Spekulatius

^ Samwise, thanks for the Detail, this makes a lot of sense. One unrelated question thought: If a company with the financial profile of Forterra cannot borrow at reasonable conditions, than the economy in U.K. is in deep trouble, because many smaller companies without access to capital markets are probably credit starved..

Yes, scale is a big issue and cost could well eat this alive. $15M is too small, even if delisted. I also don’t think selling ice cream at the Ample Hill price points ($11.5/ pint) will do well out of very urban centers, so I think this is hard to scale. Our local ice cream guys sell for a little bit more than half.

It is worthwhile to watch this and Masa is unlikely the only one gunning big tech stocks with options. The Sherwood Forest crowd was supposedly a factor too, but probably too small to matter. This is likely a Momo trade with several large players involved. Until Mr Market removes the plug from the bathtub and some players get into trouble we will never know.

Are you not worried about their history of dilutions from 2009 to 2018? Dilution was about ~1% annually since 2012. That hardly breaks an investment thesis considering that they had some decent organic growth.

This is correct, but a better way to play rising interest rates in clean way is to buy SCHW (I own a little). No issues with credit risk, Fed interfering but somewhat sensitive to asset valuations. It’s higher valued but also a better business than banking, imo.

Looks like another community outbreak in Chelsea, MA during the last few weeks. Almost 6% positivity rate - 180 cases. So much for the herd immunity crowd @15% - Chelsea had a mid thirties antibody positivity rate in a late April study (not the best study, but numbers should be correct ballpark) and Antibody positivity should be higher now. My own small town had zero cases since June - 10 cases total since outbreak with 600 tests. Population roughly 3400 people. Similar with surrounding towns. I don’t think there is any chance of Heard- immunity there. Antibody positivity rate here would be below 5% for sure, most likely much lower. https://www.boston.com/news/coronavirus/2020/09/02/latest-massachusetts-city-town-coronavirus-data

I believe the future of healthcare is a more integrated system, similar to single payer healthcare in Europe or Kaiser in the US. I have experience with both as a customer and Kaiser in my opinion is a superior Customer experience to UNH or ANTM PPO or HMO (I had thermally over the years). The reason is simple - more streamlined customer experience and workflow ,less friction (with patient data, billing) and quicker service. Go into a Kaiser building, get Kaiser, MRI or X-RAY, blood testing and your Kaiser doc can look at all this , refer to an In house specialist, wrote a prescription etc. You can be out in an hour or two vs needing several days to get all this scheduled at various locations and receive a boatload of bills. UNH tries do this a bit coming from the insurance side and now CVS tries to do the same coming from the prescription/retail side. I think standalone entities like WBA or even hospitals, drug stores, may be a hard time competing with this. Scale only goes so far and is more determined by local market share rather than world wide market shares, at least with drug distributions and insurance. CVS probably overpaid for Aetna as the multiple was rich when acquired but Aetna outperformed their initial projections when you look at the acquisition docs, so it was probably an OK acquisition. It did pressure the stock in the short Term (couple of years), but now the debt is getting worked down to 3x EBITDA (it was ~4.5x at acquisition or even higher) there is an opportunity to become more shareholder friendly and perhaps also invest more internally. That’s why I am bullish for CVS because so far, Mr Market hadn’t given them any credit and regards and values it like a melting icecube. While there is still risk, there a good chance that this will go alright and if they continue to gain traction, it really shouldn’t trade st 8-8.5 x earnings and a 10%+ FCF yield but rerate. At least that’s my thesis at this point.

These brokers own the customer relationship and associated data though. The Banks often do commoditized stuff like wholesale financing and mortgage servicing (which also provides an opportunity to get a customer relationship) but those are low ROA activities that just require large balance sheet capacity. The future of Banks will be decided how strong their internal tech stack is rather than branches and deposits. In fact, in the current interest environment, low cost deposits have lost much of their value.

Weren‘t these calls just bought from huge gains from recent trades/sales they did? Maybe they still work out if they are long dated. If SoftBank indeed can unload ARM Holdings, which seems to be a total dog (based on lack of revenue growth and profits since acquired) then they really did hit some jackpots, while also getting good value out their dogs (Sprint, ARM Holdings) except maybe Wework. For a venture fund , that’s actually a pretty good outcome.

As for Fintech, this is an interesting excerpt from RKT (Rocket Company) 424B: Between mortgages and payments, it seems that some companies are running circles around the big banks, just like WMT, TGT and others did with department stores in retail. I have personally done probably 8-9 mortgages (mostly refinances) and have all of them but two through brokers. In In my experience, brokers platforms now run circles around how banks are doing business. I only once tried with Rocket mortgage and did not find their interest rate / conditions to be competitive at that time (2015).

