Spekulatius

It’s not just losing the supply chain that would hurt Apple; China represents also 20% of Apple‘s revenues (although that contribution has been shrinking over the last few years). Losing or even gettting handicapped in this market would hurt quite a bit.

I think market cap is around $25B and FCF is $1.7-1.8B or a 7% FCF yield. It’s not super cheap, but it isn’t expensive at all. Yes, I agree the working capital changes should be ignored.

I mentioned it before, but if this Trojan horse motherboard exists, some of the hardware should show up and should get dissected by hardware nerds in the next few weeks. If the hardware doesn’t show up, the scope if this was either very limited or the entire thing a hoax.

I didn’t wear my investment hat, when I wrote this, NVO may well be viable as an investment. This price gouging (my opinion) has been going on for at least 30 years and it might work another 20 or 30 years. personally, I would as an investor be aware of what is going on and watch out for political cross currents. this could start in the US but also elsewhere. When this occurs and gains traction, the economics of this business will be permanently changed and not for the better.

Rewards are transaction based, and Prime is more relationship based. This fits in Prime reaching out in streaming, music etc. Costco does the same thing that AMZN does.

I love the hedge fund jumbo jumbo. Check: 1) Misunderstood 2) Transformation 3) Open ended growth At least this month he should do better- the TESLA short should work out and BHF is up a bit too, due to higher interest rates.

I don’t want to go off tangent, but if you like infrastructure, you can buy some of these assets fairly cheaply currently, without the additional layer of financial engineering (not meant in a negative sense) that BAM adds in. I own ENB (one of my largest positions ), NGG, PPL (the latter two are US/ British utilities) WMB and KMI in this space. except, WMB, they are all buys, IMO. The first 3 all yield above 6%. You get paid well to wait.

I think stiring the pot in this cases seems in order in this situation. I think at this point, , if market based system were at work, there should be a source of dirt cheap generic insulin available to buyers. The fact that prices are rapidly rising for a commodity tells us there is something wrong and the market isn’t working. Very likely, there is collusion at work here, there is virtually no other explanation. I am not really pushing on the high deductible or the mechanisms of payment, just on the cost of the product. The government is the single biggest customer, so they have an interest to get to the bottom of this. Sometimes you can tell that there is a crime simply by the outcome. As a shareholder in any of these cartel stocks, I would be careful.

GM still has $8B in net debt and just a BBB credit rating - 2 notches above junk. Staying investment grade is important, especially if there is stress in credit markets at some point. I would say the leverage looks right. A lot of Th eir competitors habe no net debt. They did buy back 6% of their shares during the last 12 month. Just from my point of view, the capital allocation looks sound to me. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1467858/000119312518266808/d620742dex991.htm

Looks to me like there is a cartel at work here that works to keep the prices high. The substance itself is a commodity and has been off patent forever. The process has been improved with some benefit to the patients, but what also happened is that the older cheaper version have disappeared from the market causing a price free over the years. According to the price study below, there are price difference as high as 40x for the same product. Just by the outcome alone, one can tell thet what is happened in here has nothing to do with competition. http://haiweb.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/ACCISS-Prices-report_FINAL-1.pdf Quite frankly, the government should step in, set up a production facility and produce and sell a generic insulin at or above cost for Medicare/ Medicaid. It wouldn’t be great for the shareholders of these cartel companies, but it would be better for society.

Ok, understood. BPY trades below book value. That makes sense.

Are you sure about this? Why would buying BPY be accretive to BAM’s book value, unless BOY goes up in value of course and is valued at market.

My guess is that the Bloomberg article is probably valid. Given all of the denials from these companies they wouldn't have published without being very confident in their sourcing. As to why are government security are allowed to talk to media about this? Well sometimes the government wants to leak something. Punching China in the ribs would not be inconsistent with the current administration either. Bloomberg isn’t known to make up stories like this. Ind think that if the story is true, within a few weeks, we should see some hardware geeks finding and dissected these laced motherboards. If this doesn’t occur, it would seem a bit suspect to me. I think even if this was a “limited edition” motherboard, some of the laced motherboards should turn up somewhere.

No inventory write off seems to me a big assumption considering that they have produced components with a hardware Trojan horse in it.At the very least they. Would need to buff up their supply chain supervision, thoroughly inspect and test all their existing WIP and purge whatever is suspect. Then there are e siting customers who demand that they take their already sold product back. The latter could easily make this a zero alone. Then we have lawsuits from customers, pot. criminal lawsuits from the government, class action lawsuits etc...It seems to me that a net net may not be good enough under these circumstances.

