Spekulatius

I think the close election is the result the market is looking for. It doesn’t really matter that much which way it goes. Close is good enough. That said, I do expect some mood swings from Mr Market, but that is nothing new.

I don’t own this, but from an income statement POV it looks interesting. Gross’s margins are 80% and they have shown substantial operating leverage and achieved GAAP profitability as well. Their stated goal is to generate $1B in FCF, which makes it cheap with a ~7.7B market cap (based on a $18.5 stock price). Then on the other hand, their product (cloud Storage and some newer add on apps like Hellosign, Vault) seems overpriced at $120 year, considering you can buy an MS Office subscription with some free 1TB in cloud storage thrown in for less. They do seems to be able to get new paying customers from their pool of ~500M users who have the freemium version. It is conceivable they can continue to convert a small percentage of freemium users into paying ones every year and make a nice living off that. I would like to have some eyes on this and learn what people think.

I have asked myself this for sure. I do like the wireless component of T vs Comcast but I agree Comcast’s wired business is superior. It is interesting that both Charter and CMCSA started their own wireless MVNO. I think that’s the low cost way to get into the business and gain scale. They are also bidding for wireless spectrum so at some point they will cut loose from ATT/ Verizon or force them to the table.

Is this the Kuppermann with the Mongolian real estate empire? I guess adventures in capitalism is befitting.

The election is close, which means nothing untoward is going to happen to tech. This is not that great for cyclicals which don’t care about the color of the party either, but need stimulus to get moving and that is less likely with gridlock. I could well be wrong - this could also be just momentum that somehow got randomly started and then everything jumps on the train because think Mr Market knows something that they don’t.

Whatever the final result, I find the whole process quite amusing and the stock market reaction interesting: FOX down 4%, coal stocks down 7% Gold down too, Loot stocks line RGR down 8% etc.

LMAO - oil and pipeline stocks are down as I write this. My ANTM is up ~9% If you trade the election outcome with a simplistic view, you can very well end up being right and losing money.

Why own this when you can own CMCSA? You get better pipes and better management with CMCSA. ATT’s management core competency is to acquire assets and run them into the ground. CMCSA also has its issues, but it is owner operator controlled and over the long run this makes a lot of difference.

Looking at premarket, bank stocks are down, because treasuries are down and pot. no stimulus, I suspect. Luckily I don’t own any. I will get really ? if my defense stocks are down today

Contrarian view - Trump victory is great for tech, bad for cyclicals, at least some of them. Energy is an example of this - drill drill drill got the industry in a hole, if there were more regulation, prices especially for natural gas would go up and Energy stocks would do better. Energy stocks may go up tomorrow but I don’t think it will last. The other problem for cyclicals is a stronger USD with Trump than with Biden. I looked at the exchange rates last night and at some point USD.MXN was up more than 3% and its now back into the red. A lot of the election impacts are really counterintuitive somewhat.

Return over 10 years 1)BAM 2) BRK 3) FFH I think BAM has the highest risk of blowing up in the face of these three , but it is lower than I thought initially. BAM benefits from lower interest rates and FFH gets hurt the most amongst those three, do in a way the decision is also a macro call. I do think that FFH has the best snap back potential short term.

I am sort of bullish on Brazil myself, but can’t quite ignore current quotes from equities there. I don’t really know their Brazil that well, but I know some utility stocks have gotten absolutely destroyed there the last few years even pre COVID. In a way, a lot of answers here regarding BAM are comforting in a sense that BPY isn’t as important than I thought.

