Spekulatius

Gold is highly useful for jewelry (malable), has a nice color, does not corrode and can be used to build excellent infrared mirrors (I use it just for that a bit in thin film form at work). The supply of gold will increase less than the supply of fiat money, they why I would bet that over long periods of time, it will keep it’s value better than cash. Diamond is a crappy investment because it needs an expensive and subjective classification system (not a fungible good) and the demand is procyclical and at least used to be controlled by the De Beers cartel. In addition, it is not possible to create artificial diamond that exceed objectively the quality of natural formed diamond.

Es, that’s exactly how I see it. 1980 was a bad starting point since it was quite a bubble in Gold with the price more than doubling within a year and a year later, it halved. Part of what caused this crash were the Volker policies curbing inflation.

Well Alexa is a bit of a toy, but we do use it, for playing music (from Amazon music) as a timer in the kitchen. We got an Echo studio recently and the sound is pretty good as we synched it with a smaller Echo can. My son has one that he uses as an alarm clock in his room and occasionally we use it as an intercom and to control smart outlets. There are a bunch of use cases around that make it interesting but I agree it’s more like a toy than anything.

Sorry to hear about your troubles and if I had the same issue, I would have returned it as well. the iPhone 12 should be very fast. my iPhone 8+ works very well still and looks like now, so other than a battery replacement at the Apple store, it should be good for a couple of years for my son, unless he beats it up. Over time, I see myself more and more reverting to an Apple product fanboy. I type this message here on an iPad Pro (2nd generation) and mostly prefer it over my (rather old ) Windows laptop and nowadays it’s much better for Zoom calls, because it has a great camera as well. I just bought the AirPods when they were on sale at Amazon and they are just great devices. It is my wife’s fault to suck me into the Apple ecosystem, but I have to admit the stuff just works and lasts for a while too. As for camera, why wife did comparison shots between her Apple XR and her Nixon Digital SLR and the Apple phone holds up very well, except in low light condition and I expect the iPhone 12 Pro will make a lot of difference there. My wife almost exclusively switched to taking picks with her phone and also does light editing with apps that used to take here a lot of time with Photoshop and now there is little need for either any more. It is quite amazing how for phones have come for photography and taking video clips considering the small lenses. If I were too look for a notebook, I would be taking a hard look at the Apple Air series as they get pretty competitive with mid to higher end Windows Notebooks now with the M1 chip. I think they will win quite a bit if market share next year in this segment.

This seems odd and more likely a connection problem than a problem related to the chip. one thing they has been reported is that 5G is still buggy in some areas and depending on carriers and folks have been better speeds and more reliable connections with 5G turned off. Anyways, I ordered a Iphone 12 pro for my wife as an Xmas gift mostly for the camera. She is an avid photographer and we used to schlepp around her Nixon Digital XLR (was $2000) but now rarely uses it any more, since her iPhone 10 XR makes great picks and is so much lighter. The iPhone 12 pro’s camera is much better even which means no more Nixon to haul around (it was usually me who carried it in the backpack). I personally have an iPhone 8+ and it works great and I totally happy with it. Once the 12 is in my wife’s hands, I will grab here XR and my son will get my 8+, that’s how it works in the Spek family. FWIW, this is a photo of our house shown by my wife with her XR:

Ha. I pay for one of their services and get value from it in tracking macro markets. But I am sometimes bemused by their analyst conclusions on individual stocks. They reversed on Peloton and Zoom after each had gone up multiples. Andrew Left also was short PTON—said it was worth $5 when it was $30. Didn’t work out too well. His short target for PLTR is $20 which is not all that bearish considering it’s 2x first post direct listing price... The idiots are not the hedgeye folks, but the people paying for this service.

Make sense though. Large city with many renters, large population of young and single people and high cost. But I bet Seattle suburbs are white hot. I'm throwing 700k cash offers at 3bed/1bath 1,000 sq ft houses in the east bay of San Francisco. I'm not even competitive apparently... Suburbs have largely lacked the price appreciating that Appartement or houses in the city areas had. I lived in Long Island and now in Boston area and in both cases, houses were still below ~2005 prices. I think RE in thr city core might have doubled with8b the same time frame. If this trend reverses, it could have a long way to go, but I somehow doubt that it will.

