Spekulatius

Owning a house is “safer” with a 30 year fixed rate debt in a sense. If rates go up, the value of your house may go down, but the value of your fixed rate mortgage will go down even more, so it hedges in this situation. Cash flow wise, you are better of, if the higher rates are caused by higher inflation, compared to renting where you likely would have to pay higher rents. If rates go down, you just refinance and lower the cost of your mortgage. Your house will likely go up in value unless the lower rates go hand in hand with a recession. There won’t be a problem as long as you can service your mortgage. In both cases, you have somewhat of a hedge against changes in the value of your asset caused by interest rate changes, due to the optionality provided by the fixed rate mortgage. If you are in a nonrecourse state, you also have the put option to hand the key to your house to the mortgage owner, which is particular appealing if you loaded your house under the roof with debt before the house values tank.

if I were a client of Bridgewater, I would worry more about their performance than the change in world order.

Could well be. I think they wanted just enough of NFL so that fans need to have prime. Also, interesting to note that if this table is correct, the increase for Thursday night is only from $760M to $1B which is 32% and percentage wise, the smallest increase of any packages. 32% for a decade isn’t really that much. So if anything, it seems that Amazon got a bargain here: https://variety.com/2021/tv/news/nfl-tv-rights-thursday-night-football-amazon-super-bowl-1234933792/

I looked at both S-1 and I can come to terms with CPNG but what is really OSCR business model, is it like LMND for health insurance. Their numbers look atrocious. Both GOOG health care IPO‘s AMWL and OSCR look underwhelming to me.

Human bias: Imagine two different scenarios and determine which one make people feel better 1) 2% inflation and you get a 2% raise 2) 2% deflation and you get a 2% payout. I bet that people will accept 1) and go in arms over 2). The preference of inflation over deflation is just human bias/ how the brain works.

Amazon and the other networks took away quite a bit of programming from Fox sports, it seems.

I went through tikr for the cash flow statement snd also notice some strange working capital and other income items that likely distort cash from operation trends. I would personally just use net income plus depreciation and amortization and adjust for some extraordinary items. I typically would ignore working capital changes and pension payments or st least average them out. When adjusting for this, I do t see huge growth in cash from operations.

A couple of scattered comments: VZ ~9-10% FCF yield is mentioned, but that number does not include the infrequent spectrum purchases. Those are a real cost of doing business though. The recent spectrum purchase is ~ 2.5 years of FCF. looking back at VZ numbers, they haven’t really reduced debt or purchased back shares over time and their revenues haven’t gone up much either since the merger 2014. It looks like in aggregate (corr), the FCF has covered the dividend, but not more. On DISH - that’s an interesting case too. My understanding is that DISH has to buildout a nationwide 5G network, or they will lose their spectrum. So I guess that’s what they will have to do. They have some mostly subscribers (which ride on TMUS Network for the time being) that they got as scraps from the TMUS - Sprint merger but it’s hard to see this going anywhere on a standalone basis. So since they can’t merge with any of the big three wireless carriers, they will have to join forces with either the cable cos (Charter, Comcast) or perhaps get a buyout from a deep pocketed FANG to do something new. I agree that DISH CEO Ergen is scrappy and will figure something out. In my opinion, the likely path will be that DISH joins

^ I don’t think this is correct. If this were correct, Robinhood would be truly a bucket shop.

VNT looks interestingly GARP-y. Well we have a thread about this. it is currently overearning due to the upgrade cycle for gas stations coming to an conclusion, but I think it will transform over time. It got the DHR heritage and that means they are likely good operators and capital allocators. I am expecting them to exercise the right to buy out Tritium, the manufacturer of EV chargers. https://www.cornerofberkshireandfairfax.ca/forum/investment-ideas/vnt-vontier/msg433727/#msg433727

It was too expensive for value investors (insert "lowering head in shame" meme here) and to cheap and icky for growth investors.

“The difficulty lies not so much in developing new ideas as in escaping from old ones” - John M Keynes A Prophet survey of 13000 consumers asked them about 228 brands. Top 10 were: 1. Apple 2. Peloton (up from no. 35 in previous survey) 3. Kitchen Aid 4. Mayo Clinic 5. Lego 6. Costco 7. Honda 8. John Hopkins 9. PlayStation 10. Amazon --- "When gym and studio closures deprived exercisers of their fitness fix, they knew they needed the mental health benefits of sweat. Peloton, which earns the highest score for “connects with me emotionally,” saved them, nearly doubling sales of its exercise bikes and treadmills. But more importantly, it connected them to others, both through its online communities and its constantly expanding variety of workouts available live and on-demand. These gems are powering triple-digit membership gains and impressively low dropout rates." Dalal will be pleased to see PTON on #2 but not so pleased to see Honda on #7 while Tesla is only #23 :o With Kitchenaid being #3, WHR looks very undervalued - only $13.5B in market cap.