Thanks. I'm guessing the last number is the estimate for your IFR? It's not clear what the percentages indicate (and it's not clear how they come up with such precise numbers). The simple way to build a model here is to use CFRs, adjusted for region and adjusted for risk factors defined per CFR from different sources: CDC etc. i assume the percentages apply if and once you're Covid+. (?) It may be more conceptually sound to go through a simple exercise (which will correlate with common sense) and use a risk stratification. Alberta has put up a 3-level risk (low-intermediate-high) system: https://www.alberta.ca/lookup/COVID-19-personal-risk-severity-assessment.aspx An interesting aspect is that the Alberta site does not require a US zip code and, at least for me, adding dementia to the risk factors does not significantly change the risk level. The Sanford Health group also has a nutrition coach subsidiary. https://www.profileplan.com/ Yes, the percentages apply once you have COVID-19, so the last number is the CFR rate (I think). I don’t know how the calculator works, but it is normalized to 0.25% and I suspect it has multipliers based on your inputs that either increase or decrease the three risk metrics it calculated. I played with my numbers and increasing the blood pressure seems to have the largest impact. In my case, I lost a few years of my COVID-19 age due to having pretty good blood pressure values generally.

Crude fracking going down the tubes is bullish for WMB. The NG as a side product from crude production was depression prices and less crude production means less NG as a byproduct which is good for Marcellus and good for WMB. I don’t own it right now, but as a dividend play, it may be hard to beat.

PDLI Shares trade suspiciously weak.

LVY bounced already a lot from the lows and they lost $600M last quarter. I haven’t dissected their financial statement but a lot of their cash are actually customer advances for concerts in the future. So far customer er have rolled those over, but what if they get the idea that this is going to take a little longer and want their money back? I would bet against large scale concerts in Spring. I think summer 2021 is the earliest I can see a slow return.

Can someone explain why their lease revenues are down ~24% when they collected 95% of their rents. Did they lower the rents, yet some still don’t pay? they also wrote down another $107M on their retail JV after roughly 300M in the last quarter.

BPY’s crummy assets are retail assets and office. If not ‘crummy’, at least their marks should be way off, because they bought them at close to peak value (GGP, Forest City etc). I also wonder a bit about their assets in Brazil. the currency alone is down 25%.

I use our PS4 for steaming - I like the UI for Netflix. I have the PS4 connected to my receiver and stereophile speakers and a subwoofer and the sound is awesome. My wife “complimented” me just last night when I watched “Black 47” that she though someone fired a shot in our house. That was when the protagonist fired a musket. The scene towards the end in Rambo 2008 when he turns the .5 “ machine gun on those hapless Burmese army guys sounds pretty good too. None of the above has anything remotely to do with Roku or investing I am sorry.

I read this during my lunch break and now I want my lunch break back. It’s a large wall of beautiful crafted sentences but with little substance, imo.

A COVID-19 vaccine is not a binary event. First of all, I expect traditional vaccines to win out eventually rather than RNA vaccines (Moderna etc) because they don’t need to be stored and transported at low temperatures (-4F) and possibly work more reliably. one of my holdings - MRK works on a vaccine that gets orally administered and should work well on older people too. The first vaccine may work, but are likely not perfect in terms or efficacy, cost and ease of application etc. I think this COVID-19 epidemic is a huge boost for any company in the vaccine business as even flu vaccinations and possibly others will get a large boost.

Covid risk calculator from Everest health. It calculates the risk to get admitted to the hospital, get upgraded to an ICU room and come out with the feet first. Enjoy: https://calculator.covid-age.com/ Mine are roughly 5% / 1.5% /0.22%

Thanks, those posts are very helpful.

Plaisance is an odd one too, it’s a small fund, and PCYC is their largest holding, by a factor of 5x. the next largest is STJ. One just hopes that their capital is permanent because selling out this position the open market would take a while https://app.tikr.com/investor?id=5001442431

Covid tracker seems to be correct (they add up data from individual states). https://covidtracking.com/data/charts/us-currently-hospitalized It clearly does show rising hospitalization rates. The CDC website is hard to navigate and really doesn’t have well made trend charts. My state MA also has good granular data (down to a town level - the town I life in had 4 new cases last week after being without cases since about late March) but again trendlines are missing. The best tracker I have found for Germany is from the Tagesspiegel newspaper: https://interaktiv.tagesspiegel.de/lab/karte-sars-cov-2-in-deutschland-landkreise/ As we all know from investing, momentum is real and it is even more real when looking at epidemic KPI’s and we need to look where the puck is going not where it is right now. Or at least we need to see if the elevator is going up or down, as Munger would say.