Spekulatius

Surprised? i guess he hasn’t paid attention. Isn’t this at least the third time that BAM has squeezed out minority investors on the cheap? I can’t recall when BAM paid full price for anything. Value investor 101 - buy low.

It’s GGP all over again. Investing alongside BAM means one needs to buy BAM stock, nothing else. BAM tries to obtain control as cheaply as they can, nothing else.

WH is cheaper than HLT. I just looking at the current valuations, it looks like HLT caught up on MAR and both trades at similar multiples. H is a bet difficult to compare, because they still own rather than just franchise, but they may be the cheapest of them all. I don’t have any opinion on the charts, except from a momentum perspective, HLT looks probably more the best. I am going to tear a look at international brands as well.

ScottHall starts a thread for MAR a while ago, same idea : http://www.cornerofberkshireandfairfax.ca/forum/investment-ideas/mar-marriott-international/ There is also WYN (with less brand equity , but cheaper ) and H, which still owns properties but is probably going to separate property ownership and franchising in the future. In a way, all these business are similar to Airbnb, as they create a marketplace, branding and platform. The business could be hurt quite a bit in a recession. MAR and HLT depend a lot on business travelers and business travel is one of the first expenses to be cut in a belt tightening situation.

Won't it also be lower after tax? i.e. $x * (1 - t) And add back a couple billion of legal fees. Also, the US is not the only place where lawsuits will occur, also I think the bulk of the legal liability potential is here.

I don’t think the claim they EV will have lower repair costs than ICE cars holds true. Engines on I E cars nowadays are very reliable and will last a long time. Maintenance is tires, brakes and one has way more often issue with the electronics than the mechanics. Self driving cars will be another can of worms. All these electronics, sensors , computers, software. my guess is they car mechanics will be become electronic technicians and will have a very bright future.

I calculate this as being valued at 7.7x EBITDA, and it’s probably worth at least 9.5x EBITDA. This means that a fine of ~20B Euro ($22.4B) is build in the current valuation.

I had a similar positive experience with WFC, when I bought a house and sold one at the same time. so for a short period of time (2month) I had two houses with a mortgage, due to duration of the sales process. I got my new mortgage with WFC and it wasn’t a problem. It might have helped that I have substantial assets with WF Investments. I think they might look harder at marginal loans/relationships with the asset cap, and I like this at this point in the cycle.

LOL, I like this mental image better than picking up nickels in front of a steamroller

Interesting, the stock price is back to square one (recent lows). The doubt run deep for sure. Bought some. I like the transformation in the stores I have been seeing. Minute clinics next to entry. Increased the space for the prescription counter / consulting section and trimmed merchandise.

Agree with above. If they can’t grow, so be it. With the share as cheap as it is, if they can pay an almost 4% dividend and buy back 5-6% of their shares year after year- so be it. I prefer this low risk of value creation over pushing too much on growth st this point in the cycle. They still show underwriting discipline, which imo is the most important thing for a bank.

There is no point in buying back stock, because he control and “owns” the assets already. It‘s the ultimate value trap. Except for the possibility of Devine Intervention ( as has been pointed out before), the stock is a zero for all but Mr Big. I honestly wouldn’t be surprised, if he issued more deeply discounted stock, to suck more assets into the orbit of his Biglari black hole.

There seemed to be plenty of optimism about new ad units being released. Could that explain the price jump? I was going to buy more this morning but decided to buy something else once GOOG jumped. Yea I had an order ready to go right before the close yesterday as 1120 seemed excessive. I ultimately convinced myself to hold off because I'd deployed a fair amount of cash elsewhere recently and todays move is what I get for being a pussy. Google I find tends to overreact often. More times than not it is to the downside but there is no reason to be buying a stock like this on a +4% day. I flipped some of my FB sales proceeds from a while back in my IRA’s into GOOG. I feel the stock is reasonably valued and much more safe than any of these other tech plays. On MPC, I still have some more work to do, since I haven’t looked at refiners for a while. What I think Mr. market is missing (or at least underestimating) is the cash flows that these companies are getting from their midstream operations, which by now exceed the cash generated from the refining business itself. Then they have these captive MLP which allow them to monetize assets around 9-10x EBITDA when their stocks trade at <6x EBITDA (at Times) which is a great arbitrage. Best in class PSX also looks cheap and they are even further down the road to be a midstream player.

Investment in tZERO common stock - now that sounds really promising.

