Spekulatius

^ These desperation moves are driven by managements desire to have a future ( something to do) rather than driven by the desire to drive shareholder value. Self preservation is a strong instinct for individuals ,but also organizations and companies.

The loan designation mistake looks like a very basic mistake and one can only conclude that they are not competent to run a bank. I think their regulators will come to the same conclusion. I have seen these innocent “trading updates” before where it sounds like a small hiccup while the company is blowing up. I guess it’s British understatement.

I heard at work that the process to grant export licenses is currently stalled (import licenses too). This affects a lot of high tech goods, but also services. Over the long run, this could severely affect trade. Even the import/ Export US government website is currently not working in some areas. Funny how an existing website stops working with a government shutdown. The inability to get export licenses probably could cause lost business/delays and weakness a few month down the road.

Hi. I've been looking a bit into that. Seems very interesting. Have you seen a decent writeup anywhere or mind to share a couple of points? What's obvious is the deposit growth, which is incredible. The culture is based on the Commerce Bank model, that Vernon Hill "invented" in America. The culture is real - I can tell you that. Both customers and employees love this company. You have 56 "stores" going to 100-130, roughly in 5-6 years. The "store model" is totally repeatable - and UK will eventually support, perhaps, 200 stores. There are structural reasons for the growth - by that I mean - the UK banking sector is being forced to shrink (I mean the legacy banks) as the UK regulators and the public's interests have not been served. (RBS is still 65% owned by gov). So some assets are being dispersed, the market is opening up, and legacy branches have closed at a fast rate due to cost cutting and poor locations. So there are significant industry tailwinds for the growth of "challenger" banks. Metro is the best of them all. It's the fastest growing bank I have ever seen in my life. Looks like Metro Bank is blowing up. Risk weighting for mortgages off - they had RWA for commercial mortgages at 50% rather than 100%. Did they forgot to read the manual for bank accounting in the UK? Looks doomed to me, or at least has to raise capital. On then surface, it still looks adequately capitalized, but I stay away from financials that can’t get their accounting right - a lot of them become doughnuts. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/british-lender-metro-banks-2018-072746266.html

She is now in the speech circus and needs air time to keep her brand intact.

The Problem with technical approaches is not how to avoid losses, it when to get back in. Stock markets during bear markets and early in the recovery are very volatile and probably will give you many conflicting signals. You can get whipsawed easily a few times and probably accumulate losses, if you are in the wrong side. That’s the hard part to figure out, imo.

High GNP growth does not necessarily mean a strong stock performance. China for example still has high GNP growth, but a very poor stock performance for many years now. There are numerous other examples. I believe stock market performance depends much more on how this GNP growth is achieved and profitability metrics than the actual GNP growth

As an european my answer is: likelihood of the deal not going through. I've been looking at this but stayed out for that reason. My uninformed guess is that it is much more likely a no than a yes I agree, the deal not going though - at least not to the extend envisioned, is quite high. The regulators in Europe have a lot of teeth and there are assets in a lot of different countries involved. It feels like it’s priced in though, but my experience tells me that it almost never is.

I believe it’s a worthwhile discussion. Many value investors do use a mix of technical analysis with a value approach. Mike Burry was an example. Mike sold a stock when it made new lows - his rationale was that new lows are often followed by lower stock prices from experience and he could always get back in cheaper, if he wanted to. Nothing is perfect for example, but it seems to me that these rules may work.

My son is currently learning “Child’s Anthem“ from Toto. Great song to play on a piano:

Yes, that's a possibility for sure. It'll be interesting to know exactly which group of workers were let go. I don't think this is something to worry about if they are just laying off people who were hired temporarily to fill in gaps in the manufacturing process that existed only because certain automations weren't working as well as expected. But it may be a different story otherwise. Those positions would be temps and contractors which have been laid off too, in addition to the workforce layoffs announced above. I do think the only explanation is that growth isn’t forthcoming and they are in the rationalization stage where they need to wring costs out of the system. I think Dhando got it right that they harvested their backlog with the most profitable market segment and now need to go downmarket. What I can’t for the life of me figure out is why they haven’t raised more capital.

