Spekulatius

Let’s not forget that FB tried to issue their own cryptocurrency (Libra) and then pulled it because of regulatory backlash a short while ago. Ant is only 33% owned by Alibaba and a small part of Alibaba’s value. Anyways, China and the US aren’t that different in terms of government intervention for big tech. Let’s also not forget TikTok.

Enjoyed: Christmas crossfire ( German film Noir with a bit of a seasonal setting). Imposters - 3 episodes in and the script and acting is pretty good Bridgerton - nice production. Has a bit of a woke touch to it with all races equally represented, despite being a fictional setting in England late 19th century. The Midnight Sky -yawn

Yes, I agree with this. Norway indeed may be a model to follow. I think the larger stations around highways may be fine as they can adjust their business model, but I am not sure about smaller ones in more urban/suburban areas where I stead of refueling folks just charge up at home. ai have no idea how this plays out, but know the gas stations have to compete with typically larger Conviencience stores as there wouldn’t be much of a difference. I also think there isn’t much to fear in the next 5 years in terms:of gasoline sales for EV, but one needs to take into account that the market may reduce the terminal value of assets accordingly over time due to shrinking duration of cash flows.

Imagine 100% of cars sold this year were EVs. Total car and light truck sales per year are around 17 million in the U.S.. There are a total of 274 million registered vehicles in the U.S. In that draconian scenario, it will still take 16 years to replace the fleet. If you are projecting it will take a decade to hit 50% of sales to be EV, when do you think we will hit 100% sales to be EV? My point is we have many many years ahead of usage of high quality refinery and gas station assets. The lower quality ones will start shutting down first. I think we have to handicap percentage reduction in volume of gas by timeline. How much reduction in gas demand do you need to make refining and to a lesser degree distribution a crappy business due to margin pressure - that’s the key question not when 90% of the gas demand disappears. Prior to the shale becoming a factor, refining had a lousy decade due to overcapacity. This could well happen again.

Study from Germany in the Munich area: -about 3.3% have antibodies (2x the value from April) - 0.47% derived IFR rate (which is a 2x the guesstimate from the CDC) - 4250 samples https://www.br.de/nachrichten/wissen/studie-rund-drei-prozent-der-muenchner-mit-corona-infiziert,SK3xCl6 The dark matter of undetected infection is way lower than it was during the first wave In March/ April due to more testing.

What's (not) funny is that I'd bet that those who argue for the strongest measures in a public forum like here all broke rules one way or another. This guy blocked me, I have no idea why. I recall him being a TESLAQ fellow, but I am not exactly a bull. probably no big loss that I can‘t read his tweets.

SYTE’s business model is probably broken, but I have high respect for the fund managers under their umbrella generally. Scalability is probably an issue for some of the employees strategies, but then again, most seem to operate in a low cost way so it might just work for them with less AUM than is usually needed.

You know, we generation X folks and boomers had Janus funds back in the day, and the millennials now have $ARKK:

Looks like my kind of place too, but I would go for the home brewed beers rather than the whiskeys. I really don’t drink whiskeys much, but prefer the smoother Irish whiskeys over the scotch’s generally. I am currently having a bit Calvados, which is my favorite goto drink for something a bit stronger.

The US and China has very different perceptions on what is right or wrong. Just watch the Movies from each country - like in “Hero” the Hero takes on for the team & country even though it wasn’t fair. The you have countless Us movies where a food looking blonde female teenager gets in trouble because of stupidity, then 10 special forces troops rush in to bail her hour; eight of them die, but two survive and rescue good looking girl with a few scratches and we call it a happy ending. Ok, I am stereotyping here and I don’t like the chinese government interfering as they do, it in case of BABA this risk is priced in. I still think we are looking at a double here by 2022 if things go well and not much worse than $150 if things go very wrong. I like those odds.

What does CPC want: 1.) no rule of law 2.) no respect for individual human rights 3.) no freedom of press China is a military dictatorship, plain and simple. Its core values are polar opposite to Western democracies/Japan/South Korea. China needed to develop quickly and relaxed a few constraints for a few decades. Stage 1 in their growth was building economic and political power. We are just starting to see stage 2: the pivot with China starting to exercise that power. Wait until their economy is twice the size it is now - is the world ready for China (and its value system) being the dominant economic and political power? This is true, but it is also true that the country has economically evolved tremendously and the communist party isn’t really communist any more. In a way, the chinese capitalist system is the one of the most cutthroat capitalist system that has ever existed and that’s how Alibaba evolved into the into a national champion that the CCP is unlikely to destroy. I agree there are risks in that the CCP regulated Alibaba and permanently impedes their profitability. Then again, the same thing was said about Tencent back on 2018 when the CCP was restricting new game launches. The stock reacted pretty unfavorable but if you bought Tencent after it corrected, you made very very well. BABA at current levels could be roughly a double in 2022 assuming this blows over and I think that makes the risk reward pretty favorable. I guess we will find out.

