Spekulatius

The real estate market is no more logical or efficient that's the stock market or the market for Pokemon cards. It will only be efficient if the market participants are rational. the whole point of a bubble is that prices can far exceed what people can actually afford - for a while.

Which other store let me buy a nice $7.99 charge cable for my ipad and have it the next day, free of shipping. I even got a tube of my favorite German mustard for $6, shipped from France. No other store can get me this.

800k in annual corporate expenses is about 8% of the asset base right now. That's a very high burden.

I doubt it. They already have I think ~$500 million, going off of memory of development costs in the pipeline that they will need to fund. And you can bet Sears will be closing 100s more stores that they will have on their lap in the next year or two. Don't really have the capital to take on more stores. I think they will raise equity fairly soon. SRG will do a rights offering and Eddie will backstop it. I actually think they should do it now, before SHLD goes belly up.

If the bubble is as big as it looks like and the popping of the RE bubble in the US is any guide, than you don't need to time this perfectly, in fact t is probably better to wait after the prices have turned down for a while. US RE went from red hot to cold in fall/winter 2005 and it took until 2007 to play out.

Thank you for the heads up Scotty. I will habitually continue to puff my 50c/$ cigar butts until the day I can't find them any more, or I become engulfed into the "All becomes One™ " singularity that you have been talking about.

Ok, my 2 cents as a transplant from Germany, then to California and now in Long Island (New York). The reaal estate taxes become less logical on every step of my journey. In Germany, RE taxes are so low that they are not worth fighting over. Probably about $200/year. in CA, taxes were about 1.25% of the value at the time of your purchase, adjusted for inflation. After the financial crisis, I was able to reduce my taxes simply by sending in a form letter with property value estimates that I got from refinancing my home. sInce property values had dropped momentarily below my purchase price, I was able to get it adjusted very simple. In Long Island, taxes vary significantly from town to town and even from property to property and no one can tell you exactly why.You can fight your taxes, but need to hire a specialized lawyer firm that takes half the tax savings for the first year as pay. It seems to work most of the time, but even after that, taxes are absurdly high at about 2.25-3% of your property value. The reason for this is as oddballstocks stated is that taxes are a patchwork of federal, state, county, city and township legislation which has been developed over the years and is incoherent.

Looking at this a bit more, I found that peer company Heico's R&D is even lower than TDG's, at around 3% of the revenues. So the argument that TDG's R&D is not compatible with their business model based in comparables in the industry is not valid. Just wanted to point this out there for the sake of disclosure. Doesn't make me a long, but facts are facts.

Tangible book is around $17/share. Below that, the stock is interesting, at current prices, not so much.

^ The above explanation for the low R&D implies that TDG is just harvesting existing products from the companies they rolled up and not replacing them, in agggregate. As we speak, the engineers at Boeing, Airbus, Lockheed etc. are designing the next generation Aircraft and TDG's engineers should be designing parts for those, unless they don't care about the business in. 10 years. That's the VRX model again. It's either that, or TDG's products are really build to print from their customers, which imo, creates a lower hurdle to replace TDG as a supplier long term. I also ask myself what engineer would want to work for a company with such abysmal Glassdoor reviews. Admittedly, the Glassdoor reviews may be biased, due to TDG merger activities, but still - this is one of the lowest ratings I have ever seen. I probably would pass on a job offer from such a company. You will be the judge whether that matters or not for an TDG's investment thesis. For me, the red flags with this one are quite obvious and very evident. I think this will be another case where the Rollup story ends up in tears.

That does not rhyme with the fact that their R&D spending is 4% of revenues. Based in what they are stating and diversity of the product line, I would expect their R@D content to be much higher. Either it is simply not true whet they are stating or they are just harvesting profits from the companies they acquiring from existing products, which would be similar to VRX business model. Decent article in gurufocus: http://www.gurufocus.com/news/493786/transdigm-looks-cheap--but-no-thanks

I think ERP/Enterprise has various levels too, some more difficult stuff on the backend and how to handle data and the potential easier stuff in the front end, hopefully making the user experience better. I think the latter requires someone who puts himself into the shoes of an actual user and it appears to me (as a user of these systems, I don't know squat about programming) that those are lacking too. either that or companies don't want to pay up for the level of customization that is actually desired from a user perspective. It's probably a combination of both. I have some buddies from my research group at the university who went to work for SAP many moons ago and make a very good living doing so.

