Spekulatius

I think an application of the punch card method will lead to more thumb sucking, not less.

That’s the power companies job.

You're being more politic than I was when I made this argument to you on Saturday. As I said then, my only explanation is that Zoom users didn't claim responsibility for the Tulsa rally debacle. My fear is that when we look back on this in ten years and people ask "what did we completely ignore in the Pandemic that cost us the most", it could be that the answer will be that we gave IP to China through Zoom. I looked in to Zoom as an investment back in early February before it was widely held public knowledge that Zoom was being chosen by many IT departments. Among the top reasons for not making an investment was my concern that the China risk was great enough to pose a business risk in addition to a "can I sleep at night" with the ethical concerns regarding this business. The post wasn’t meant to be political. It is hard to say how much of a security risk Zoom really is, but since we know that there is some Chinese connection in writing the code and that Silicon Valley tends to break things first and asks for forgiveness later, I would consider it really carefully if I would use it as a corporation. As I mentioned before, some of my work is defense related and I don’t know any defense company that suggested using it for their CC.p so far. My sons school uses it, but there likely isn’t much in terms of proprietary information to be gained.

^ Wasn’t the whole Apple thesis that their high margin and growing recurring service revenues justifies the current high valuation? If this mutiny from application vendors gets some traction and this gets scrutiny from the government, then what bull thesis is left? I think regulation for big tech is a vastly under appreciated risk right now. Some regulation could help them but others could really hurt.

The counter argument to the 15-20% immunity is that high infection rates of 80% have been seen in some settings ( prisons and a Korean psych ward if I remember correctly) Anyways the herd immunity threshold depends on the R0 from a pure mathematically perspective, which is a highly volatile and setting dependent number.

So if a short form Video web site is a national security concern how about Zoom. There is likely 1000x more valuable and proprietary content in Zoom meetings than in TikTok. Apparently a lot of the Zoom development staff is located in Chiba and done development is done by entities that are not even controlled by Zoom. How can this not raise issues? My own company doesn’t use Zoom because the understanding is that it wouldn’t be ITAR compliant. It seems to me that we are investigating the mouse ( TikTok) and forget about the Elephant in the room ( Zoom).

The RISC vs CISC debate is probably at least 20 years old. I remember hearing about this when the Power PC processors came out. I think the lines between the two are too muddy anyways now to be meaningful, since Intel Chips have elements of both for example.

Some folks on Twitter think it was Todd. Does it really matter? I think it is just a trade.

fck that kitchen, bro. 8) How many silicone baking spatulas does a person really need? That’s temple construct above his stove will not pass the test of time.

I am pretty sure you can get this. I got 3 3/8% no points, very low fees (~400-500$) pre Covid in February for a 30 year conforming and I am fairly certain, I can get 3% now. Try Polymortgage.com. FWIW, the spreads for 30 year mortgages over the 10 year treasuries are still high historically. I think there is room for mortgage rates to fall, even if treasuries just stay where they are. I am hoping for 2.75% rates for a 30 year conforming with no /low out of pocket.

I own a bit of AMBEV (I actually added a hit last week). My thinking is that folks will drink beer again way before they fly. Nevertheless, the Mexican airports are attractive because they have good balance sheets. They will make it too the other side without dilution. The worst of the currency devaluation for the Latam currencies seems to be over already because the USD is silently devaluing too against most major currencies.

My wife drew this picture describing how she felt about a colleague at work during the Coronavirus surge. Very fitting when you see some of the postings here:

Bump. Thank you so much for hosting and letting us non NYC folks in. I highly recommend this meeting to anyone interested. One of the benefits of this epidemic is that you can zoom meet people that you otherwise never would have met before.

There is also a great interview with Ridenour (ANGI CEO) in thr Boyar podcast series that explains how they think about their business going forward. ANGI is still core to the IAC’s thesis: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-world-according-to-boyar/id1374552755?i=1000487503656

Thanks for your thoughts Spek. There are definitely some good frameworks for thinking about the issue in your comments. Here are a couple of questions. Wouldn't a 0.1% position still likely lead to regret? And how is that different from thumb sucking? Would a tracking position mainly differ by scale (0.1% vs 0%?) and the benefits of having a position might come at the cost of diworsification and increased tracking costs. Should we be looking to improve the odds of fully committing to the correct decision? I like the idea of using pepper oils to prevent thumbsucking, but I see a couple of issues: -First, have you already made the mistake by the time you are sucking your thumb, or is the thumbsucking itself the problem? -Second, we really want to encourage the right decision which is to take an action in the real world and take a risk on other people or a company, which is more akin to sucking someone else's thumb. Putting pepper oil on someone else's thumb might prevent you from sucking that thumb, but that would mainly be of use when it would be inappropriate to suck on someone else's thumb, and what we are looking for is the rare opportunity when you should encourage yourself to act in scale when an opportunity presents itself. Plus, it is a little socially complicated to try to go around putting pepper oil on other people's thumbs. So maybe we should be looking for positive reinforcement, rather than negative reinforcement? I find that putting 20-30bps into a position forces me to look at it and pay attention. Lots of time, I don't add to it After 18 months or so, if the fundamentals aren't improving, I sell it. If the fundamentals are working out, I'll add to it. It helps. CEO of Markel talks about this. I see it the same way. It forces you to get involved and pay attention. If it doesn’t work out or you bought you too expensive, the loss is manageable. For me, the biggest issue to pass on opportunities is valuation. I think some stocks/business looked good, but were too expensive At that time. i these cases, I should probably should still buy some. If the business is good, but the starting point was unfortunate, I might be a chance to buy more at a lower price. If I don’t have a bit of skin in the game, I often forget about this entirely and end up doing nothing. It’s a mental crutch, but I think it works for a lot of people.

