Spekulatius

It’s the long term Performance of a lot of his investments that I am worried about. That’s why I hold less FFH “bags” now than I used to.

Yes, KCLI is cheap based on price/ book. I do find it strange that they buy up another insurer ( Grange) for multiples of their book value, while their own stock trades at 1/2 book ( roughly). Also, the CEO ( Buxby) is paid very well - ~$3.6M in 2014. After they went semi private, we don‘t know, but I suspect hiding the extremely generous salary is one reason why they went down that route.

Doesn‘t matter. Health care and Pharma is getting Trump‘ed and Demo‘lished right now.

Largest privately subsidized public transportation company files for IPO: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1543151/000119312519103850/d647752ds1.htm

I think any drug that targets amyloid are highly suspect at this point, because there have been quite angewiesen failures targeting this pot. disease path. I think Biogen has one more drug (BEN2401 Phase II) targeting amyloid while the other drugs target other pathways. Alzheimer is high risk/ high reward without question.

WFC and RHDGF

Low double digit return in a brief timeframe would work just fine with me. I bought a few shares today. I owned this many years ago with Ok, but not great results, and sold in one of theses surges.

Not so bullish here. I opened an account to research this and was kicked out. This happened when i clicked on a topic (“Glammy babes” - 133k followers and looked really promising ) and was immediately suspended due to violating the spam policy. I guess I know now why the audience screws female. I kind of liked the format and it should be easy to monetize, but I am done mucking around with this. RIP.

How they went about this ( changing ethics code retroactively, obtaining personal phone records) doesn’t seem that great to me. Of course the above link is the plaintiffs perspective.

Image what she could have accomplished , if she had joined a hedge fund! Jokes asides , it is quite a feat to get spatial resolution on an object so far away, even if this object is the size of our solar system. Will listen to the Ted talk later. I wonder if they will have a go at the black hole in the Center of our galaxy next.

Looking at this one too and have been for a while. It‘s trading around 1.1x sales (~15GBP revenue) and their largest business (civil aerospace engines) responsible for almost half the revenues is still losing money. balance sheet looks Ok, but there are LT customer commitments and pension issues. The turnaround is taking years and the Trent 1000 issues and cost to fix seem to be getting worse. It’s an interesting business, but the two top players in it GE and Rolls Royce are both struggling for different reasons. No position. https://www.rolls-royce.com/~/media/Files/R/Rolls-Royce/documents/annual-report/2018/2018-full-annual-report.pdf

PINS seems pretty mediocre to me. Also note the last private round only raised $150M at a ~$12B valuation, so maybe that round was just done to get a high valuation mark?

Looks like a donut to me 8)

Annual report is out. Cliffs notes: Trust fund assets and under management and revenues up +15% YoY after stagnating for a while Earnings ~$70/share ( some extraordinary gains from 1031 swap of RE included) Book value ~$1050/ share ~$600/ share in bonds and cash Some investments in RE and startup ventures initiated ($20/ share) $53 revenue/ share in real estate rents 0.52 acre/ share CA farmland I am very pleased with the pickup of the trust business.

Can you name some examples of well run family business conglomerates?

It’s not the same than Valeant, but it rhymes. Heavily regulated market and protected product, government customer, price gouging, Rollup strategy, highly levered Balance sheet. It doesnt mean that it will blowout, but all the ingredients are there. I agree the military has power it can exercise. Just from my experience , the defense business is somewhat clubby. I think there is also the revolving door issue where a lot of retirees from the military find a second carrier in the defense sector and they don’t want to poison the well...

Just a possibly stupid question - how can the US enforce a fine for Danske? Danske has no operations in the US - could they just tell the US to take a hike? This is different than Deutsche Bank or even BNP since the latter do investment banking in the US. The risk reward ratio for going long Danske looks quite good here.

If you ask me, the report is damning. The military has a mechanism to single source parts provided that essentially a cost plus method is used and Transdigm appears to abuse it. Looks like Valeant to me.

I wouldn’t call ICBC’s profit enormous. NIM is 2.3%, ROA :1.1% and ROE 13.8%. These are OK, but not great numbers.

Spek is right: I actually canceled my prime membership that ive had since '08. Prices were not as good for some of the books I was looking at. Plus, late last year I took their seller app and scanned in a dozen or so bar codes at the store and they were either in line and not worth buying at the store to arb the diff or were not allowed to be sold on prime. On twitch all i lost was my prime sub. Sometimes I view adverts in a separate browser thats muted and give away the bits I get for them. They do throttle me sometimes but you can usually get 2-3 bucks a week depending on how much they give you. Each advert can give you 5, 10, 50, 75 bits randomly and are worth a penny apiece. You can pass them out to anyone and split if you want to. AMZN as a market place slowly becomes too unwieldy. It’s almost like an Department store of yesterday, where you could by everything, but nothin really competitive. Too many crap products from questionable resellers, and some are obviously trying to screw customers with tricky packaging sizes etc. I know order more things from retailers (online and shop to store from Home Depot and other Brick &Mortar mortar retailers , as their offerings are more curated and they don’t have resellers. I think Walmart could really make a dent too, if they get their offering together. AMZN speed of delivery is hard to beat though.

I believe the US banking market is an outlier in terms of profitability at least in the developed 1st world countries ). I do not know of any other 1 st world country where banks can generate similar NIM with the possible exception of Britain, which come close. Some 2nd world countries like Brazil, Russia, Chile etc have similar or even better NIMs but the risk is much higher too.

Wells hasn’t updated their online platform for as many years ai remember (probably 2008). That said, it works, but I think they could do better than the average $3B balance sheet credit union with their online banking. I also use Wells Fargo advisers (still 100 free trades) and it works as well. There was one platform refresh since 2008. Again a working platform, but nothing compared to online brokers like Schwab etc. I do like their way of tax lot management and they get the taxes right (downloads into Tax software without issues). Spekulatius, I'm shocked by reading your post. Somehow it - to me, at least - exposes WFC as some kind of dinosaur, underinvesting in its business, over many years. Thank you for sharing your customer experience. WFC is not a leader in online/ digital banking, that’s for sure. I failed to mention that they have improved their mobile app during the last few years, and that’s quite important. I also felt their branches were better run than the big bank competition a while ago, but since Inrarely go to branches any more and WFC doesn’t even have branches where I live (greater Boston area), it doesn’t really matter. One thing I noticed when opening a checking account with a local credit union a few days ago, is that they have clickswitch (apparently a fin tech company) that has a software that allows for easy accounting switching. It will switch direct deposits from many employers and reoccurring payments from an existing checking account to your new account. This could indirectly increase competition for checking accounts as it makes it easier to switch. I haven’t tried it out yet, so I don’t know how well it works.

Couple of risks 1) The banks may have to pull out of the Baltic states (Estonia, Lithuania etc), which have been very profitable 2) Heavy fines by US and demotic regulators 3) Management is consumed to deal with the scandal and can’t take care or the ongoing business (see WFC and this problem is far worse, imo)

He is right, the IP part is the most important part of the unfair trade issue with China, followed by market access. It won’t solve the trade deficit issue with China though.

competed away. meaning what? all C corps have same lowered tax rate (and LLCs, and LLCs in "bad" industries like law and accounting having managing members earning less than $315K income filing jointly). so are you saying some c corps will do exactly what in this competing away exercise? It would simply mean they would lower prices as the return on investment hurdle is post tax not pre tax. I believe lower returns would be most likely caused by new entrants. I don’t think existing market participants would likely lower prices.