The Hurdle to replace a part with a part from a different supplier, or even the same supplier made differently is quite high in Aerospace. some parts required requalifcations, engineering reviews etc. when engineers would even think twice if it were a consumer product. Think one of the risk that had not been discussed much that TDG is facing is if an customer find substantial deficiencies in TDG quality system. It may not even be an actual defect part, even though those often abuse those deficiencies come to light. From a quality system POV, aerospace is quite unforgiving and the norm for AS9100 (aerospace quality manual) is much tougher and specific than the standard ISO norms. For example aerospace typically requires full tracablilty of all the produced parts/lots as well as raw materials. If something were found significantly deficient, because TDG cuts corners, it would potentially be very expensive to cure and in this case, I think the airlines willingness to look for alternative suppliers would go way up. I think with all the acquisitions that TDG is performing and the associated cost cutting, this risk is way higher than it would be with a company that has a lower growth rate or growth organically. I don't work in Aerospace, but I have worked with a company that supplier parts for aerospace customers as well, so I am sort of familiar with the quality system as they compare with standard industrial products for example.

The provisions seem to be offsetting deposits from customers for remanufacutured parts. I don't understand the business really well and who has ownership of the remanufactured parts while work is in progress, but I assume the provisions are tied to the business model and can't be regarded as float, or if it is, it is akin to a very short dated float. Borg does look like a very good business, and probably a good acquisition.

The real danger is that something is fraudulent about TDG business model, the debt will just provide to gravity to have the equity slide against zero, in the case of serious issues, just like it did with VRX. The thing that I don't get is how they do make all these "highly proprietary" parts with only 4 % R&D. You would usually expect a huge development cost to make all these "highly proprietary" parts, but in fact the R&D cost suggest that this is not the case. How can this be?

The way the Op stated his survey, it was geared towards those that made a high return to begin with, so it mswould t certainly skewed. There is nothing inherently better about choosing few stocks vs many, other than allowing for results deviating from the norm, both positive and negative. I suspect that if you had done a survey for those that achieved very negative results over the same timeframe, you would also have found many with concentrated investments as well, except those exhibited less skill and perhaps less luck as well.

Yes, your can definitely get excellent Chinese food in Flushing. Actually, you pretty much can get any kind of food in Queens. I have generally found that you need to go or be close to immigrant clusters to get good ethnic food for reasonable prices. This means you get Indian food in Hicksville, Vietnamese food San Jose, Koerean food in the Korean cluster in a midtown Manhattan, Thai food in Hollywood (Thaitown). WHenever there is a cluster of immigrants, the quality of the ethnic food they like goes up and the prices often go down - competition at work. This also seems to be a matter of supply chain, such that it's easier to get the ingredients readily and for a reasonable cost. Well at least in Long Island, you get very good Italian food pretty much anywhere.

I am guessing at most new members of this message board don't even own FFH. I don't own it and I know some other ones that joined that don't own it either. With no ownership in FFH, One is much less likely to attend an investor event that is related to FFH. I personally have never been to any investor event nor have I been to a shareholder meeting. I have been investing for over 30 years.

Re Chinese in Long Island I live in Long Island near the border of Suffolk and Nassau county and did not find the Chinese food very desirable. As I mentioned before, am a transplant from the Bay Area, CA and my wife is Chinese ethnically, but we both found the Chinese food quite terrible, especially the takeout variety. So far, we only tried it once. They solely cater to the "white" populace and only have standard fare like Kung Pao, Orange Chicken, egg roles etc. There are a few good restaurants in between, which I think are mostly recent opening from emigrants. Those are sit in restaurants which do takeout on the side and charge a little more. There is a cluster of decent places near Stony Brook catering to the large population of Asian Students there. I did find Indian restaurants to be much better than in CA generally, but for Chinese food, it is the opposite. I can attest to the long hours are willing to work and determination that Chinese emigrants have to get ahead and provide for their kids. Comparatively speaking, Vietnamese, Thai and Philippino's seem to be less successful. Compared to all these above, I grew up with a golden spoon emigrating from Europe with a very good education.