Same here. Looks pretty solid. Their trust business revenue and AUM keeps rising at a decent clip.

I recommend buying a tracking position (0.1% perhaps) when the valuation is in doubt. Those tend to be my largest regrets. So far, I have never regretted investing in lousy companies and fraudulent stocks, even when they do end up going up. As for the real thing, try rubbing your thumbs or finger tips with Ghost Chile’s or habaneros. It sure will at least remind you that you are sucking thumbs, which typically is 80% of the battle ;D

Why is that? Currency devaluations , inflation , or something else? In my opinion, it is a higher country risk premium. Or look at the central bank interest rate (I wouldn’t call it risk free), it is currently at 4.5%. Brazil is in a very similar situation. https://countryeconomy.com/key-rates/mexico FWIW, these countries stock markets are interesting, because those rates are coming down. That should boost equity valuation, but may also weaken the currency.

Thankfully there's no libido in there. There's no questioning of personal tastes but somehow the combination of Orthodox Jews and libido doesn't really do it for me. If interested in the topic with time restraint, here are two useful references: http://faithandworklife.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/faith_and_fortune.pdf https://financialpost.com/opinion/a-hard-look-at-paul-reichmanns-long-goodbye Paul Reichmann was a true genius but was also a gambler. In the end, this was about financial libido. A potential problem occurred when the collateral that banks relied on was substantially related to the reputation of a single individual. The best ways to 'kill' a man is to prevent him from working or to give him unlimited credit. They also mentioned Dome Petroleum. Oh, the memories.

Of course there are many variables, but still, it's a data point that doesn't help support the approach. Also, since about May, many European peer states are just as open than Sweden. Schools for example opened in late April or May in Germany and Denmark. I don’t know about France though. One of the issue that caused the recent outbreak was travel during the summer. There were issue with crowds in Mallorca (around the infamous Schinkenstrasse etc) and contact tracing showed 25% of thr confirmed cases due to travel and the real number is likely much higher. On the same note, I think father day and 4th of July likely caused the recent surge in the surge that seems to be ebbing no. I expect another surge when schools reopen and on thanksgiving. @Castanza- the protests certainly didn’t help, but most protests were in blue states and that’s not where the surge happened. So, I don’t think the protests were the main reason for the surge.

I also like Gavin Baker, but you always wonder how much these writers know. He doesn’t really seem to have a lot of semiconductor experience, but he has been an investor in tech for a long time, so there is that. He probably also has inside sources. The Cruz of the problem for Intel is that the Lithography at 193nm went towards their limits and it seems that ASML (and their lead customer TSM) decided to go for a quantum leap to 13.5nm (which is almost X-RAY) while Canon (and their lead customer Intel) tweaked the existing 193nm tech once more and that didn’t seem to work well. It is also noteworthy that Canons next gen tech is not based not EUV, but a contact tech that Canon calls nanoimprint which works totally different and we don’t know if it works well at all yet. https://global.canon/en/technology/interview/nanoimprint/index.html Seems pretty bullish for ASML (but well reflected in the shareprice already ) because it could be that ASML becomes a monopolist for the most advanced lithography equipment for a while (and possibly a long while). In a way that’s bullish for INTC though because if betting on the wrong horse in lithography is the main issue, they should be able to correct that with their next gen process by going along with ASML equipment. It’s likely more complex than that, but then again, as outsides, we only see the tip of an iceberg in terms of what’s really going on.

I think these billionaires will buy, but they will into something that they control ( complete buildings etc) rather than Reits. Right now, there doesn’t seem to be much of a market yet for these deals, so they are not buying yet. It seem that replacement value is an overused metric. Even these retail crowdfunding RE platforms offer a lot deals To participate in for ~70% replacement value. How can this be?

Well, the android App Store cut is 30% too, so there is your problem to going elsewhere. I would guess they over time, a 30% “tax” is high and won’t stay that way. I think it’s likely we see a digression with higher revenue.

^FWIW, Brenntag published their RIOC and how they calculate it in their annual report. Their number was ~13.6% from memory and it went down a bit due to inclusion of lease liabilities. This also includes all the intangibles and right of use. Total invested capital ~5.7 B Euro ( from Memory). The real ROIC number may be a bit higher, if you take into account some amortization. Brenntag‘s numbers are very Transparent and easy to understand. I really like how they go about their business. Univar is messy. If I have the choice between taking a one foot vs a three foot hurdle, I take the one foot one any time.

There arn’t many things about Long Island I truly miss, but one of them are various Greek food joints. You also could get excellent German food in the Long Island “time capsule”. Are there any Greek Seafood joints on Long Island? Well Huntington was close to where we lived and has probably the most restaurants. Neraki was good, but I am not sure it meets the requirements of a sophisticated NY Palate. We also liked Aegean Grill in East Northport, but the latter is not a sea food place per say. https://neraki.com/