Spekulatius

Are you just being sarcastic? Rarely does the fundamental investment case go from investable to not a great idea in 24 hours or with a few buck s/t move. Or are you just looking for a quick flip here? Bought a small bit this morning, not super exciting, but basically at mid March levels now. The fundamental bet will need time to work out, but my entry was in retrospect too hastIly, as it often is good idea to wait a bit and letting the bad News And selling to dissipate a bit. In fact even today’s entry may be too early. But then again, I typically start small and adding more is pretty much part of the plan. iI am typically not that keen on turnaround any more, but in this care, I think there is enough meat on the bone that I can get out flat if they keep screwing up and it should work out nicely, if they get a few things right. They are lucky they they have a lot of secular tail winds (5G, cloud, remote working, AI) that goes in their favor he gives them more time and resources to execute. Worst case, they need to pivot and abandon their strategy to keep leading edge manufacturing in house, sell or spin off wafer fabs and use TSM like AMD did more than a decade ago when they couldn’t keep up.

More INTC (my AH buy yesterday was clearly not a great idea) and a bit more CBOE.

Yes, that’s a reasonable expectation. It’s a tough time to turn around a bank though with pressure from shrinking earnings power (lower NIM), higher provisions and the need to fix business processes and customer costs. other banks are already where WFC needs to be and have a business mix (Credit cards, investment banking) that makes them less susceptible to some of the factors impacting WFC. I am hoping for another shot at BAC at or a a small premium to tangible book.

I cant think of any other way a virus that started in China goes global...can you? Way to totally miss the context. The countries that are doing badly are doing badly because they didn't do the steps to control the virus, and those that do well do so because they did. There's variance and some places were less lucky or had worse demographics/density/etc than others, but generally, the virus was within the borders of all these islands and if they hadn't done the steps, they'd be doing just as bad as anyone else. In the early phases the virus spread by travel, but once it's everywhere and travel has been mostly shut down for months, what matters is the local response, not blocking new infections from outside. Or in other words, it's been many months now that the source of new infections is local, not international. I agree on this , local response matters more later. Being isolated ( relatively speaking) gives a country a better fighting chance to isolate early outbreaks and prevent subsequent reinfections. All this doesn’t really matter if your local response let the virus run rampant - the UK is a great example of this.

NZ did very well. One overarching theme is that islands ( NZ, Australia ( technically a continent but still surrounded by water), Iceland, Japan , South Korea ( norther border is impenetrable) can do better because they have easier ways to control access. The exception are the turds from the UK of course.

Dad, is this you? Yes, Jenny and Joe are pretty upset about Greg trash talking about them. Anyways, their branches used to be very well run, much better experience than BofA back then. It seems that this is not the case any more. Now we know that their IT systems and Online banking suck as well, which makes it clear that they have a lot of work to do. I now wonder what makes people think that CEO Scharf is so great. Visa is a company that runs by itself, and based on where BK is right now, he didn’t make a great impact there.

Maybe people expect their sanitizer sales will sky rocket... https://www.cnbc.com/2020/04/24/coronavirus-kegs-are-going-bad-boston-beer-has-a-solution.html I think SAM May benefit from the demise of some craft brewers. As far as I can tell, booze sales have been pretty good so far during the pandemic. I certainly did my share buying beer, wine and cider. The valuation is egregious, but that’s true for a lot of stocks including those with much crappier fundamentals than SAM. I wish I had gone long this one at ~$460. Their sales have been gangbusters. They have category killers in craft beer, ciders and now hard Selters.

Ascena has ~2800 stores and just went bankrupt too. There are plenty more opportunity for SPG to roll up the complete B&M retail sector.

The tone from today’s earnings release sounded pretty bad, but at least now it’s priced it. Bought some shares today AH at $54 and change.

The problem with TV is that the bundle is is falling apart. This means that either revenue go down for the teams (and with they their value) or the viewers that do like to watch sports in TV will have to pay much more. I think the latter is how this is going to play out, but it won’t be a painless transition, imo. With MSG, you have to add the “leaches” MSG (TV rights) and part of MSGS (stadium rents etc) to the EV value and I am not sure the way this was split is creating much value as is. It makes it harder to sell the teams. Anyways, I am out after some consideration. In the end, it’s just an asset play that won’t create any FCF and likely will bleed some money while waiting for the sellout.

WFC just has poor systems overall imo. My last straw was the trouble I had to go through to get a cashiers check for the down payment of my house in 2018. What used to take 5 min took me more than an hour and the bank branch manager had to do it personally. Then I decided that I finally had it with them.

where in NYC? I live in Burlington, VT. I remember the days when people (myself included) would line up for an hour or more to get it. Now, it's available at every supermarket, gas station, corner store, etc. here. I still grab some every once in a while, but there are so many other amazing IPAs here in VT. CT/ Burlington has some good stuff to drink. We recently stopped by at von Trapp in Stowe and Vermont Artisan Coffee and I loved Citizen Cider in Burlington when we visited a few month ago. Would be nice to meet for a cold one when this pandemics crab blows over.