I.e. owner works 24 hours, their family works 24 hours, and/or hires (potentially illegal) immigrant workers who work 24 hours for below official wage salary. Which makes the operation the low cost operator. There might be more to it, but the huge-work-for-cheap is likely major component, no? I agree with above that the willingness to work long hours is the biggest factor. The whole family chips inhours, including the kids. Competing with paid employees is very hard and even paid employees are mostly less reliable and honest. This is not just true for restaurant or service business, but also for other business lie construction business where you can get incredible value from contractors, if you know how to deal with them. We had some work done in my old house when we were living in the Bay Area for about from Chinese contractors for about half what a regular contractor would charge, and the work was quite good (not the highest attention paid to detail, but pretty decent). However, we could do this, because my wife is Chinese and new the right contacts and how to deal with them in their own language.

He probably should abstain from managing other people's money, since he appears to be a gambler. He has a computer science degree and should do something more productive.

Political ill-will. Politics has nothing to do with good outcomes, logic, or solutions. It has everything to do with getting your way and/or making sure your opponent suffers. Self interest. The NWS is immensely profitable for the government right now, why give it up? Mnuchin works for the government now and Trump, who will need every penny he can get hold of for his projects? Why give away the goose who lays golden eggs now every 6 month? I would expect the governement trying to dump FNM/FRE when the housing market goes bad and these entities become liabilities for them. Who do you think would be the best suitors for Fannie and Freddie when the housing market goes bad and wants to dump them? So the gov will keep the money now and then try to find buyers for trillions of dollars of securities when the market turns down? Sounds like a great housing finance plan. I can tell you put a lot of thought into this. I am pretty sure they is how politicians think. They may dump FNM/FRE really cheap, if it is not wanted any more, but now, why let it go? You are correct however that I have not put a lot of thought into this.

Political ill-will. Politics has nothing to do with good outcomes, logic, or solutions. It has everything to do with getting your way and/or making sure your opponent suffers. Self interest. The NWS is immensely profitable for the government right now, why give it up? Mnuchin works for the government now and Trump, who will need every penny he can get hold of for his projects? Why give away the goose who lays golden eggs now every 6 month? I would expect the governement trying to dump FNM/FRE when the housing market goes bad and these entities become liabilities for them.

THe article is from March 2013. So far, the house of cards still stands

Yes Congress is a check on the President's actions...my sense is that Trump really shook up the republican party, and the republican congressmen don't know where their allegiances lie...so even if they did disagree with Trump, they are hesitant to really "check" him. But you're right: we're lucky enough to have a strong foundation with a gov't with checks and balances, unlike a blatant dictatorship or oligarchy. In terms of Obama's biases, my view is that, although the biases were there, Obama at least let his opponents have a seat at the table. Take the White House Correspondents Dinner (Trump just announced he will not attend). Obama attended and, admittedly, took blatant shots at his opponents, but he showed up and let them show up as well. Finally, in terms of the Press. To me it's pretty simple...regardless who is the President, we live in a democracy. He doesn't get to define what is "rational" enough to get aired. Freedom of the Press is pretty straightforward. Trump can argue that that the Press is unfair to him. The other side can rebut: Well if Trump thinks entire Press is out to get him, maybe it's because they have valid reasons. In some sense, it comes with the territory (as the saying goes, if you cant take the heat...) +1! Absolutely correct. I don't remember the Obama Administration taking any such stance with the press or even a single Republican with all of the crap that was spewing out about Obama's nationality or religion. Forget everything else...just this one simple issue was carried as a torch by Trump and Tea Party members for nearly the entire 8-year term of his presidency. Even Glenn Beck was one of those stating that Obama was a muslim, born in Kenya. Even now, there are millions of Trump supporters who believe this shit. Cheers! It has been said before, but we live in an age, where facts don't matter any more.