Spekulatius

I don’t think we have ever seen a president surrounding himself with so many crooks and lowlifes ever- Manafort, Ross, Nunberg , Scaramucci, Pruitt etc. Feels like a banana republic to me. Surreal.

Minor detail. Elon is a Twitter junky who just can’t leave it alone.

That’s great. Now the shorts need to find out who provides the financing and short those entities or the bonds.

These guys would be stupid to stay in CA. It is smart to keep working, until they have figured out what to do with that windfall. I also wouldn’t recommend to stick with their employer for advice managing their fortune.

The fundamental threat is that Pandora’s jewellery is a fad that is past its peak and declines quickly. I actually think that is the case here and if I were to go long this stock, I would need evidence of Pandora being a durable brand. The idea to encourage repeat purchases , making it easy for the buyer ( men) by making jewellery a collections is a good one, but few of these thing are really durable and once it goes downhill, there is almost no way to arrest the slide.

Doubling down on a POS in my opinion is not a good strategy. I double down too, if I like the company, but if I go wrong with a trading sardine, I think it is better to just take the loss and get out.

It looks cheap, but book value keeps falling. The $200M buyback is small, won’t make a difference.

The price may not have been right for BRK. BAM can pay more, because BIP foots the bill, while BAM cashes in fees, so growth in size benefits BAM. I am also not sure that the assets are utility like, there are some gathering assets in the packet, which generally have a lower lifespan and are hence of lower quality. Just as an update, the valuation of the NG transmission assets sold to BOY was mentioned in ENB earnings CC. They were sold at 13x EBITDA. As an ENB shareholder, I am very satisfied with this price.

The shipping industry is a disaster. Sure, money can be made in an disastrous industry, but why go there, when there are far easier way to do equally well with much less risk and effort.

The last sentence is the key here. Thank you for your take, StubbleJumper.

He can sell the Cracker Barrel stake and pay off all of the debt...so I think the bondholders are overreacting. That being said, my concern always was that he would over-leverage the business at some point...this really should be essentially a debt-free business based upon where they had gotten it after Sardar and his team turned it around. But his desire to get rich as quick as possible has actually added a fair amount of risk to the holding company and alot of SNS' cash flow is now going towards interest payments. What happens if we have another market crash and Cracker Barrel stock drops over 50%? Cheers! The debt at SNS is non-recourse and CBRL is held at the holding. I think he will let SNS go, because I don’t think it is worth more than the debt right now. Sardar also could squeeze bond holders in a restructuring and inject equity in it to keep it viable.

Yes, I believe this too. I don’t own SRG, but if I did, it would be gone.

^ I agree with Parsads logic here. It is common practice that pot. conflicts of interests are disclosed if you work for a company and that if such a conflict arises, somebody else or a committed would have to make decision on a transaction. I recall some cases, where a company takes over a company, where the CEO has a personal stake in and the board or a omitted needed to decide. The deal looks proper to me, the disclosure was fair and the price of the transaction does not indicate any favorites, but it would be interesting how BRK internally deals with these conflicts of interests. It would be good to get some disclosure in thr SEC filings on that matter. This is particularly important because WEB will pass on the batton in a few years.

Yes, there are issues, but the scientific method still works. Good science will crowd out bad science, because good science works and bad science doesn’t.

Yep, generate great performance when you manage a few million, then generate lousy performance when you manage billions. Talebs Monkeys at play.

The numbers look very weak to me, given the valuation and recent runup. Stock might well go down more.

I agree with rolling here that if you do define conflict of interest too narrow, the rule would become too restrictive. The deal was fair by any measure and WEB SRG holding were fairly long term and well disclosed. Martha Stuart was convicted of insider trading and lying in court. Sokol has recently purchased Lubrizol stock, then peddled it to WEB without disclosing his interest. Very different cases here. While I think one needs to tread very carefully in these situations, I think this deal would have passed (and probably did pass) any internal review.

