Spekulatius

I didn’t feel that INDUS situation is dire, it‘s just that the stock was too expensive at 20x earnings and now is around fair value, but still not cheap. A shallow revision in Germany is possible. It might bring better buy opportunities. A lot of stocks in Germany were quite overvalued and have now come down to fair value and might become good values going forward. There are a lot mid cap companies in Germany that are world leaders in their niches and could be great investments in a recovery.

In my opinion, Windows 7 is vastly preferable and more reliable than Windows 10.I dont care for the new Post Windows 8 GUI either.

Oh, that is such a brilliant comment, and hits at the crux of the problem in America. So many people, (gov workers, etc) - want something for NOTHING. Where did the idea of sacrifice and work ethic go? With government - cutting spending has to happen - I live in Illinois - and there is going to be a tax revolt here one of this days. Real estate taxes are out of control, Chicago city taxes are out of control and city workers don't actually work. Pensions, etc - they all want to retire at 50 with full pension/benefits and get a second job. It's a ticking time bomb - raising taxes will be the route they take, until the public revolts and forces spending down. I hope I am out of here by then...Florida, here I come! You can buy a really nice waterfront home in NWFL for around $500K - 700K. The higher end gets you a property with more elevation & lower flood premiums. Cost of living is low. No state income tax. Beautiful beaches. Tolerable winters. Summers are less tolerable. There are also no well paid jobs in North West Florida, which is the issue with most nice low tax states. Of course for retirement , it doesn’t matter and that why the folks from the NE like to move there. Schools are also rumoured to be terrible. I have lived in 3 states so far and at least in NY and MA, the high taxes paid for a relatively safe environment and good schools. Illinois and particular Chicago seems to be basket case to me, because it appears to have neither of the above and high taxes.

My own opinion is that they did very little regarding buybacks, as they were napping the entire time. We will find out soon enough.

FWIW, I agree on Indus AG, it’s nothing special. They do add a layer of holding company debt on top of the operating company debt, so they seem to be more leveraged than I’d like. I have owned some in the 90’s last time. At times, the stock is cheap, but it’s not particularly well managed. I do like the concept of rolling up Mittelstand companies, but haven’t seen a vehicle that does this consistently well. There are some that do seem to do it Ok with a concept of owning several independently operated companies in the same industrial sector. Dürr AG and ISRA AG come to my mind. I particularly like Dürr, but I don‘t think we are at the right time of the cycle to buy this yet. France and Scandinavia the richest hunting ground for holding companies.

Excel is my daily bread and butter. I can’t do without it.

These types of incentives are apparently the norm and other companies making substantial investments are getting them, it's just not front page news because it's not Amazon. And they need to do it because cities and state compete with each other for these valuable prizes, and if high-cost (high tax) areas don't sweeten the deal, they'll lose almost every time to low cost (low tax) competitors, and yet it can still be win-win to give tax breaks because of the multiplier effect of having something like 25,000 high-paying jobs for the long-term in an area. This is NYC we’re talking about, not Buffalo, NY or Nashville, TN or the state of Nevada. NYC needs no such incentives to attract such firms. De Blasio and Cuomo come off looking clueless here. NYC should’ve sat out to begin with. Glad Amazon pulled out. you have obviously never been to Long Island city. would have jumpstart a conversion of the large area from dying low tech industrial to high tech engineering. frigging shame it won't go through. I have been to Long Island city and I didn’t see a dying low tech industrial area there. It’s more like a skyline that almost rivals Manhattan. Exorbitant housing costs with shoe boxes going for 600k. not that I th8no scaring AMZN away is a good idea. However, put yourself in the shoes of an average Joe trying to I’ve there and renting. He probably won’t get employed by AMZN, would he benefit when RE and rents really go through the roof? Most people are probably renting in LIC. From their perspective, it might be totally rational to be against AMZN expanding.

I like it. A basic EPS of ~$23/sh under the assumption of zero realized gains, zero increase in net earned, and zero increase in interest rates. It's certainly not hard to imagine an actual figure of double that amount.... No it’s not hard to imagine, but even if this comes to pass, FFH just looks like an OK value.

The insurance business has done quite well with a combined ratio of 98.3%. The investment side continues to suck wind. I have reduced my exposure to FFH after some considerations. I would be quite happy to hold FFH, if they would just stick with bond investments like other plain vanilla insurance corporations. I am sure the book value has recovered some since 12/31 due to equities bouncing back, but so has the PPS. I don’t feel like their equity investment are set to perform well going forward though.

I haven’t seen this stock being mentioned for a long time. They go whacked very badly during the financial crisis (down more than 80% if I remember correctly) being in cyclical names back then and due to holding company leverage , but seem to have made it back. Discount to NAV north of 20%. I will take a further look, but I think I like EXor and some others better.

Interesting, they he now owns almost exactly 8.75% of both WFC and BAC. He is not really limited with WFC any more - has sold quite a few shares and is quite far below the 10% limit.

Yeah, hardly anyone would notice 5 million more rats in NYC.

