Spekulatius

Koyfin is messed up after the recent update. The site is harder to use and charts are often messed up. I do like access to international stocks, but some of the other changes are questionable. I think Roaring Kitty is better of with what he has got.

MA actually has done this and listed smoking as a comorbidity condition allowing to get the vaccine faster. https://www.mass.gov/info-details/covid-19-vaccine-distribution-timeline-phase-overview#phase-2- I am guess that I am going to tell my doctor that I started smoking because I got too stressed out about COVID-19 and not getting the vaccine.

It is very possible to have instant (in human time scale, in computer time scale obviously it won't be 'instant' but would take a few microseconds) settlement even today, the reason it is not like that is netting, netting is the concept that you don't have to change the ledger every time a trade is done and if in the mean time offsetting transactions occur you don't need to register them at all, netting is done to lower the cost of trading since millions of transactions can be netted and there would be only one lump some of money transferred between the brokers instead of millions of cash payments for really small sums. Thanks for the response. From a computing/distributed systems perspective I agree near real time is possible. But still a very hard problem. We know how to build these systems in practice but in reality it’s hard to build them correctly. But not saying it can’t be done. But I think daily or bi daily settlement gets us much better visibility. Less intrusive of a change. And firms can still net or batch, just more often. I am sure they can deal with that. I guessing that netting happens on a daily basis today but the lag to settle the netted transactions is T+2. Reducing the 2 to T+(EOD-T) would be a big step. China has already T+0 settlement in HK ( China connect): https://www.globalinvestorgroup.com/articles/3693040/overcoming-the-t-0-settlement-cycle-in-china FWIW, the problem with Robinhood was that they settles the trades themselves and apparently the mushrooming trading and stock prices caused an increase in capital requirements. In a way, it’s a high class problem to have and that’s why they were able to raise $1B in capital that quickly.

Yes, I watched some videos too. it is definitely different than the gunslinger, I expected. He had a lot of energy names in his portfolio and HHS. He is an interesting fellow. I subscribed to his channel and he had 146k subscriber and it’s up to 178k now (Ops make this 181k). This guy could easily raise a billion $, I am guessing.

The utility functions in FB - Facebook groups and facebook Marketplace and perhaps going forward FB dating are adding significant value. In my town, it seems that politics (discussions, web meetings ) are largely done within FB. There is also Nextdoor, but I feel they are falling a bit behind. I do think you have to assume that Mark Zuckerberg is going to steer the company in the right direction for the foreseeable future.

L3Harris thesis in one sentence: 20% EBITDA business (Harris) + 13% EBITDA (L3) margin business = 20% EBITDA margin business (L3Harris) NOC had very strong revenue growth in the last quarter. LMT also looked good, but outlook disappointed a bit. All those will be buying back a lot of stock if they stay cheap.

$GME is the blue chip in the WSB portfolio, perhaps with PLTR and has recovered better than the rest apparently (AMC, BB etc.). GME is back at $340, almost a triple from the lows yesterday. Why are we dealing with duds like BRK again?

Yes, that’s a simple fact. P/B ratios have been falling for most insurers, except short tail (auto) because the profits from investing the float are reduced in a low interest rate environment.

Sounds like a huge number but really won’t make a dent with a ~$450B market cap. They trade around ~36x 2021 earnings estimates. MA and V are surprisingly hard hit by the lack of travel and cross border transactions which are highly profitable. Full recovery will take until 2022.

For most companies that is true. It is not true for companies that need to access the capital market frequently, like most financials or even MLP that have financing needs to that access capital markets for debt and equity. Financials in particular need to roll over debt, over gibt credit etc literally every day and and their reputation is extremely important in the view of their stakeholders (counterparts, customers, depositions, creditor). A severely lower share price and undermine confidence na impact the business very quickly. That’s the reflexivity principle. For other companies (industrials, even tech) that is much less the case.

I bought a few shares. This stock was presented at the value investors meeting and I liked what I saw https://www.cornerofberkshireandfairfax.ca/forum/events/online-zoom-meeting-value-investors-meetup/10/ There is a VIC writeup too, which gives a pretty interesting overview: https://www.valueinvestorsclub.com/idea/VONTIER_CORP/7923879108

No $41t Sherlock. Would have never guessed stock prices would drop when people are not allowed to buy them. ::) These newly minted millionaires need to move to a real broker. IB lets you buy anything. Got an limit order for NOK below $4 in just in case things get really funny on the downside.

There is a bear market in Meme stocks today : GME, BB, AMC, NOK, PLTR are all down today.

