Spekulatius

The intangible here is Lithium in their name, that may be all there is too it.

Edit - not sure where my list went the first time. Corporate expenses are $660k , not $2M, still high, but the slowly dying Internet business covers most of them. The earnings came $2M+ appreciation their Alluvial investment, which had a great year in 2017. I think the biggest headache seems to be the HVAC roll up business (HVAC value fund is a terrrible name for it, IMO) with its operating losses. ok, they hired a new GM, so we will see how this does this year. I don’t really understand all these fee sharing deals, it sound like Alluvial helps other asset management business to get off the ground This is not a conglomerate, it’s more like a venture capital fund housing several upstarts, thwt really don’t have anything to do with each other. It will be interesting to see, how capital allocation decisions will be done in the future , because I am fairly sure, not all of them will work out and when to pull the plug is important.

Don’t buy an LP if you are a foreign investor. It’s almost certainly not worth the trouble. I think technically , you need to file an US tax return and/ or suffer withholding taxes from distributions. I don’t think this is worth the trouble for most individual investors.

Biologic molecule generics standards are much more stringent in the US than the rest of the world . In the US, clinical trials must be completed to prove therapeutic equivalency, in the EU and the rest of the world, only the biological/chemical equivalency of the molecule has to be proven, albeit extensively in the case of the EU and much less so in India. http://www.bioprocessintl.com/manufacturing/biosimilars/biosimilar-markets-regulation-countries-going/

As far as Mr. Market takes the units down. There is no way of telling because a bear market will not be rational. My concern with the “parking units” approach is that I think we could easily look at a 50% loss here , albeit temporary, since OAK will be classified as a financial or asset manager, which is technically correct. I also agree that disclocations in the credit markets will come with any recession. This is what happened in 2002 and in 2008 where spreads increased significantly. We had a short spike in spreads with energy credit in late 2015, where you could buy bonds of perfectly fine BB+midstream companies with utility like business models for 11% interest rate yields.

Boy, is this interior ugly. I wonder what happens when the central touch screen goes bad when driving.

It’s darn messy for a spin-off, probably by design. I owned LMCA just a short time ago and that thing started to split into pieces I don’t know how many times and shares had children and grandchildren. I sold most shares (for decent enough profits) sine the individual stakes get small and at least for some, the discount to NAV at that time. I sill hold andere shares in the Atlanta Braves that did OK. it’s got to be almost a full i me job to keep track of these things. Too much work for me, but one of these days one of these shares becomes very cheap, I am sure.

I agree that SYF running their own network is very relevant. The lack of interchange fees should make them very competitive against other bidders for store card contracts and keepibg the data in house and sharing them with customers helps as well.

I would probably try to figure out when they have to raise equity. I think they have a convert that is underwater and needs to be refinanced in early 2019.

SYF stress test results are also interesting. They are posted in their IR website. The net result is that they would get through the Great Recession about breakeven. I think thid is better than most banks would do. Obviously also running a bank to finance the CC receivables is key. I believe thwt during the Great Recession under GE Financial, they were living off commercial paper directly or indirectly.

+1 I was surprised by that too. Well that happens when the market goes down.

Some things to note: 1) They don’t really own their CC customers. Their customers can pull the business upon contract expiration and move it somewhere else 2) They not own the payment network, unlike DFS or Amex. Although, they do some to have a proprietary network to facilitate payment in store terminals without going over other CC payment systems. Note that this is a real threat to Visa and MC It is a cyclical business. 10% chargeoffs during last recession -outch! Even 5.8% right now when everything is peachy seems kind of high.

Firing anybody above 50 is not possible in a Union outfit nor anywhere else for that matter. the fired worker also still would have the pension claim, he would just stop accumulating new ones. Stopping elganility for a pension plan doesn’t do much either. If a a 30 year old worker in a pension plan, I can still accumulate claims for my entire work forthright next 35 years and then can get claims payed out for the rest of his life, it could be 60 years from now hen the buck stops, after they closed the plan for new employees.

I think it is just higher discount rate. Pretty much everything with a yield or utility like attributes has sold of, including utilities, cable stocks, MLPs, Pipeline companies or other high yielding dividend stocks.