I can understand why one would sell on the news. I am myself inclined to sell when my investment thesis is proven incorrect, almost regardless of value perception. Empirically, I found that “thesis shift” does not work well and the fact that one was wrong to begin with either means that one was wrong assessing the business or the business has changed for the worse. Either one is a reason to sell. FWIW, some long CTL bonds were up from 82.5% to 90% today, so the bond investor like the dividend cut.

It should be noted that CTL‘s EV actually probably increased after the dividend cut- the trades debt jumped by ~8% in price. Wealth was simply transferred from equity to bond holders.

There is also Cielo, the large incumbent, which reports competitive pressure (presumably from Stoneco and Pagsugero. Seems like and interesting industry. https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/CIOXY?p=CIOXY

I believe that LT home values will move with income/salaries in the given area, not so much inflation. People tend to spent as much on housing than they can afford.

You know the photo is staged when she wears high heels on the factory floor.

I don’t own MKL, but have had a significant position in two insurance stocks - AXS and RE which I sold out. The reason was that they haven’t been able to generwtenvianle returns on equity at least since 2015. It appears to me that this soft market lasts longer than prior ones and it could well be that the hybrid capital (catastrophe bonds etc) has permanently changed the market and reduced the returns in this segment. I also note that some specialty insurers like WRB still seem to be doing well. FWIW, both AXS and RE had a history of producing underwriting earnings with 90-95% combined ratios, but they don’t juice the returns with an equity component like MKL or BRK does, Both of them trade at about 1.1x tangible book, but they are been as low as 0.8x tangible book before. If the current return on equity persists, I don’t think they are even worth tangible book.

It's beer ;D Essentially branded consumer discretionary purchases. They have decent brands (Molson, Coors) and an established distribution network. It's pretty cheap and was 10% off today. While the business may go thru ups-and-downs, especially in terms of management's execution (as we are seeing with other CPG's like Kraft-Heinz), I think product demand will remain relatively more steady (compared to say, Tide detergent). So it's basically, multiple is low, they have scale, brands should have staying power. Was just curious if there was more than met the eye to the thesis. In the alcoholic beverage segment, beer is losing market share to spirits and wine. Within the beer segment, TAP’s mass market brands are losing share share to craft beers. I think TAP represents a slow bleeding consumer franchise, somewhere in between a consumer staple and cigarettes, imo. The bleed is probably slow enough that an investment in equity makes sense at this point, especially since pricing holds up.

The reinsurer AXS and RE don’t look that great, they took quite a hit last quarter. I had positions in both of them and sold out a couple of days ago. I do agree that Münchener Rück‘s result look pretty good. We will see how BRK and FFH are doing. FWIW, I have reduced my FFH Position, but not because of their catastrophe risk, but because of concerns about their investment side.

WFC is cheap, probably caused by negative press coverage about the outage. I added some on Friday. FWIW, I could still access my accounts, but it was slow.

Interesting show any it the legendary 1960’s Le Man races, which were more porpluar than Formula one back then. I didn’t know that Ford almost bought Ferrari for $16M back then: https://youtu.be/xxlAJ4tUvpI

Another issue with Interactive Brokers. I bid on an stock (which I purchased before on IB) and the order remains in “blue” status, meaning that the exchange doesn’t accept the order. This has never before happened to me and seems to be only with one stock. I put in a ticket with and they first told me that there is no bid ask. However, I lok at the same stock with E*TRADE and Fidelity and there is an bid ask. After I put in a second ticket the answer was as follows: This does not make sense, because I know that the stock has traded since I made a bid ask. It almost seems like IB is trading in a different exchange than these other bid ask or trades go though. Anyone understands what’s going on? Again, I have traded the same stock before using IB.

I believed they will go after Google and possibly Amazon too. Germany and most other countries in the EU have laws governing the use of data. Germany has a “Datenschutzgesetz” since the 70’s. This happened, when people got worried about the state and police doing data mining to find terrorist (then the communist Rote Armee Fraktion), which caused a violent epterror wave in the 70’s. While the datamining was successful, a lot of people got worried (due to expirence from the Nazi state) that this sort of data mining would go too far, and a law was out in place in 1977. While this is all great, the law and the regulators haven’t really kept up with the newer data collectors like FB, GOOG and AMXN and the like, with a few exception like google maps cannot show street fees of private residences etc. But I think the grace period is over and they will have content with much much more regulation to the original spirit of the law now, not just in Germany, but in the entire EU. Also for a historical perspective, the US is one of the few developed countries that does not have a comprehensive law governing the use of data. The other countries are China and Russia. Also upsetting to me is the Patriot act, which became effective after 9/11. With that law, the privacy of data with respect to the state pretty much went out the window. I am not sure there is much to show for this. And yes, I own FB stock, but that does not make the unregulated use of data right. The worst offenders of privacy are not GOOG or FB, they are the credit agencies, which pretty much make it their business model to sell private data. Stepping of the soapbox now.

Pensions don’t go away, when a company closes a pension fund. Those employees that were covered by the pension agreement still accumulate claims as long as they work for the company, which could be decades until they reach retirement age, and then another couple of decades when they can draw pensions. If you close a pension plan now there are probably have substantial claims open 50 years from the closure date still.