Looks one like folks in my office were gambling too. I hear words like Gamestock, AMC, Blackberry around our break room area this AM. Even some boomers were apparently in.

To find what? Rocket ship emoji’s? Bloomberg terminals have a built in chat function, why is that?

If I remember correctly, Porsche’s CEO stated that “a Complete takeover is not our intention”. First of all, Porsche never took VW completely over (they just acquired control ) and “intention” is a bit rubbery and subject to change. Fact is that Porsche’s board voted in March 2008 on the matter and gave the go ahead to acquire a controlling stake and a couple of month later, they just did that. At least to me, it seems that the hedgies didn’t really didn’t pay attention to details and got caught with their pants down.

+1 He covered a lot of companies and provided solid analysis. PCYO, MSGS (E), AYR just to name a few. And of course all those SPAC’s. He also runs a big mouth sometimes (hence the ban), but you got to take the good with the bad.

What legal theories are you referencing? I am only familiar with Rule 10b-5, which is here: https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/17/240.10b-5 A 10b-5 violation requires a material misstatement or omission of fact. Speculative statements of opinion ("This stock is going to the moon" or "Buy GME, can't go tits up") don't count. And there are more hurdles than this in the law. Importantly, the Supreme Court held in Ernst & Ernst v. Hochfelder (https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/425/185/) that there must be intent to deceive. On top of that, you actually have to show that the misstatements or omissions caused someone to buy or sell the stock in question, AND that they lost money. Are regulators really going to trawl through millions of posts from 20-year-old kids looking for deliberate factual misstatements to trace to individual buy/sell decisions? I doubt it. I would've thought it would've been more around the intentional manipulation, but looking back at Porsche/VW, the courts ruled in favor of Porsche. They ruled in favor of Porsche because what Porsche did (buying options on VW to gain control) was allowed in Germany at that time. Hedge funds who were in that trade wrongly assumed that it wouldn’t be allowed (in fact it would not be allowed in the US and many other countries) but they didn’t really know the rules. i don’t think you found more than a handful souls in Germany who felt sorry for the hapless guys. Right now, there is a lot of odd trading going on where shorted crap stocks go up and perhaps higher quality stocks go down. It seems to me that long /short traders and institutions are wetting their pants because they are afraid they get blown up in an infinity short squeeze, so they unwind their positions. This means that likely interesting opportunity may represent themselves. For example, I suspect that some folks are long Dell and short VMW. This makes sense perhaps, but now VMW is going up and Dell looks a bit sickly. I am long VMW and it think interesting things could happen in the short run with the relatively small float in VMW. I bought VMW for fundamental reasons so no big deal either way. I might buy some Dell too, if things get silly.

Gregmal banned? Timeout maybe, but the board is poorer without him. He needs to come back!

What crime? What crime is the average Joe committing? How can a participant in an idea with no central or governing body be committing a crime? I see it the same way. someone posts GME ???, another one says it’s going to $1000, another one says “Hold the line “ , what the crime here? Who, what why? In the meantime Ackman goes on TV and says “hell is coming” and pockets $2B in genius trade short trade! Give me a break.

MMAC and VNT. Also angling for more BERY, but limit order missed.

I don’t agree. If short sellers drive down PEP, it doesn’t matter, the company is self financing. In fact, the company could compound value and buy back tons of shares cheaply and the pensioners would benefit from this in the long run , even if they did nothing. More likely though. At least some folks would buy the discounted shares and benefit even more. the simple fact is that PEP share price doesn’t really matter for its operations. As for GME, everyone who has been and is involved in this from either side is just a greedy SOB, so why should be care if they make a ton of money or blow up. Personally, I think it is great that the little guys can form a Piranha swarm and gang up on the big fish, it usually is the other way around.

Thanks, it was a good interview. Tom Gayner’s integrity shines through. Not bad value at the current price IMHO. It was a line ball between BRK and MKL, I opted for a bit of diversification. They should both do OK (10-12%) compounding from these levels. Set and forget cheers nwoodman How do you get 10-12% from here? They have compounded book value at 8% CAGR in the last 5 years and with interest rates being low, I don’t see much more than that going forward Even worse, they take a lot of equity risk compared to other insurers. Assuming an 8% CAGR gain in book value, MKL is worth about book, but not more, imo.

Shorting anything right now is just playing Russian roulette. There is a huge swarm of piranhas out there sniffing for short sellers in the water. What we may be seeing now is that money gets pulled from large cap solid stocks to provide liquidity to participate in this game, because I fully believe that some hedge funds and other institutions participate in this, it’s just that the WSB is the tip of the spear.