China isn‘t really communist any more, it is just run by a party that used to be communist decades ago. The state owned companies are kind of hybrid between both worlds and a left over from communism. It’s not where the puck is going. In some ways China has a brutal Manchester capitalism.

My wife gets anxiety in a clinical setting and her self-administered-at-home blood pressure reading is far lower than what the nurse or doctor will see. I took her into the Mercy Hospital ER a couple of days ago when her blood pressure dropped to 84/57 with a pulse of 91. The triage nurse then took her blood pressure and it was way back up again. This happens to my wife a lot, but she's never had a reading THIS low. What the hospital should have done, but didn't, is lay her down on a bed in a quiet room alone with a machine periodically measuring her pressure every 5 minutes. Her primary care doctor has measured her low blood pressure using that method, and tells her to eat pickles and put salt on her food to manage it. If not, she gets dizzy. My mom get‘s crazy high blood pressure readings when she goes to her doctor for checkups. Then when she his home, it’s back to normal. She has some problems with heart arrhythmia lately, but her doc thinks the high readings SRE due to anxiety - I guess it’s the white cost Syndrome that cigarbutt mentioned. As for false negative COVID-19 tests that’s a problem at hospitals my wife works. Every patient get‘s tested but some test negative even though it looks like they have COVID-19- Then they retest the next day and they sometimes test positive. That means that everyone who with them Better gets a test too because they wear different PPE and follow different procedures based the first negative test result. Crazy.

Hulu has a BF deal for it’s ad supported version for $1.99 for one year. I subscribed to it. Watching the seasonal “Free Birds” animation and it’s actually pretty good. I am slo rewatching the Fargo series that originally aired on FX. I watched Episode 1 and it’s a classic.

The Sprucepoint presentation illustrates the bear case pretty well. I also agree that DBX doesn’t have an offering that is interesting for most larger companies. I think smaller companies/organizations and individuals are the main paying users and compared to competing products, their offering seems overpriced, at least if you only use it for cloud storage. I don’t own this and most likely never will, it went into the too hard pile.

Talked with my Mom today (she lives in Germany) and they are putting in several vaccinations location for COVID-19 vaccinations in her town. Vaccination to start in mid December. The vaccinations centers will work in 2 shifts. To roll out mass vaccinations as quickly as possible. Health care workers and first responders come first. https://www.dw.com/en/coronavirus-digest-germany-may-start-vaccinating-in-december/a-55696560 I wish I had a better feeling about rollout plans in the US. This should be front center and focus, imo. @Eric - thank you for sharing your episode and glad you and your family are OK. Do you have any idea how your stepson get infected?

Isn’t the risk with SPAC’s that they announce a crappy deal and the stock falls below par ($10)?

Yes, I came to the conclusion as well after thinking about this. The lower end Mac’s now look really good compared to $1000 Windows/Intel based laptops. It also means that Intel fell not just behind in process technology, but also in chip design. To tough for me to figure out how Intel gets out of this mess, especially since their dominance in Server CPU’s is also under attack.

Bought a bit of MITK the last few days. RKABANG brought it up and it looks like a decent growth/ value intersection stock to me.

Embarrassing , but I never bought the stock despite finding some attractive attributes when I looked at this. I should have listened to the voices from the peanut gallery that were screaming “ Swing, you bum!”. Or as someone said on Twitter: “ Do you want to look at numbers or do you want to make money?” I guess the voting machine wins over weighing machines this year.

How would you know that valuation is lower than for public companies if you do not have financials? Or you're just taking absolute valuation (400M? for Synthego) and comparing it to absolute valuations of public companies? But Synthego may have way lower sales than your comparables. Can you even list comparables without sales breakdown? It also may have lower growth rate. The only info I can get is employees (~250 ) and revenues (38-50M depending on sources). Valuation is roughly $420M at the current offering price at EZ. I am valuing this based on P/S so it’s around a 10x P/S. Synthego’s offering are specialized products and services for CRISP. A public company comp would be TMO, but they are selling very generally things like lab consumables and equipment. TMO trades at 5.7x EV/ Revenue. Given Synthego’s specialized offerings and hopefully growing revenues, this relative valuation seem to be reasonable based on P/S. Now with ~250 employees and 50M in revenues (assuming the upper boundary) that’s only 200k annual revenue/ employee and means that Synthego certainly generates losses, but this is expected at this point. I wonder how I could pull better numbers - perhaps tax records (those would be trailing) or something behind paywalls. Again, the above may all be incorrect and wrong and likely is incorrect to some degree so do your own research.

