Spekulatius

An acquaintance of us bought an Airstream this summer. I have seen his wive walkthroughs of the interior and a lot of pictures but none where on the road. I wonder if they used it at all. I do think 2 years from now there will be a buyers market for used ones.

This report gives you some idea: https://www.asminternational.org/web/fort-wayne-chapter/asm-industry-news/-/journal_content/56/10180/39738678/NEWS INTC is at 817k/200mm wafers month. That would be 0.817M*(8/12)^2*12=4.36M 12” wafer equivalent/year. I don’t think that just the wafer throughout is the right matrix without taking into account the process used. S9me fabs are old and almost worthless. There are still fabs that use 50 or 65 nm processes which are useless for leading edge CPU’s, but can be used for automobile electronics etc. Analog chip plants sometimes use decades old equipment because smaller feature size isn’t necessarily better (if you need certain current outputs etc). Just eyeballing I don’t think that INTC manufacturing capacity is worth close to INTC EV, if that’s your ultimate thesis.

Revenue and earnings projections for 2022 are substantially down from 2021. These gun stocks have commodity like roller coaster boom and bust cycles. https://app.tikr.com/stock/estimates?cid=414079&tid=2650917

Well, good point really: the more power you give politicians in this Covid situation, the more they ignore the real problems of our country: https://amgreatness.com/2020/12/21/overdose-outnumber-coronavirus-deaths-in-san-francisco/ 621 people have died in San Francisco of drug overdoses – that equates to nearly four times as many as have been killed by COVID-19. The most recent data released on Thursday from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) indicates that approximately 81,230 drug overdose deaths occurred in the United States in the 12-months ending in May 2020, a new record. “The increases in drug overdose deaths appear to have accelerated during the COVID-19 pandemic,” the CDC noted. 81k death is an increase of 12k over the 69k overdosing death in 2019. 12K<<326k incremental death due to COVID-19 so it is not “the real problem” by a wide margin. https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/podcasts/20190911/20190911.htm

This will be resolved in a less than a year but the path there seems anything but pretty. In my opinion, BJ has not proven to be a good negotiator or even a good leader with his wavering and indecisiveness and I am evens sympathetic to his (very British) quirks.

Picasso, thank you for writing your side of the story. It puts thing into a different perspective and takes guts to do so.

It looks like all politicians get early access to the vaccine- even COVID-19 denier Marco Rubio got his shot already. I guess the idea is to increase public trust in the vaccine. I agree that neither Rubio nor AOC should be high on the priority list otherwise. Let’s just Invert this and assume Rubio and AOC would state that they wouldn't get the vaccine yet, would the optics be better or worse? I think they would be worse, so it’s probably better to get all the ruling class vaccinated. I personally find Deborah Birx’ behavior much more deplorable. The Uk and other nations have fired politicians on similar grounds.

Yes those two things (travel restrictions and trade) issues are unrelated, but that doesn’t mean their effects can’t compound. The failure of the trade talks very likely will cause some shortages for the Uk, as goods get either stuck at the borders or diverted to other markets as seems to be the case with lumber and likely either goods. I also think that London as a financial center will have a much diminished role in the future.

Aren’t you conflating two entirely different things? And why take a German view on how prepared Britain is, out of interest? Not that I have a particularly strong view... The BBC is not the German view. However, I am German and have relatives living there. I have been following this since Brexit 2016 using a variety of sources and it looks like a train wreck to me.

No idea how to get this, but in my opinion, the most rational explanation would be higher equity allocation for institutional and individual investors because bond yields have been dropping so an 60/40 portfolio becomes 70/30 etc.

I just had a talk with my brother (who lives in Germany) and it looks like the EU just nailed the door on the UK: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-55385768 Another fact that I wasn’t aware of. He deals with lumber (trade on a large scale) and they so t deliver to the UK any more because it is simply not “worth the trouble”. Apparently no one really knows the conditions for imports anymore in this specific business to decided to to elsewhere as there is enough demand for lumber anyways. a the same is true for other commodities and fungible goods apparently. Looks like the Uk is on the brink of a disaster here as they seem totally unprepared after more than 4 years.

