Spekulatius

Even the question wether Elon is a great engineer is besides the point. What he is apparently though is abgerät Engineering Manager. A great Engineering manager almost never is the best engineer, but he is a good engineer , who asks the right questions, hires the right people and put the right people in his teams, have them work on the right things, motivates them etc. Elon is certainly good on all the above, I still don’t think he is a great company CEO in the end, but I think he is a great engineering manager.

Added to my pipeline stocks ENB and KMI today. I suppose higher interest rates and the trouble in BC has added to the weakness. The big picture is that owning franchise and hard to replace cash flowing assets is probably a good thing.

Whilst I am a layman in crypto, I think the question I’d which one is the better store of wealth and which one is the better underlying technology to facilitate transactions. For the latter it seems Etherium, for the former it is most likely Bitcoin. If you want to invest in the technology though, purchasing the underlying token (Ether) is not the way to do it, you need to invest in a company that owns or uses the technology.

That's a good way to phrase the perception of the status quo and the overall outlook, Spekulatius. I share this perception with you. My major concern right now with the US is actually the relation between US Politics and US economy. Personally I consider US politics unpredictable right now. [i'm not trying to stir the pot in a topic in the Investments Ideas forum here on CoBF, just posting my personal perception here.] There is to me no doubt that the losses and provisions on the loan books where we are now in this cycle for these banks are artificially low, ref. what you have posted here on CoBF before. This will not continue long term, I think. I can't find anything else anywhere [that I want to own], that offers me a forward P/E in the lower half of the teens with a fairly large share buyback program running, that to some extent is quality [varying extent for the big four US banks] and has similar prospects within the next 1 - 2 years. - - - o 0 o - - - I may be totally wrong here. The loss, however, will not get a chance to escalate. That's also the reason why I want to do this in tax deferred accounts, so if I screw up here, I'll at least have the opportunity immediately for tax deduction at year end, because of yearly taxation of returns, based on MtM valuation taxation of both realised and unrealised gains [called PAL-tax here, 15.3 percent]. I do not share your sentiment. While I consider Trump incompetent, I don’t think it matters for the economy. So far, he seems to have gotten some tax cuts through (which in high tax states are really not that large for better earners, due to offsets), which are a modest positive, but he hasn’t done and is unlikely to do much else. Presidents doing absolutely nothing traditionally have been good for stocks, especially if things are moving along by themselves.

I thought you first entry point was $7000 for bitcoin, why $500-1000? Why not $100 or $10? While I agree that a lot of money can be made playing the rallies or the busts, the lack of intrinsic value for any crypto currencies makes it hard to get entry or exit pointe for three tokens.

Issuing shares doesn't increase market cap it lowers the value of each share. Or it should anyway. LOL

Yes. And I'm out of this stock the moment I see things start to break in the US economy. What issues do you see with the US economy? Seems pretty peachy to me right now. we probably going to have a recession two years down the road, when the recovery goes into its 10 years, which historically speaking is almost unheard of.

The next recession will prove otherwise. Citibank has a storied history to be leader in getting knee deep into any junk anywhere in the world.

During the last few month, i have opportunistically added significant positions in AXS, RE and AHL. All of them trade close to or below book value. RE is the highest quality of the above and I bought it at a small premium to book.

Sold AIG. Not worth holding. I am overweighted insurers anyways, having recently added significantly to AXS, RE and AHL. At least the former two are not run by complete morons.

The RR is for amusement and feeds off from cruise ship guests docking at the town. It’s a pretty fun and scenic ride - I took it when our ship stopped there at an Alaskan cruise. My guess is that their revenues depend on the # of cruise ships docking there.

Total insanity. The investors in dot com companies 18 years ago were like coupon clippers compared to this crowd.

WFC online banking (and brokerage) GUI is less capable than that of many credit unions 1/100 their size and certainly BofA's. Their mortgage salespersons are not competitive either with respect to rates and ease of dealing with them (my personal recollection as well as that from colleagues. I think the bank is retreating probably as consequence of the reboot due to the scandals. I would WFC to have a few years of stagnation before they can resume growing as fast as their competitors again. That will be the true cost of this scandal 3-5 years of stunted growth, not the few hundred million in fines, which are really peanuts on their income statement.