The FERC ruling makes very little sense, but I think there is a concern that the overall ROE will be pushed down by the ruling. If example, if MLP do not get reimbursed for taxes, but C-Corp would, and if MLP just accepted that as is, how would C-Corps compete against MLPs in. FERC proposals, since they would be inherently more expensive for customers, everything else being equal? Again,I don’t think the ruling makes sense and will be reversed or amended, but right now customer would need to pay less to MLPs than they would have to C-Corps, so why go with an expensive proposal?

Because I can get 1 Gig and it’s not that pricey Jurgis is correct that some of the issues appeared to be backbone related ( some local nodes in Long Island) but again, it’s the providers job to get this right. It was also played on wireless on a mobile device. But then again, I had the Verizon router and the cable companies router, but then again, it is the providers job to get the hardware right. My pingtracet indicated that wireless wasn’t the issue though. When on cable internet, I even had issues with Netflix or Amauon video streams jamming up. Again YMMV but in my comparison test, Fios performed better. Small dataset, I know.

Pensions are like debt, just worse, since the assumed returns are often lofty and most likely not achievable. It’s clear why - it is more convenient to kick the can down the road, than to deal with it right away. It also helps that analysts tend to ignore it and because they can’t model it well and the expenses are too lumpy to fit in their neat spreadsheet models. Just look at GE and UPS or UPS. UPS has spent more on pensions during the few years than on buybacks and dividends. GE does not even have the money to fix their pensions right now.

It’s listed confidential, so hopefully Bill is Ok with posting it here. One should note that recent results have been poor due to cost increasing faster than revenues. Their annual report will be published on 4/1 (probably coming in by mail a few days earlier) and they hopefully will shed some light into this trend. I have a seizable stake (for me) since 2012 and I agree, this is a great LT investment.

Fiber to the home used to cost $3000 when Verizon did their buildout, but this has dropped to below $1000/ home (LBTYA mentioned £650 for example). Some of cost is cost/ home fixed, some of it is discretionary when customer actually orders it. I would imagine that getting $80/month of high margin business with a $1000 upfront investment is reasonable ROI, because based on what I have seen, the uptake of reasonably priced FTTH is quite high. I had FTTH first (50MPS first) then switched to cable (200MBPS) and then switched back to FIOS(1GPS). At that point, Played an online game and when I switched from the slow 50MPS to cable, I noticed increased lag. I investigated with a ping tracer they hater were ping spikes and packet losses, which I had not seen before even with slower nominal data speed. I was extremely happen when gigabit FIOS was offered and didn’t look back since. The nominal data speeds mean very little when you game or even stream and have ping spikes and packet losses, which depend on you local network, what your neighbors are doing etc because bandwidth is always shared to some extend with cable. FTTH get rid of these issues and that it why I is superior. This will become very obvious when people start to stream video music on circus devices at the same time.

I have got. FIOS Gigbit and cable can’t touch it. I actually tried it and switched it toi cable for a while l because they gave me a good offer with 250Mbit, but the issue is not speed, it is ping and packet losses. I ditched cable fairly quickly. Fiber, where it is available has high market shares and houses when sold listing the availability as a plus. I think it is also getting cheaper to get fiber to the house.

This doesn’t matter if reimbursements for operators don’t grow. I also suspect there is a lot of wage pressure for operators as well. They don’t tend to pay nurses and skilled personal well, so if the labor market improves, those folks move on.

I am guessing that Malone purchased and valued cable assets at lower EBITDA multiples back then when interest rates were higher.I also think that the price increases taper out and are lower than they used to be. just my guess, I have not looked at historical numbers closely. Cable systems do have competition in most areas. Where I live, FIOS for example eats their lunch.

Yes, a 47% haircut to depositors with more than €100k in deposits. It’s all good now, Wilbur Ross was vice chairman for a while after the collapse https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/mar/23/wilbur-ross-russian-deal-bank-of-cyprus-donald-trump-commerce-secretary

Same here, I added to my small Fb position. I also bought CMCSA - relatively cheap asset at 8x EBITDA and good operators.