Some negative factors: 1) Trump tax cuts could be reversed. this would be a 10% hit to valuation theoretically (give or take) 2) Interest rates rising. (They have moved up already since May) 3) Inflation could go up quickly once economy opens up more which also correlates with 2). The Fed May not do much, but treasuries would move up nevertheless. 4) Biden is less fixated by stock market than Trump, which could transcedent down to Fed decisions. 5) External threads like the latest large scale cyberattack have been downplayed but can we ignore this. Tensions with China, Iran, North Korea also could come into play. Both Iran a d NK are probably close to having a nuclear bomb right now. 6) Brexit (probably doesn’t matter for the US too much but will for the UK and Europe). 7) As cardboard said, it is the bus you don’t see coming that is going to hit you.

I could well see a scenario where the economy will recover and the stocks will go down because of higher interest rates. Actually interest rates for treasuries have already been slowly rising - they are back to late February/ early March levels and may go up further. Or perhaps stocks go down just because people have other things to do than gambling the stock market.

Would they be able to pay more? Where should the money coming from?

That's the problem for most near-term bear theses on Intel: AMD simply does not have production to take Intel's market share. It's possible that things will change in couple years, but adding 5nm capacity on the Intel production size is not gonna happen in months. Disclosure: I have some Intel. Longer term the situation is not great. I sold my INTC stock, swapped some of it into SIMO. Ok, I am exaggerating here, but the fact that every Joe Schmoe ? - AMD, NVDIA, Apple, Google, Amazon, Alibaba and now Microsoft can design their own silicon and bring it to market using better manufacturing technology than Intel has is not exactly bullish. The WinTel alliance has been in existence for 40 years roughly and the fact that MSFT starts to design their own silicon Tesla’s me that they are scared to fall behind because Intel isn’t cutting it any more. Intel need to do something really quick, or the go they way of IBM. They need a technical wizard on the helm that takes some risk and shakes up their engineering because at that point, the biggest risk is that they keep doing what they have been doing.

Interesting enough, interest rates have been moving up. We are basically back to where we were late February/ early March.

Well, at least beer, wine and liquor sales are healthy recently:

A lot of timelines have been thrown around - the last date for conclusion discussed here was 12/9. I don’t know how you can get 100% confidence that something will happen between now and mid January. My own assessment of the probability would be less than 50% for sure. I also think that all those leaks ( sitting on his desk waiting to be signed ) are probably worthless.

I guess my issue with these interviews is that the idea given is more of a marketing tool about how cool of research you do, rather than if its a good idea. I haven't listened to the one with Tobias, but I'm guessing it revolves around spending 3 days in a Colorado hotel interviewing customers of DJT products, followed up by hiring an intern who scoured all of the public court databases looking for any information related to if those counties were using DJT product. It sounds cool, and he certainly might be right. He mostly cited the securities including the $~100MM (I think) BYD position and said there's an embedded option on a SAAS bidness. Also discussed potential upside from the positive aspects of the culture such as being able/willing to delay gratification to get the sign ups. At least, that's what I took from it. How would they attract employees and in particular software engineers with a leadership like this? I don’t think they anybody capable would go there with so many, other opportunities. I do agree this software business looks like a money pit to me that is on the road to nowhere.

Nailed it! I agree as well (probably a first in this board). It is quite possible they you can buy the preferred with a good risk reward after a deal is announced. That’s sort of why I am watching this somewhat. Right now, it’s just a crapshoot and time is running out. If nothing happens in the next 3 weeks, then it will likely take another 4 years to waiting. And why would it happen in the last 3 weeks when they couldn’t get anything done in the last 4 years?

How is enlisting celebrities for a lot of money like (Joe Rohan, Cardi’s, Meghan and Edward) going to help SPOT economically? I thought the idea was that podcasts become a cheap source of content in lieu of music streaming, but I don’t think this is the case here. These content providers will charge a pretty penny for their content and when the contract is over, they might move to a higher bidder. I don’t see a flywheeel here.

I use this page to translate pdfs and it works quite well. They use the google translate engine. https://www.onlinedoctranslator.com/en/translationform Yes, that site is great. I also use tikr.com for a first look at the financials: https://app.tikr.com/stock/financials?cid=875981&tid=20178992

This is the most logical response No filing so it wasn’t him who was running up the stock. I still wonder how you deal with this as a fund manager, if an illiquid stock is a substantial part of a fund. This is particularly important if an Invest or redeems or if you have new money coming in. What is a fair way of dealing with this? Take 30 day average of the closing price, like is done for done mergers?

Huge dilution most likely. It hasn’t been lack of deals that held back this stock.

Unless something happens in the next 3 weeks, it’s over, imo. I would argue it’s likely over already since nothing happened for 4 years, so why now?