I consider FDX a mistake. I did not really react to the indications (reorg, noise about trade etc) that there might be an earnings revision. So my cost based ended up too high, since I also ran out of funds when it got really cheap. I bought more, it not enough, my cost based is still a bit underwater. I agree some downgrades were downward silly, I saw one report where the analyst reduced the target price from $240 to $160 or so, with the rational that he now slapped an 11x multiple rather than a 14x multiple, due to a “murky near term outlook” or something like this, I like it at current prices and most likely will add in a correction. GS went better and I sold my shares recently. I don’t really like the business all that much, but below tangible book value, it was just too cheap.

Very good exchange above. I don’t own this and it doesn’t really fit what I am looking for, but I agree this is an interesting business to look at. I suspect the most important comment may be this one:

I felt like most people here kept a cool head. There were certainly great opportunities to make money. I unfortunately ran out of cash too early. I sort of expect the volatility to stay so I am cashing in most of the stocks that bounced hard and hope for a repeat of some sorts. Most of the issues that caused the crash are still there.

If a company is growing in leaps and bounds (20%+) there isn’t a need for large scale layoffs, because it would grow into an oversized workforce very quickly. The layoff is a big hint that growth won’t be forthcoming in the near term.

The bigger surprise was the cut for SpaceX. Cash issues in the Elon sphere?

Does a valuation of ~$30B for Airbnb make sense? Are there any revenue and profit numbers out there for this company? The combined market cap of HLT and MAR is less than $60B and those two are doing pretty well at the moment and control a significant part of the hotel space.

I averaged down in this stock when it cratered and now sold a chunk when it shot up more than 30% to ~945¥. Anyone has any idea why the stock cratered and then shot up? Looks like something was announced during the stock session lunch break a few days ago that caused the surge, but I have no idea what was announced. Oh the wonders of the Japanese stock market ... I bought it just because it was too cheap.

Am I missing something? I have never seen anything that stated that either Alluvial, Bonhoeffer, or Willow Oak Select owned any shares of SYTE, let alone a large concentration. SYTE does not have any ownership of Arquitos, just a revenue interest in exchange for administrative costs. It’s me who is missing something. ::) The revenue interest would be just like owning an IDR interest like a GP and is not an “ownership” in a common sense.

I don’t think it’s a good idea that the funds owned by SYTE also hold a large concentration of their assets in SYTE stock, but that has been stated before, I believe. i do think that SYTE has suffered permanent impairment with their HVC, real estate and probably even with their asset business. For me, the overhead is the killer for these small operations. If I had the make a guess, the Alluvial part is the most likely to grind out consistent Alpha and grow assets, also it might be limited on how much it can grow without abandoning the microcap focus.

I use my PS4 mostly for Streaming and secondly for gaming. The user experience for Netflix and Amazon video is much much better than via the crappy TV app. I also have set it up via a receiver for a great sound ( I have high end loudspeakers and a sub). The multi platform F2P with ingame goods are a big problem for platforms ( iOS, PlayStation, Android etc) because these platform typically charge 30% of the purchase and now the game company can reduce this buy incentivusibg purchases on lower fee platforms ( like Amazon fire). Once purchased, the virtual goods are available on all platforms , if the game company allows it. This is great for the user and pot. game company, but not at all for the rent charging platform company.

Is that so? I know a town next to where I live who bought back their grid from National Grid years ago and they enjoy much lower electricity rates than I do. Their grid also seems to be more reliable, as they had little outages during the snowmaggedon in March 2018 and what went out was quickly repaired. I rented at this time in NG Territory and my Appartement was without power for a week. Maybe just the exception from the rule, but there does seem to be easy to make it a truly local utility work. The town in question is a rural community of roughly 10,000 people.

It dawned on me that Muscleman never stated that he would seitchnto indexing. As stated already before, indexing really doesn’t solve above problems. MM also outperformed in 2018 (+10% ) so it’s doesn’t seem to be a matter of underperforming recently either. He had some multibaggers in 2018 (SLMR) that don‘t look like traditional value stocks. I would be curious to know what he is going to be up to.

These have been especially difficult years for value investors given QE. I'd be very leery of shifting to a Boglehead buy-and-hold index strategy at a time of QT. Index funds started to be available to me in 1998 when I started my 401k.if I had bought in back then, I would have just been flat in 2010 or so. Some foreign indices have even longer periods of underperformance. The enlightment of indexers comes after 10 years of pretty much straight bull markets if you take out Q4 2018 and some dips along the way. I fully expect to see another 50% down market in the next 10 years again.

So, looks like you are serious about raising cash. Nothing wrong with this as I have been doing likewise. I try to have 10-20% cash available to take advantage of correction and I am getting closer to 20% now.