Spekulatius

It all depends on the gold price and the discipline of the operators. It is similar to oils and gas except prices for their product are better. Personally, I would rather own a little gold etf and not worry about thee things. FWIW, I own a little IAU.

Interesting. Hospitals in ND full, asymptotic nurses can continue to work. https://www.grandforksherald.com/newsmd/coronavirus/6753876-With-North-Dakota-hospitals-at-100-capacity-Burgum-announces-COVID-positive-nurses-can-stay-at-work SD looks similar.

Heating with NG is highly efficient (90% efficiency) and way better and cleaner than oil furnaces. it is mind boggling that we have one of the largest NG fields of the world in our back door (Marcellus) and still have houses heated with dirty oil because we can’t get the pipes to the houses or per it’s for large pipes approved. Not to mention a lot of homes already heat with natural gas. It will be many decades before everyone switches their heating systems to something else. Most homes around me (including mine) still heat with fuel oil.

No, but I liked the price I got. Pure play Defense Play NOC and LMT have barely moved. The way I see it RTX is half defense and half commercial aerospace, so If I consider defense didn’t move (much) then commercial aerospace is worth 25% more than yesterday? I don’t think so.

Sold my RTX, PCYO and GRA.

Jokes aside, I added back $FAF today. There is always something in the doghouse.

Highly recommended. I bought one in October of 2019. It has been a godsend. My wife and I spent just about all our free time out on Lake Winnipesaukee this spring, summer, and fall. A boat is great for social distancing. Also in case Biden gets any crazy gun control passed I lost all of my guns in a tragic boating incident this past summer. CorpRaider and rkbabang, could you suggest a specific ticker . . . er, I mean model? $MCFT sunk today -6.8%. Obviously a WFH stock.

Which one ?

the real news is not that we have a vaccine, it is the high efficacy (90% indicated). A vaccine that with only 50% efficacy is not a game changer, one with 90% is. I do agree it doesn't really change anything for the next few month, but it does indicate the light at the end of the tunnel. Now I would like to hear how the vaccine rollout is going to be handled, because handling the logistics well is crucial. An now it's even more important to contain the spread as well as possible so we don't have another 200k dead before this vaccine is available.

I think NG will be around for a long time (decades). My thoughts on WMB is that they have good assets (Transco), but also a history of bad capital allocation. They kind of tend to go broke about incense decade (2001, 2009, 2015 etc) and some more recents buys (CHK gathering assets in the Marcellus) haven’t really helped either. WPZ was a Great vehicle for a while, but MLP went out of favor somewhat after the financial crisis and then again after the crude crash and the cost of capital kept going up to the point that WMB first had to support it (musing units and paying for this in shares and then taking it out altogether. One can hope that they learned their lesson, but I am never quite sure and I don’t think that WMB‘s Management is really that great, but if they have little to invest in, there should be much less appetite to do something stupid. If you are too concerned about this, just buy KMI where management has made mistakes too, but more skin in the game. I kind of left this sector, but keep watching ad stocks are very volatile and there tend to buy great opportunities every couple years. Perhaps current prices are such an opportunity, but who knows.

I have this company on my watch list but never really put work in it. We know that the revenues are down 18,7% and based on prior communication, they remain profitable, but earnings are down substantially: https://www.fountaine-pajot.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/cp-fountaine-ca-2019-20-vdef.pdf What they are selling are very big ticket items and it‘s hard to say how this works out. Sales are more driven by confidence than economic consideration and I would bet that target clientele isn’t hurting. Besides the financial angle, it would be great to know how the produce (yachts) are regarded by their customers and what kind of competition exists. I think they compete with some Italian yacht builders.

Us farmers are heavily subsidized too, but I am surprised to so how heavy: https://www.nupoliticalreview.com/2020/05/16/my-beef-with-dairy-how-the-us-government-is-bailing-out-a-dying-industry/ If this source is correct, 42% of the revenue from US dairy farmers are government subsidies. Other sources seem to indicate lower subsidies, but still pretty high: https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/american-dairy-farmers-depend-on-government-subsidies-1015126442

I looked at ELBIT Systems (ESLT) as it trades near its low ($113 vs $110 - 52 week low). I will don’t see it trading at a discount to US defense plays that I think are lower risk. It is a nice outfit they I owned before - I bought it around $30 in 2012 and sold it for more than a double in 2013 (looking back at my records) but it was very cheap back then and trading lower than US defense plays. Maybe people are worried about fallout from ELBIT selling 'suicide drones' to Azerbaijan given the conflict w/ Armenia? https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/israels-elbit-systems-sells-azerbaijan-skystriker-suicide-drone-577053 Just a guess off the top of my head. Oh boy, these things are for pretending, not for actual use. The part with the live demonstration on an adversary driving a Jeep sounded bad too. These things are basically a mini version of the V1 invented in WW2 by the Nazi’s - carbon neutral due to their electrical engines. Unrelated to this, my holding Rheinmetall (RHM.DE) had pretty strong results in their defense sector. it’s an industrial conglomerate that used to be 1/2 defense and the rest automobile supplier, but not the mix is netter than 60/40 due to defense growing and the automobile part shrinking. With European defense spending surging, RHM has one of the best growth profiles in the defense sector, imo. I recently rebought some shares around 63€which I had sold around 80€- paying attention to the sometimes widely fluctuating shares can pay off. https://www.rheinmetall.com/en/rheinmetall_ag/press/news/latest_news/index_21696.php

Broeb22, I agree with your concern about lack of supply and then of course there is an issue with the complexity and fragmentation of services, making pricing very difficult. If they can crack the pricing code, this could become very attractive, but right now, I am not seeing a whole of evidence. There are similar business models using the subscription/insurance model like FTDR and even ORI has a sub, but while that model has appeal to the customer, the customer satisfaction with these models/services seem to be very poor.