My recent adds were BABA and spin-off VNT.

To put in sanity checks like this, you don’t need a blockchain at all.

Any insight into what caused that momentary spike in MMAC share price today? I have no idea. It is a thinly traded stock and there were some sellers just a few days ago when a leadership change was announced, but the stock since has bounced back. The 10-k is supposed to get filed soon. Perhaps someone knows something, perhaps not. Anyways, I cashed my few shekels from the short term trade and moved on.

MMAC and CRBBF (Corby).

The end must be near.

I agree that Rocket Labs looks great compared to Virgin Galactic, but that’s not a high hurdle. Rocket Labs is an interesting company to watch for sure.

^ Besides clever marketing, it seems to me that T-Mobile was very clever picking up spectrum relatively cheap for quite some time and picking up mid to high band rich Sprint in a way was a huge master stroke in Spectrum acquisition besides gaining scale. In a way Verizon was getting spectrum poor and had to strike out, it to get ahead but simply to stay in the game: https://www.lightreading.com/5g/verizon-keeps-snapping-up-spectrum-and-small-carriers/d/d-id/763058 These spectrum acquisitions are quite an interesting chess game. T-Mobile was a significant disadvantage for a long time (lacking low band spectrum) but over time, they maneuvered themselves in a position where they are actually leading.

I own NOC, LHX, LMT and GD (in that order). I was initially overweight GD (actually bought some as low as $100 and change) but reduced in favor over the others. The risk that is Common with all of them is cuts in defense spending. air is possibility, but with MMT now making the rounds and threats from China and to a lesser extend Russia increasing in their sophistication it seems like a bad idea right now. If cuts in defense spending were going to happen, I expect another round of rationalization and consolidation and massive share buybacks just like what happened from 2010-2013. Consolidation will perhaps not amongst the prime contractors but all those secondary ones underneath. Those mostly are not pure play defense, they will just move resources to other areas. I work for what is one of the secondary ones (supplying the big ones with components so to speak) and I know for sure that if the business gets subscale, the effort is just going to be moved into commercial activities.

T-Mobile is definitely cheaper followed by ATT and Verizon being the most expansive. FWIW, the way to save is going MVNO which is what I am doing - I pay $17/month for 7GB on ATT network, but few people do this because they need to pay for the phone out of pocket. I will probably try TMobile again for a family planI had them for a while on prepaid but then moved and my new job was deep in a concrete building, so I had no reception (T-Mobile didn’t have lower frequency spectrum ). I had no problem when I switched to ATT. Now after the Sprint merger and significant network improvements, it might be a different game. My wife is on Verizon prepaid (more expensive than ATT MVNO) because she wanted a 5G Network access but so far, 5G performance (where she gets it in a city close by where she works sometimes) has been nothing to rave about. Anyways, details aside, I can see that betting on VZ is attractive, if you look for something like an equity bond, which is likely how Buffett looks at this. It might become part of his regulated package including his Railroad, BH Energy. He wrote in depth how much he hates bonds, which is probably the detail in his letter that really matter so shuffling some of his cash into something that pays a higher dividend than bond with some growth is way more attractive.

The F-35 is imo wrongly accused of being a failure but it is commissioned and works despite some deficiencies. It also can’t really fail because it is the only fighter platform there is and those platforms are almost like SAAS, they live for ~40 years (the F-35‘s projected life is until 2055). The F-15 is still around and still getting Development contracts for upgrades for situation where stealth doesn’t matter as much. It was developed in the 1970‘s. LHX is a Great Outfit. They don’t own large programs, but they are involved in every one of them. I love their Proxy Statement 40% EBIT, 40% FCF and 20% Revenue growth. Plain and simple and shareholder friendly.

The occasional spectrum purchase needs to be accounted for. It wasn’t the first spectrum purchase and it isn’t the last. Those are really Capex expenses. I also wonder how much the regular Capex expenses are going to go up, especially if they end up going after fixed broadband. Also T-Mobile is going for market share in their Wireless business. They have huge mid band spectrum holdings through their merger with Sprint that they can work with. that’s why they didn’t have to bid on the spectrum auction: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-01-22/5g-network-t-mobile-tmus-leads-verizon-vz-at-t-t-to-start-2021

This will be interesting to see how it pans out. C-band is 4GHZ (or 7.5cm) which is similar to wireless which runs at 2.5GHZ and 5GHZ. Those frequencies don’t have great building penetration. Those who played with it know that 5GHZ is worse than 2.5GHZ. It will go through a tree with leaves or branches or even sheetrock, but concrete is pretty much a hard stop. Lower frequencies like 700Mhz will go through concrete. This will make it difficult for Verizon to make their 5G reliable. It will work in some locations but not in others. It will be interesting to see how pans out.