^ I never looked at Stocktwits, what a chess pool! Anyways, the problem I have with shorting is that a small position (let’s say 0.5%) only gives you a potential for a small gain, while also exposing you to the pot. For large drawdowns or losses. In have tried this years ago and for me, it seems an iffy proposition and Just took away too much mental bandwidth and attention. I’d have also listend to John Hampton’s talk ion Jolly Swagman’s podcast) and he spent a lot of time on risk management besides finding these shorts. His shorts are small (0.25-0.5% typically if I remember correctly) and he downtown toy monitors them as a portfolio, but makes most of his money on the long side. I don’t really think a private investor can pull this off generally. I sparingly use index puts when I can buy them cheap for risk management and hopefully gains, but with a VIX of ~25, I find they way to pricy so I haven’t been Doing anything on the dark wide since February and even if I do, it’s usually small. I think the risk of blowing up my portfolio with shorts would be higher then blowing it up long only.

One way to monetize the size is to market add ins like screeners or data sources like rocket finance, tikr.com through the website in exchange for a cut. The clientele here is likely susceptible to these products/ subscriptions.

I am looking at this. My read is that the presumed crime ( racketeering and bribery) dates back to 2016 ( pre split from FES) so FE would have to face criminal charges too if Larry starts to sing. With criminal charges pending and likely to succeed, FE can’t really operate ( raise debt, pay dividends) so they are going to file for the holdco while the regulated subs continue to operate normally more or less. I think the better comp is PCG 2018 or BP in 2010 rather than the JPM London Whale incident. There is also the question if FE @27 ( currently) is cheap enough to compensate for above risk. They made ~$2.5/share before and ~$2.05 after pensions. That’s not cheap enough to compensate for lower future earnings ( taking back the nuclear and coal plants) and the rail risk, imo.

I wonder how folks go about risk management in a case like this. This was written up as a short on May 7 and the stock closed at $1.95 and a high of $2.31 that day. It is now at $5.85. It may ultimately go to zero at some point, but if it goes to $10 first, it really wasn’t a good short.

Curious what interests you about MRTN? TL trucking is a pretty rough and tumble industry. MRTN just posted outstanding results, and after following(like with a lot of names) for some time decided to use some cash to put it in the portfolio. They are incredibly well managed, have an impenetrable balance sheet, have refined the business to be primarily temperature controlled transport rather than competing for everything under the sun. As such they've been able to hold reasonable leverage on pricing and grow revenues much more consistently than the "peers". Theyre basically a trucking company that doesnt really have the problems most trucking companies have, and this has historically been the case. Someone recently blogged on ODFL and how despite being in what is typically a "commoditized" business have earned very good returns on capital. Marten doesn't seem to earn returns on capital or achieve operating ratios similar to ODFL. Do you think their business is improving so that returns on capital and operating ratio continue to improve? ODFL is the class act in the industry. I owned it for a bit in 2007 and then sold because of the economic unrest with the upcoming recession back then. I wish I just stashed it in a coffee can. Today the trucking stocks are much much more expensive. Edit, back to the topic, I bought some WFCF today. For whatever reason, there was a very motivated seller who hit every bid.

I think we're gonna have a shit show this go around. No worries, the Fed prints a lot of toilet paper.

Russian dealers are so 20th century. Just buy it on Amazon FFS: https://smile.amazon.com/Images-SI-Uranium-Ore/dp/B000796XXM/ref=sr_1_1?crid=2X6ULNHYIQ44Q&dchild=1&keywords=uranium+ore&qid=1595350695&sprefix=uranium%2Caps%2C157&sr=8-1 Good news! I was able to get in contact with a prince from Nigeria. Wired him money to buy call options on Uranium. He said he has both U-238, and U-235. He said he would US mail me a confirmation. I think we can find Uranium closer to home now - how about Ohio? It seems it’s not needed there any more. I wonder who the goto guy is now. Apparently “marketing” is done by politicians: https://www.cleveland.com/open/2020/07/fbi-agents-deployed-to-ohio-house-speaker-larry-householders-farm-report.html

Yeah, but who wants to live in Manhattan now? My twitter feed says everyone moves to a cabin in the woods. #NYtaxes #Covid2wave Jokes aside, selling or even renting out NYC Appartement seems challenging now.

I wonder about the difference between U-238 and U-235. I know it looks and tastes the same. The Russian dealer I have been chatting with sells both.

I feel like Nacho Libre.

What precautions do you need to take to store/handle uranium? Uranium investments get interesting once you reach critical mass.

Thanks, couldn't get past the paywall but this SA page provided insights in the comments section. https://seekingalpha.com/news/3507213-brookfield-to-take-25-stake-in-dominions-cove-point-in-2b-deal I would love to be a fly on the wall in the meetings where Brookfield determines their fair value marks. Between this, the overpriced Railroad they bought, the GCP shopping malls, the Forest REIT projects etc. The mental gymnastics will sure make the flys head spin. It would probably kamikaze into cow poop to feel better afterwards. I started wondering today if any of these public private equity firms are good short/put option candidates. Some are levered at the parent level, and generate are likely coming from highly indebted investments. If investments start turning sour, fees could dry up. Without deeper insight I would tend to own the parent and short the stepchildren. The reason is simple - the debt is with the subs and BAM will dilute theit equity if they have to and even benefit at this point if they can.

Curious what interests you about MRTN? TL trucking is a pretty rough and tumble industry. Probably not as rough as owning shopping malls and NYC office space nowadays. FWIW, I added a bit $LEVI today.