Some of this predates the current government. This is very unlikely a US government plot to get back on China. The Chinese have shown sophistication in cyber warfare before and I think this is just one incident they has been uncovered and the scary thing for me is that there may be many more. What if they can get something into Apple phones that are used by virtually anyone, including government officials? Apple is very good at managing their supply line, unlike this company in question. They have many boots on the ground in China , but still.... I believe they should build a phone for government use that is not build and assembled in China at all. I believe it wood make sense, even if it needs to be sold at a premium. There are enough friendly nations that don’t do these things.

Agreed. I've added about 20% to my position last couple days. My only concern, you touched on though. It's there with auto, and it's there with semis. The whole sector is out of favor and trading at these whacky kind of valuations. And as a GM shareholder I can attest to the nuisance of how long these overhangs can persist. There's nothing IMO that will prevent this from trading at single digit multiples for the near to medium term. I do like this here though. So whatever. No question the stock could go lower. I was quite impressed by their recent investor presentation that was touching upon the growth markets they are in. Essentially, they are providing the shovels for the internet of things, automobile electrification and self driving cars. I think they are in a good spot.

Recent buys are NXPI ( add ), EUK3.F (European ports) and TFSL (S&L).

Adding on weakness too here around $83. I think the dependency on China (~24% of revenues) and automobile is probably causing the weakness in the stock. I like the growth runway here.

Don’t worry about what Powell says at all, he is a cheerleader for the Fed / his employer. It’s his job. Watch what he does.

So the company is toast now? The article is quite alarming since putting this kind of spy hardware into the servers requires coordination and collusion on so many levels. 1) design and produce a spy chip 2) Make it work on targeted motherboard without detection 3) inject the t into a manufacturing line undetected by quality control systems ( or make sure they collide with you). It seems that this company must have design engineers in the US colluding with the Chinese. I think all western companies need to rethink about ITAR level security on their components as well. ITAR level work requires US persons only. Components even in military hardware are often not ITAR to save costs. Then what about spy chips in smartphones also used by government officials? Yes we need to think about security much more bradly and possibly require hardware used by the government to be completely yuk in friendly countries. I could envision Apple to build a model of the iPhone this way. In the long run, revelations like this will cost the Chinese dearly, imo.

What do you do with service? Aren't you forced to go to original dealership for free warranty service? If the dealership offers freebies, like oil changes, than yes. For all other things, you can get service for warranty at any other dealership and I found it not to be a problem. I have moved my cars a couple of times across state lines, so I know. A dealership with a good service department will beat a crappy dealership with a bad one, regardless where you bought your car in my experience.

I agree that performance has nothing to do wether a pitch is selected or not. I suggest plentiful dropping of hedge fund key words like misunderstood, transformation, masked, free cash flow,, hidden, catalyst, investor base, capital allocation etc. to make it last the reviews, based on what I am reading. FWIW, I don’t think the quality of most pitches is very high in VIC, but I still like it as a resource to obtain ideas.

Cruise is just like a free call option at this point. FCAU is doing well right now, but I agree that the future outlook is muddied. I think owners speculate on a sale at this point, but if it doesn’t happen, than what? All car manufacturers are cheap, thr Germans like BMW, Daimler, VW, thr japanese like Toyota and Honda ir chinese ones like Great Wall Motors and others. The consensus is that the profits going forward are lower, which might be right or wrong. GM generally moved in the right direction, they fixed their balance sheet and went out of unprofitable markets ( Opel) and fixed others. That’s the managements primary job, not financial engineering. It is even questionable to me that the share prices would be higher, if they had bought back a lot of stock at prices higher than it is today. Many companies have not done that well doing so.

I am actually surprised that OP can get a hedge fund off the ground in the US even though he does not live in the US. It seems to me that his investors must already place a decent amount of trust into him, since he could well defraud them and perhaps never get caught ( depending on where he lived). In that case, I would just put the personal account into an index fund in his home country. A cynical person would say thet by doing so, he will likely outperform his clients ::).

In one case, I had the choice of 3 dealerships within a 30 mile radius. Welcome to suburbia. I bought get from non of them,I chose to buy from a dealership 50 miles ago, basically based on positive online reviews (Yelp, Google). Contrary to popular believe, I have found that large numbers of positive or negative reviews on Yelp or Google tend to be deserved. In some cases, you have the to “trade” distance for better service or prices.