Spekulatius

Going after FCC subs for rural broadband - ~$900M: https://www.cnbc.com/2020/12/07/spacex-starlink-wins-nearly-900-million-in-fcc-subsidies-auction.html

I don’t think this #neversell will age well.

I have been with IB for ~15 years and this was the longest partial outage I have experienced with them. IB is typically rock solid even on extremely high volume days when other websites from Wells Fargo, Etrade and Fidelity were unresponsive. Yes, their customer service is crappy, but I had much better luck with chat than I had on the phone. I do business with them because of the international trading and margin/interest on cash balances. If Fidelity comes up with better international trading, then I would probably move my accounts over.

Stock now at ~$45 and seems to get done bids now after comments on a CS sponsored IR presentation possibly.

Systems appear to be up and running again at 10:02AM when I checked. This took a while. I bet a couple of IT guys there have a really bad day.

Looks like IB has one of those rare outages this morning 12/7/2020, starting 6:50 EST.

Yes, invest in the right fruit company. If you watched the movie and just did invest like Forest Gump did when the movie came out, you did very very well. Nice self promotion. The Bollywood music is very annoying.

ABNB should be an interesting one. Pricing between $$44-$50 actually seems to be reasonable. I try Fidelity for an allocation but I don’t think I will get any. I am not interested in Doordash, but those guys truly timed their IPO well.

The VW ID.3 seems to be outselling the Tesla 3 in Europe. It will be interesting how the ID.4 (a bigger crossover type vehicle) will do - the base version is supposed to come out in March 2021 in the US. I think we will see quicker adoption than some people think as it looks to me like the tipping point finally has been reached in EV availability and adoption. Ten years from now, I wouldn’t be too surprised, if the vast majority of new cars sold are EV’s. The UK is already considering a ban for ICE cars starting 2030. If you own a gas station or refinery assets, you are setting on a rapidly melting iceberg, imo. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-11-26/vw-s-id-3-quickly-climbs-to-top-of-europe-s-electric-car-market

Putting this here for a lack of a better location. Interesting Sunday read on the Canadian Avro fighter project which got canceled in 1959: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200615-the-record-breaking-jet-which-still-haunts-a-country For those interested, the BBC has great long form articles about aviation history right now and the above is one of them.

Most traded stocks in Europe - Nov 2020 from Degiro: https://www.degiro.ie/knowledge/blog/most-traded-stocks-november-2020 Tesla has been tops for a while in many countries. Derigo publishes this monthly.

The bull case is that it’s just a Ponzi scheme getting started , I guess. It is a bit concerning to the bull case that they’re are so few bears out there, since almost anyone seems to thinks BTC is going up.

^ Cigarbut, thanks for the comments. I really have looked at the very long term fundamentals too much, just at the last few years. it seems that earnings have declined from 2010 to 2015 and then slowly rebounded. Anyone knows what happened? My thesis is that this is a slow growing (growing with the rate of inflation) equity bond that should rerate with lower interest rates. They have some net cash, some of which was spent to pay for her privilege of Pernod&Ricard brand distribution and it yields ~6%. (On my original purchase price, but I also bought some on the VOVID-19 plunge at better prices ). At least on the surface , it seem as stable or a business as it can get. I would think that over the long run PR would buy them out, but this has been contemplated for a long time and hasn’t happened. Edit : I believe what happened is that they sold of brands/business lines and essentially distributed the proceeds as dividends

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-japan-autos-gasoline/japan-may-ban-sale-of-new-gasoline-powered-vehicles-in-mid-2030s-media-idUSKBN28D044

I suppose Taylor Hathaway-Zepeda is related to the Hathaway clan, but I am not sure. I little bit of googling shows that she in the LA chamber of commerce to get her with Karen Hathaway and there are a lot of inter generational members in this institution. Taylor is 35 and will be around for a while, I think and so will be LAACZ. If they sell the self storage business they either take a huge tax hit or do a 1031 exchange which means they own a probably worse business without controlling it. If I were them, I wouldn’t sell. This business is as good and safe as it can get. The important part is that the year end distribution has been raised to $25 so things are going OK, it seems.

This sleeper business did pretty good +12% revenue growth and +68% earnings. Dividend is back to 22c/ quarter after they reduced it to 20c: https://corby.ca/en/news/article/?id=137348

^ big surprise if you live in crowded quarters m use the same bathrooms (that was one way infections were found in the study) and have roommates bunking together (I bet they do t wear mask when they sleep, how could they). My only conclusion for a civilian setting is that I wouldn’t rely on mask preventing infections in a setting like a cruise ship (the closest equivalent). As for the general conclusion of the reference (not the study ) that mask don’t work, I wouldn't agree. If you refer to the often cited danish mask study, check out Taleb’s posts on Twitter. He concluded that the design and even the math of the study is incorrect and that the results actually infer that the mask cohort did show lower infection rates. Edit: corrected for typos.

Added a bit of NOC on recent weakness.

Thats all one needs to look at imo and it can’t be ignored. My wife is working overtime as I type this in various hospitals, as COVID-19 patients are back in our area. The problem with seniors getting isolated is a real problem, but it’s not lockdowns that are causing this, but the virus running rampant. Lockdowns don’t prevent visits to seniors unless in special circumstances.

Why would anyone buy into this ? It‘s basically an extremely high cost Angel investment. They are printing shares to pay insiders salaries. I have seen frauds that have better chances of return quite frankly. I know, I repeat myself.

This thing got a second life. Looks like they get a do-over as a startup after the secondary. Ark Investment bought into this too. The tech always has been interesting, but as a stand-alone business, I don’t think it’s viable.

A better analog May be a really crappy SAAS business - high acquisition cost, low retention , but comparatively high margin. Didn’t Malone own an alarm business rollup at some point that went belly up? Another big concern - these new smart cameras ( Ring etc) with automatic motion detection operating cloud based etc make traditional monitoring obsolete or at least create new competition which eats into the incumbents market share.

They are selling more to their users than phones- watches, AirPods , iPads. I think the Macs will get a hit boost due to getting more competitive with PC Laptops. The reason Apple sells less iPhones is because users keep them longer, not because they are switching to Android, imo. However, as long as users stay within the Apple ecosystem, the annuity value of Apple’s users base is intact.

Isn’t Kiel an Insider and would have to file? We should know in a few days and until then, I would reserve judgement.

Significant update - Koyfin now covers foreign stocks. This looks very good after a quickly look: https://www.koyfin.com/help/release-notes/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=release-promo-11-20-global&utm_content=notes-b1