I am not sure if Europe has peaked. France had 85k yesterday (per worldodometer) and that number has been rising. The Czech Republik, Belgium and France has reached their hospital capacity for ICU, so there is severe stress on the health care system a d other countries aren’t far behind (Netherlands , Switzerland etc). I watch hospital utilization and admissions more than anything and three US has seen a remarkable increase in admissions from below 40k to more than 55k and it is going steadily upwards. We have seen already the hospital system in Midwestern states starting to get into capacity issues (the the posts about South Dakota) but this will get much more severe once we cross 60k admission, which were the former peaks from Covid wave #1 in March and #2 in July. This time, wave number 3 is broad based and cases are rising everywhere, not just the epicenter in the Midwest. So, I think it is likely that we will exceed former perks in hospital utilization forcing local shutdowns if the health care system which is going to create widespread knock on effects to everything else. While it is true that tolerance is higher this time due to knowing much more about the disease and better clinical outcome it is also true that the increased complacency makes it harder to reverse trends in rising infection rates. Also, while we have invested a lot in equipment, we still have the same restraints in personal that we had in March, since it really isn’t possible to get more doctors and nurses in hospitals quickly. because of all the safety precautions (gowning up, segregating COVID-19 patients in COVID-19 floors) treating COVID-19 patients require more manpower than regular patients which is the reason why hospitals will be shutting down with an influx of COVID-19 patients before capacity is reached. All those quickly erected field hospitals are more or less useless, because there aren’t enough people around to operate them. Quite frankly, I think the administration should be activating army medical resources again, as they may be needed in due time, but it’s hard to predict where. In any case I watch hospital admission more than anything else, as I think this is the key indicator driving the decisions. MA (where I live) is on the cusp of its second wave and we have already a soft curfew from 10pm to 5AM and it is likely that those measures may be ratchet up more.

It looks like the share count has been stable since converting to a c-corp in 2018. One of the advantages of converting to a c-corp is getting off the MLP growth model of issuing shares and debt to fund growth. Anything is possible, but WMB and KMI so far have been sticking to a similar playbook to get off the MLP model. There was a significant increase in share count when they folded back their captive MLP WPZ into WMB in an exchange of units for shares. But that’s just an asset swap and not really dilution, imo. Besides that, there is just a very slow creep in sharecount due to options/ equity for management.

Isn’t dairy a shrinking business. I don’t think milk and cheese are going customer wallet share. Viking, thanks for the writeup, I put this recently on my watchlist. Those compounders that are have temporary issues can be great investments, especially when bought at infliction points.

I think there is a difference between collectibles and assets or business that generate cash flow. I don’t think accumulating collectibles is really investing. For other things that generate cash flow, it is more about semantics. A business is harder to value than a real estate asset that is rented out and where you have a pretty good idea about future cash flow and comps. The problem with investing in hard assets like real estate assets is that we don’t have direct control of the asset (the cash flow and when it can be liquidated) and there is an layer of G&A expense that is never going away unless an entity is liquidated, which rarely happens. So those Reits etc. in my opinion should trade at a discount to NAV, the question is how much.

That’s all fine regarding NVTA, but what has this to do with PLTR? The latter seems to do rather well lately.

This stock hasn’t received much recognition, despite performing fairly well. As far as I can tell, they beat earnings substantially today and also raised guidance to $7.35-7.45 this year. https://s2.q4cdn.com/447711729/files/doc_financials/2020/q3/Q3-2020-Earnings-Presentation.pdf They have substantially reduced debt since the Aetna merger and with debt in the low 3.x range, they should be able to start buying back stock and/or increase the dividend fairly soon. I have added recently when the stock fell below $60. It looks way to cheap, given the fairly strong financial performance.

This is interesting too, but based on my observations true. https://www.nbcboston.com/news/local/gov-baker-top-education-officials-to-provide-coronavirus-update/2225052/ This is especially true for smaller kids. Also , some parents are forced to mix kids with other households because there were no childcare options. That leads to higher transmission rates than if kids go to school in controlled conditions.

I looked at ELBIT Systems (ESLT) as it trades near its low ($113 vs $110 - 52 week low). I still don’t see it trading at a discount to US defense plays that I think are lower risk. It is a nice outfit that I owned before - I bought it around $30 in 2012 and sold it for more than a double in 2013 (looking back at my records) but it was very cheap back then and trading lower than US defense plays.

There was also questionable nutritional advice about fried sweet potatoes being a healthy. Reading this newspaper feels a bit like reading East German newspapers in 80’s before the wall came down. There was a spurious habit of putting totally meaningless news on front pages and the real interesting stuff was hidden in small articles in the other pages often in between other meaningless articles. I know that the interested people there were pretty good at reading this code and I do wonder what people in SD have similar filters.

Yes, the risk of a large animal reservoir is that the virus can remain there, has time to mutate enough to make current treatment ineffective and then eventually jump back to humans and start the whole “game” all over again. I agree with Doc that it’s important to find out (and push China) to do forensics on the origin and try to eliminate the thread that we get a repeat of this in the future.

It is also interesting to note that the VIX is way down from ~40 to 27 now. There were probably a lot of hedges in place for the election that are now worthless or being liquidated and add to the buying pressure. Personally, if the VIX goes below 20 again and I see some decent opportunities to hedge for a reasonable cost I would be interested to do so, but not at current levels. This is all pretty worthless after the fact rambling, but still fun to do so.