The problem with the strategy is that if the stock goes straight up, you just get 10c/ share.

I don’t think that anything has changed with respect to QUCT‘s Land holdings. I have been tracking this stock since at least Y2010 and I don’t think there were some larger land purchases. They continue to shuffle around their commercial real estate holdings den possibly some plots near Long Beach. Buying another 25,000 acres would have been in the news, that’s a size of 40 sq miles and that’s a lot of land!. What I did find is that the ranch is held via Messer Land &Development, which is registered in 12707 Huasna Road in Arroyo Grande. When you look this up in the San Luis Obispo county website, you can look at some plots there, but they are only part of part if the land apparently. https://assessor.slocounty.ca.gov/assessor/pisa/Search.aspx Pro Tip, search for the street number 12707 and a couple of parcels will pop up. The parcels are named Huasna Rancho, which is actually from a Mexican land grand from hr 19 century ( for 22k acres back then), but I don’t think that the areas for Messer Land ranch and the land grant are a exactly the same, but I think they overlap. Anyone is welcome to do do more sleuthing, I have spent already enough time in this rabbit hole :o

GOOG - what caused the inexplicable weakness yesterday and this AM and the even less explicable sudden jump this morning?

AJC and wabuffo, thanks dort he pro and con discussion, it’s quite helpful. It seems to me that from the business models presented here, it’s one of the tougher and higher risk ones. Compared to for example SPOT, I find it much easier to construct and investment case with the latter. Both have their challenges as marketplaces (content generators, vs drivers, lower gross margins ), but SPOT really doesn’t have the cash burn that Uber and Lyft have.. I don’t own either one, but I think I would rather bet on SPOT than the ride hailers at this point.

Having an upstart business with an yet unproven business model fail compared to running an existing business with upward momentum in the ground are two entities rely different things and much more blame should be put on management in the latter situation than the former. I read though the archives of this site (before I signed up) and while he was hailed as the second coming of Jesus, some of Sadar‘s character flaws were quite evident. This story here is the perfect example that ability (which I think is even questionable at this point) in combination with character flaws (narcissism, self absorbed and greedy) creates disastrous results. When Managements character is lacking, the rest really doesn’t matter.

Dow has done reasonably well after the spin-off. I agree it’s solid and last quarterly results were pretty resilient relative to its competition (HUN, etc). I bought the remainco stock DWDP, which has a higher multiple, but also higher margin business. I think I would be interested in DOW below $50. The stock is somewhat tied to credit prices (or more exactly to the crude NG spread), since it used cost advantaged NG as an input, while a lot of competition uses crude.

MPC is quite interesting from a value POV. Their cash flows that can be used for buybacks or dividends exceed their earnings due to the cash stream from the MLPs. Twas the toast of the town, best of breed, sector champion maybe a year ago...now its poo poo. I don't see much that has changed to warrant such sentiment shift. Me neither. Bought a starter today and will see how it goes. I have owned it way back in the past at the spinoff before the shale oil boom became a buzzword and sold it too early then. Thanks for posting. I also bought some MSM. Arguably not super cheap, but I like the company and the management and I think it’s a good business.

TEVA is just a somewhat milder version of Valeant. Lots of Acquisitions, lofty growth targets, price gouging, high debt - the ingredients of hubris are there in both, albeit expressed differently. I think TEVA will survive, but it sure isn’t pretty. I think TEVA screened better, so it sucked a different blend of value investors down its toilet bowl.

Interesting background on Uber IPO: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/uber-blame-game-focuses-morgan-014218851.html I also thought UBER might be a decent flip. However, I think there is a warning here they with these mega IPO where they wait such a long time until they IPO that most semi professional investor have gotten in it already or IPO and there isn’t much demand left. I find it ironic that even so I subscribed for a few shares with Gidelity, I did get zero allocation, yet when the stock was started to trade, it dropped like a stone because nobody wanted to own it. I guess most of these semi professional pre IPO investors simply bought this for flipping. Thanks for playing!

It’s going to be expensive (huge fine). Equally important, the generic industry appears to have been overearning for a couple of years and this unlikely will come back.

I still own this (actually sold and rebought) and I am quite surprised by the good results they been putting up. Could be a one off (crop insurance isn’t or miss), but I take it. The car is ursnc they bought seems to be doing OK too, and they bought it very cheap. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/ni-holdings-inc-files-results-201000598.html