Tikr.com does provide 1 year forward estimate, but I am not sure they are consensus estimates (I think they are: https://app.tikr.com/register?ref=o94y6y Another thing, I can access CapitalIQ through my public library (Boston public library) for the time being.

It seems that other sources have a more nuanced recap what Fauci actually said. One thing is sure - if a more transmissible form of COVID-19 starts to dominate, the threshold for herd immunity will go up.

I see it the same way Spek. I have a starter position waaaaay higher than what it is at now and bought my 2nd 1/3 yesterday. China is in an interesting predicament. On one hand, they need companies like BABA, Tencent to keep pushing forward on the tech front and on the other hand CCP has to retain control. I also don't see Yukos-like scenario unfolding here. At worst/best, BABA is broken up. There was a debate a while ago how “profitable” AMZN is, considering that they don’t show much of an GAAP profit. The smartest argument that I have heard is that it is I possible to grow the business at high rates (20-30%) with little dilution unless the business is very profitable (in fact has similar ROE than the growth rates ). The same argument applies to BABA. BABA growth 30% annually and dilation is <2% annually. For BABA it would be I possible to do this, if they weren’t very profitable. I have been critical of BABA’s accounting in the past and it is truly a black box. However, based on the input (dilution, equity raises) and the outputs (top line growth etc) it just has to be very profitable. Either that or everything (including topline numbers ) are completely made up which I don’t believe to be the case. At least that’s my thesis.

I bought some BABA yesterday. While the political risk is hard to handicap, I think the shakedown confirms that BABA is a monopoly which is growing by 30% annually. This reminds me of the FB drawdown in 2018. If this blows over, BABA is a $400 stock in 2022. I think the risk reward ratio right now is quite favorable. The best case scenario is that BABA is forced to split up in various companies to limit their market power, because in this case, I think the sum of parts is worth even more.

I don’t think there are a lot of Japanese financials that are thriving , they seem more like the zombies in Walking Dead that keep moving.

Seems like everyone who wants to start out investing on behalf of friends and family or even wants to start out with SMA as a business should read this thread as a cautionary tale. To me at least, it seems like doing these binary type bets in SMA looks like a ticking time bomb and lawsuits waiting to happen. If you keep doing these things, it is probably just a matter of time until it blows up and creates a nightmare of lawsuits. It is probably not just people being bad, but the human brain will remember failures and losses much more so than success. I could easily envision an investor making 4 equal sized bets with three of them being doubles and one being a wipeout and yet in the end this investor being disgruntled as the failure was “evident from the start” in retrospect of course. After the fact everyone knows better . It’s just how humans are wired, I think.

^ I concur with above and have been adding to my position recently. It seems undervalued relative Cortiva and any sum of part analysis with their pharma business. They have made good progress settling their Roundup liabilities and the monetization of their Animal Health Business has greatly helped. I am not a fan of their management p but this seems clearly mispriced.

On thought that crossed my mind is that it could work out really bad for insurers if interest rates stay near zero while inflation picks up. The reason for this is that higher inflation means that cost to settle insurance claims will pick up. Since premiums are paid for future claims, it means that the underwriting ratio will develop unfavorably in this case, because there costs will outrun the premium increases for a couple of years possibly.

Maybe why GILD is near a 52-week low? I owned GILD and sold during a spike due to Remdesivir news and it turned out the right decision. Remdesivir was never central to the thesis though, but the pipeline disappointments and continued issues with their Hep C franchise are putting a lid on the stock.

I watched Greyhound too. This is also basically an alternative history movie where all the German U-Boot commander collectively loose their mind.

My wife just got the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine today. So far, so good. Some unrelated stuff: My wife talked with an ICU nurse at the hospital and she mentioned they that generally don’t administer Remdesivir for COVID-19 cases any more. Frontline treatment are steroids and often it is just that.

Ark - I wonder about cause and effect :

Before Tesla monetizes Mars, they first must deal with pesky competitors that have launched EV‘s that seem to outsell Tesla where they are available, with many more models coming down the pike next year. Volkswagen et al. also produce cars where the trim doesn’t fall off when you close the doors as happened to an acquaintance of mine in Germany. Next year should be pretty interesting in terms of competition for EV‘s.

Same here. Only a tracking position, but up >70% in just a few weeks on no news?