I would likely to get vaccinated once a Vaccine becomes available. If the news suggest that a conventional vaccine becomes available shortly after the Moderna vaccine, I may decide to wait a month or two, but I wouldn’t wait for half a year or longer. I have been keeping up with my vaccination and get a flu shot every year. So far so good and I haven’t had the flu since the late 90‘s. I had flu several times before and it wasn’t a pleasant experience. FWIW, I assume COVID-19 vaccination will become mandatory for school children and students and probably colleges or one has to go for the online option. I also assume that vaccinations will first become available for first responders and health care workers, and higher risk cases. One thing to keep in mind is that there is an individual benefit to vaccinations and a community benefit and both are equally important. For example with flu and other vaccinations , the vaccine doesn’t work as well with older people because their immune system doesn’t respond as well to vaccination . So those people benefit when other people get vaccinated the most , as it helps choke the community transmission reaching them. Another interesting case is kids and school. Kids themselves are not vulnerable, but teachers and school personal and parents may be and this May drive a vaccination requirement for kids (which I would support).

This MA thesis from VIC was pretty good and very prescient: https://www.valueinvestorsclub.com/idea/MASTERCARD_INC/8364047179

So I decided to open another COVID-19 related topic about vaccine with a poll. I hope this is not becoming a political discussion. My goal is to find out how people think about this from a risk/reward perspective, especially those with a medical background. My underlying thinking is that we will get a vaccine most likely from Moderna in November that uses a somewhat novel (and unproven) RNA Messenger approach and mot likely a second option of a traditional vaccine a few month later. I hope it adds value for readers and posters.

CVS - free one day or two day delivery in my area: https://www.cvs.com/content/delivery?eval=40A50HhmBxkBF+ajmu95bWe3dRQ6vEzpfwxceAlMKO8=&WT.mc_id=EM_RX_200905_All_the_Ways_to_Shop I do think that same day delivery is just a matter of time.

The answer is simple. (Almost ) Nobody does this (Tracking filings off 100 companies).

The US isn’t like Canada.

Shares are down another 7% after hours on the news. This might be the top for them with no more splits and no S&P inclusion to look forward to. Not to mention a retail crowd disillusioned by recent losses from buying @ 15-17x sales and losing 25% in 4 days. They can always do an reverse split to get the share price up again ;D

I don’t follow WBA closely, but I do follow and own CVS. 1) It is correct that CVS and WBA prefer that you pick up meds at their pharmacies. There are several reasons for this - no shipping costs and it gives them an ability to offer other products and services. CVS store pickup is also pretty convenient in most cases, as a there 70% of the US population has a CVS pharmacy within 3 miles. CVS used to be pharmacy only, but now they bought Aetna health insurance sort are sort of integrated and now offfer Pharma, health insurance, but also services like testing, flu shots, minute clinics etc. This is all supposed to work synergistically - for example then they bought Aetna, they started to drive insurances customer through CVS Caremark exclusively ( which hurt WBA). This is sort of what UNH has been doing, starting from health insurance when they got into Pharma distribution and owned a piece of health clinics etc and got this to work synergistically. Kaiser is a nonprofit health insurer and was fully integrated including an In-house pharmacies (from my perspective as an insurance customer this was working very well). Ok, this is a long way of saying that I believe (and many industry players too) that integration is the future of health care and single line business (like pharmacies be it online or B&M ) are most likely not the future.

I took a look. It has a lot of data and it looks pretty good. Still, I won't pay for TIKR since M* for free is good enough for me. ::) Just MO though. I can also get M* for free through a library, but it’s a pain going through the library website and quite frankly, the M* user interface sucks. I would pay a little for convenience. Edit - I just realized that the Boston public library gives access to CapIQ. Cool!

Seems like a tough area to enter,I agree with Jurgis here. I know that CVS/ Walgreen/Amazon/ United Health all are looking at this problem from different angles. One thing I noticed that they claim to be tech driven with software, automation, robotics as the secret sauce, but none of the founders seams to have any expertise in these areas. Perhaps you politely ask them who is doing this work? Yours sincerely, The always skeptical Spekulatius.

I know this is totally irrelevant, but Rheinmetall has some pretty cool YouTube Videos demonstrating the Oerlikon 35mm cannon air defense system and other stuff. Here are two for nerds. I can’t wait for the consumer version to come out ;D FWIW, Rheinmetall has put up some impressive numbers with their defense business recently. I own a few shares.

You need more than a 10% discount to compensate for being externally managed. I personally avoid anything externally managed at all. Also, the business model reminds me of BDC which is another area littered with dead bodies.

Added to CVS and a tiny starter in HII.

For the commercial products, I just hope that a Tier including international stocks is available that is affordable for individual investors. I don’t need an API Or any fancy power tools. I honestly just look at a better version of yahoo finance.

Thanks for bringing this stock to our attention. I spent little time on this, but the explanation for the Capital raise seems very flimsy. The brick production expansion costs ~95M GBP of which 35M was already spent and they made 65M operating profit - why can’t they just borrow. Their balance sheet looks pretty good up to 2119. I find it incredulous that banks would not be willing to lend. ÄI read that Management doesn‘t have a large stock position but participated in the Capital raise. I wonder if they just trashed the stock price to get their piece the company on the cheap on the Capital raise. If that true, Management isn’t trustworthy although maybe shareholders are now aligned for a while. This seems to be a decent business that even idiots should be able to run, but then again, never underestimate idiots.