The problem with PDH is that the capital ase and the potential returns from it are way too small to carry the current overhead. The loss in Sequant makes this problem much worse. Shareholders look at continued losses and dilution here.

I like it. It looks like they own a mix of gathering (which are lower quality) and backbone (higher quality) assets. Typically, something like this would trade at 10x EBITDA. I need to take a closer look, it I am inclined to buy some here.

I understand that bitcoin is anti fragile by design, but on the other hand, the concept is only a few years old. I expect rapid development in this field and it is possible and actually quite likely, that. Vulnerabilities in the bitcoin concept or the way it operates will be found and exploited, especially in case sovereigns have an interest to do so. Your lack of understanding is causing you to think it's fragile While it's actually anti-fragile (and has proven to be so over the years). I advice you to either increase your knowledge or choose to let this opportunity to pass you by. If you choose the former start by understanding that whether something is physical is not relevant. What is relevant is whether something is scarce, ownable, divisable, durable, non-reproducable, etc. The funny thing it's better able to do that than the best known physical store of value (gold).

I understand that the #of bitcoins is fixed, but this does not answer my question. Creating these cryptotokens is like creating money, as long as those tokens have a value and there is no economic benefit created (at least for the time being) with these tokens. This makes it inflationary in the real world.

Some questions: 1) Aren’t all those crypto currencies inflationary? Creating these tokens creates no real value in the physical world, but they have a real value for now. right noe, the total value of crytocurrencies is just a few hundred billion $, but if this becomes larger in the trillion $ range, we are talking about a huge and non-government controlled extra money supply. 2) I understand that the network are safe because information is distributed, but what would happen, if most of the processing Power were concentrated in one spot, even if temporarily so? Could China hijack the Bitcoin simply by flooding the network with mining servers, then temporarily or even permanetly damage it with fake transactions amongst each other, which makes it hard or even impossible to restore. A distributed network sort of lives in the moment, If I can gain control or quasi control over it for just a while, one could change its history ?

My return was a paltry 7%, mostly due to a large cash position and underperformance in MLPs and pipeline and real estate stocks (WMB, KMI etc). Biggest loser was BWP and GE. Biggest winner was BRK.B (go figure)

The payoff of Luther’s thesis was not immediate, it costed Europe literally a hundred years of war until his ideas finally came to bear. He also died being more or less on the run and bitter.

Real estate is a Cash Flow generating asset, while bitcoin and gold are not generating anything. Big difference, imo.

CFO leaving, especially for such an outfit ( highly leveraged, lots of acquisitions), is potentially a big red flag.

I lived in CA and now in Long Island. FWIW, PGE has been much less diligent cutting trees than PSEG, the local utility here. Just and observation and obviously a small sample size.

Had the same surgery (Hernia) this fall and used a grand total of 2 tablets of the batch of opioids (forgot the brand) my doctor prescribed for me. I managed my pain (which was pretty strong at moments, but most of the time fairly bearable ) with Ibuprofen and went to work a week afterwards. I recall to getting fairly decent batches of Vicadine (with refills) for surgeries a few years back, where I barely used more than a few. A somewhat junky acquaintance told me back then that they would go for $5/ each on the Black market (I politely declined). Comparing this to Europe, it seems that the threshold for pain is much lower in the US than over there. I Even remember dentist drilling teeth without any pain treatment. He was from Russia and told me it only hurt if you think too much about what he is doing.He was right, but it is difficult to think about something else, when you are lying on a chair with a drill in your mouth going all in. As to OP’s initial post, I am not quite sure what he wants to say. It’s certainly not the distributors fault, that opiate drugs make their way in circulation, maybe the doctors for prescribing too much too freely, folks for taking them too much, folks for reselling their overage.... I don’t know, the drug does no seem to do all that much other than dull your mind and removing chronic pain. They did not even work that well for the sharp pain experienced sometimes when moving around after my surgery, which was quite unpleasant but generally only lasted a for a few moments.

I meant NG ( natural gas) - phat finger when typing on my phone. I think the MLP are selling off due to concerns about the tax reform, which believe to be unfounded.