A couple of belated comments on this - I don’t think the PE is 11-12, at least not any more. I have owned the competitor Eurokai, but just recently sold out into the surge. I initiated the position pre COVID-19 and added a little to lower my cost bases so I exited flat, but it wasn’t a great investment. EuroKai has stakes in neighboring harbors Bremen and Bremerhaven as well as some assets in Hamburg Harbor and other European harbors too, but they were hit pretty hard by COVID-19 . HHFA operationally has outperformed Eurokai though. FWUW, all the German Harbors have struggled to compete with Rotterdam, which is one of the largest Harbors in Europe. One problem is that the largest container ships can’t get into Hamburg (or Bremen) due to size and depth do strained, but they can get into Rotterdam, which gives them an advantage. Hamburg city a few years finally get through the permits to extend the waterways and negate this issue, but it will take a couple of years until the work is done and the facilities are upgraded. HHFA is majority owned by the city of Hamburg, so a buyout is unlikely but on the other hand, stuff like extending the waterways may be way harder without this. I think at some point down the road, Hamburg an Eurokai will merge and rationalize their German Harbor assets but the ownership structure makes this hard. No position.

Gregmal, thanks for the heads on Synthego at EquityZen. I got a notification too and decided to take a closer look. That’s is a reasonable attractive offering based on my 60min of due diligence :o and having heard of the company before , so I decided to subscribe to this offering of the minimum amount of 10k and see how it goes. From the above platforms, I signed up at Sharepost and EquityZen. I did try to sign up at InvestX, but they asked for sensitive personal information right away (SSN and birthdate etc) which is just too steep of a privacy price to pay to try a platform. here are my impressions: Sharepost : seems to cater to well known pre- IPO companies (Bytedance, SpaceX) and while they state a min amount of 25k, I think most investment actually require 100k. EquityZen: they seem to have a lot more deals but with of less known companies. Min. investment varies, but at least in one case (Synthego) it was 10k with a 5% commission. They also have an IOS app and in my opinion, the GUI is much better than Sharepost. In all of the cases, what you own is not shares directly, but a stake in a LLC with the sole purposes of owning shares in the company. I guess that gets around legalese issues. It’s is similar to VIE’s for Chinese companies, except you can actually read (and have to sign) the contracts. What is interesting with EquityZen (and perhaps Sharepost) that you do not partake in an offering directly, but buy these shares second hand from an existing shareholder (most likely employee) who want to cash out. In some cases, you can buy in at a discount to the last VC round. Of course one needs to be fully aware that you are buying essentially from an Insider who knows more than you do about the company and without having access to financials. It is more costar tailing other Investors than anything else or buying a used car from Craigslist. Still, just ballpark ing the valuations seem to be quite a bit lower than for public companies (post IPO) in most cases, but of course there is the greater information assymetry and no liquidity. I feel like a patsy on the table here, but also more greedy than fearful ;D

Yes, governments as well as the potential reward from selling the vaccine caused the development to speed up. It wasn’t just warp speed either - BioNtech got ~460M Euro in R&D funding from the German government for example. Moderna got R&D funding from the US government, I believe. Both had contracts to sell the vaccine (in the US and elsewhere) if they can get approval. The internet really took off after the HTML protocol was developed at CERN in Geneva. Since other countries had it too at the same time, I don’t think Al Gore had much to do with it. The early funding in the 60’s and 70’s came from military funding in the US.

Why would you want to deal with Merrill Edge instead if Schwab, Fidelity or Interactive Brokers? I see no benefit of using Merrill Edge (I have never used it, but used Wells Fargo brokerage). The dedicated investment brokerage offerings are far superior in terms of platform and customer service, imo. Back in the day, Merrill Edge and Wells Fargo gave free trades when you had other products with them, which was worth something. Now everyone has free trades, so that point is moot.

Going back to the topic of the thread - where is the predicted recession like we have never seen before? When is the stock market finally getting the message?

Sold INTC (loss) and reduced PKE, CMCSA and BNTGY

Did the narrative change the share price or did the change in share price change the narrative ? I have no clue as far as GM in concerned but this year, it seems more like the latter to me in many cases.