s another crappo spinoff (GTX is a sinking ship also), so I take my 15% loss and move on. KTB is doing better than I thought, also the earnings report is nothing to write home about either.

Familiar is too strong of a word, but I have owned them for a little while. I was attracted by the cheap metrics. I sold after reviewing the first earnings after they announced their LXFT acquisition , which had not closed yet at that time. ( it was a negative earnings surprise). I felt this was quite complex and the business may be in rapid decline. Also, the Luxoft acquisition felt like a desperate measure. I exited flat, so avoided this dumpster fire. This company feels like a bunch of crappy IT companies held together tight duct tape. The buybacks have significantly worsened their balance sheet. I don’t feel like I have a handle if this can turn around and managment isn’t exactly inspiring either.

It’s probably not that easy to improve performance of this business. Boeing now has their own wholesaler KLX, why would they need WAIR at all. high customer concentration also dozens Bode well for pricing power, They can’t make money in the largest aircraft building boom ever, what makes you think they could change that? To me, the price looks quite fair, considering the low quality of the business..

I thinking’s a possibility. I don’t think it’s likely that DISH will go alone, they will most likely Partner. Another possibility is that a tech Giant like GOOG or AMZN Partners with DISH but I am not sure how they deal with the infrastructure side.

Have you ever tried to rip out and replace an essential piece of software, and retrain your entire workforce around a new system? Broadly categorizing software makes no sense. Software plays a huge part in what makes the world more productive and distinguishes products. I use specialized software at work and without it, I simply couldn’t do my work. I could use a different notebook, screen, or even work at a different company in the same business and it would be easier than doing without the software.

Maybe they are too deep in? If rates increase, the value of those low/no/ negative interest rates bonds would drop and the bagholders owning them wouldn’t broke. Maybe all that can be done at this point is dig deeper.

Well, alive and trading doesn’t mean much. Julia is probably a zero ultimately and ST!P trades at a fraction of whatnot used to be a d may not come back in my lifetime. It remains to be seen how BUR turns out. It is unlikely to go out of business quickly, but it could wither away. Einhorn could do similar hit pieces and get a quick return, but I think nowadays the stocks he shorts do better than his longs

I think Buffet hates commodity business , after all they are just price takers.

I smell a preferred deal with Warren B. 8% interest and warrants to purchase stock. This would kill the common stock price, so I am not sure how WEB would go about the conditions.