These guys don’t need to adapt. They were filthy rich before before their performance record went to hell.

I think OTCQB/OTCQX will eventually be the OTC market. Current pink sheets will be around for some time though. I agree the grey market is as good as dead. It's the fault of any company that isn't labeled "Pink Current Information". Instead of posting their financials on their website (or mailing annual reports to investors), they could submit them to OTCM and you'd be fine to trade their security. OTCM accepts hand-written financials if you are a real penny-pincher. There's no excuse to be "No Information" or the like unless you are planning or actively trying to screw your shareholders. You got that right. You either don’t want other shareholders, or you want to screw them.

Stock is up 10% so I if it’s working don’t break it.

Time to get back on topic or remain silent imo. Doug asked a personal question and didn’t ask for a debate. Sorry, if I contributed to the thread digressing.

I'm not sure how this scenario would be that different than what David Sokol was doing at Berkshire before Buffett parted ways under the guise that this was unethical behavior with Lubrizol. That being said, it's probably best to wait for any comment from Buffett regarding the investment before jumping to any conclusions. This may be capital that the double T's (Todd and Ted) are managing and the decision is independent...again, not sure how this would be any different than the Lubrizol issue. I'm sure Buffett will comment shortly. Cheers! The issue with Sokol was that he didn’t disclose his personal holding in Lubrizol when he proposed BRK to buy the company. With WEB, the position is disclosed and was purchased years ag and one could also argue that the gain from WEB personal holding in SRG is virtually immaterialfor him anyways. I am fairly sure they have considered the optics of this related party transaction and made sure, it is beneficial for BRK as well, based on the loan terms. With a 7% interest rate for a 5 year loan term, they look pretty reasonable for BRK to me. I am also curious on the disclosure of this transaction.

I don’t think that MySpace ever had the same scale, depth and advertising tech and scale that FB had. MySpace was a first mover in the social media space, but they didn’t have any depth other than some scale. FB does have that and in a way, you could say that the FB property itself is just the front for the advertising machine behind it. you can see FB management thinking along the same lines, because they use the same engine and apply it to Instagram and most likely whatever they want to monetize next. The same can be said about GOOG. Before GOOG, there was Altavista, which was delivering the best search experience, it there was no ecosystem (Adsense etc) behind it to fuel further improvements.

AGREED! I disagree. This is not a one time cleanup. The new costs are fixed costs and rebase costs at a higher level. What you guys are talking about is that if revenues continue to grow then margins will grow again as operational leverage does it's thing. This bit I agree with. But if revenue is to continue to grow it probably would have grown anyway. With the new costs even if the margins will increase in the future they will still be lower then they would have been otherwise. I agree with FB's decision to do this btw. I think sooner or later, the security will be automated for the most part. A large part of their AI drive may go in this direction, It’s a few billion dollar of annual expenses and I am fairly sure, that AI sooner or later can do this better and faster than any human can.

My grandfather went to war (drafted as a reservist) in the German army during WW2. As teenager, we did find some of the pictures during his service time and asked him about it. He did talk about his service and some of the memories from that time and some fellow soldiers on this pics who didn’t come back. we were curious back then as 12 or 13 years old, but understood that some questions should not be asked and it is better to let him decide what he want to talk about , rather than lead with questions. Soldiers in war, especially young ones, are pretty much all the same. I met quite a few the soldiers going over to Iraq desert storm in 1990, since I was living near a big US garrison and airport in Germany. A lot of 18 year old, with little education, somewhere from the Us heartlands that had never seen foreign soil before and wouldn’t be able to pick where they were Much less where they were going and what exactly what they were fighting, if their life dependent on it. Many of them had never had a beer (since they were underage in the US), but we bought them a few, since they were of legal drinking age in Germany. We found it odd , that you can sent someone who is not even allowed to drink a beer, to war and kill people. Those guys were too young to even be afraid. Strange world, but it’s pretty much any war anywhere is fought by 18-22 year old young men who don’t really know what they are fighting for.