Spekulatius

How do you know the Chinese were the aggressors? It always takes two parties to get a bar fight and finding out who started it is usually an exercise in futility.

We also had low interest from 2010-2016 and lower valuation multiples than we have now. The important question for stock valuation is not where interest rates are 2 years from now, it is where interest rates will be 10 or 20 years from now. Stocks are like bonds with infinite duration that way and most of the value is decades out.

Prime is a legit contender, but it’s not Netflix. It could easily see Amazon adding a subscription offering for a few $/ month as they keep adding content. Right now, it is a supplementary service just like Amazon music (which I also use as a prime subscriber ) rather than a viable standalone offering.

Regarding confederate flags and shades of grey, this classic comes to my mind: God is not on our side, because he hates idiots !

So a couple of overeager soldiers had a really bad bar prowl about a worthless piece of land and this results in a large scale conflict and nuclear war. I guess that could happen too on 2020. I don’t think it’s very likely though.

Very interesting analysis. Thanks for sharing. I had two thoughts when I saw the graph of deaths vs mobility. 1. A common sense explanation which makes me think there is causation here: you can tell people all you want that they should stay home and apart, but they only listen when the bodies pile up. 2. The r-square is ~50%. This is wonderful billionaire territory for financial market predictions and rubbish noise in laws of physics. Not sure where in the spectrum between rubbish and wonderful such an r-square is in “epidiomology”. R^2 =0.483 is pretty much rubbish in any field. Anyways, this is a multivariate problem. No single factor can explain everything.

I am not sure what you are trying to prove. The deaths are going down much more sharper than new cases. That shows CFR is going down. And Arizona deaths/million is 180. NY is 1598. I believe you are correct that CFR rate is going down. The reason are two fold in my opinion: 1) in NYC, the health care capacity was exceeded which meant that only the most serious cases got admission. Since disease progression is hard to predict with COVID some patients got admitted to the hospital too late. 2) Treatment has vastly improved since March, Doctored understand much better how to prevent severe diseases progression and how to deal with clotting, inflammation etc. This all helps bringing down CFR rate and progress is ongoing.

I kind of like Portney. He is just like James Cramer, but far more entertaining. There I said it.

There is most likely a real business, but it is far less profitable than the current numbers suggest. This scandal is a big embarrassment for the regulators, but it doesn’t exactly moved to the top headlines either. It is kind of surprising that Mr Market still values this at 3B Euros.

Mark Cohodes considered it a fraud for quite some time in his tweets. I wouldn’t touch anything with a ten foot pole that he considers a fraud. Some frauds have been ten baggers after the fraud was discovered basically: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lernout_%26_Hauspie

The COVI-19 infection numbers are pretty bad today with 3k+ infections in CA, TC, FL and 2.5k in AZ. AZ is about the same size than MA and we hit a limit with 3k hospitalizations. I think AZ is at 1.7k now, but rapidly rising. If this keeps up they will reach 3k in a week and then they do need to shut down, or risk of running out of hospital capacity. Or perhaps they take it more serious now and avoid all that trouble.

LOL, mine was “Stuck Everlasting“ It predates yours, but I still recall the feeble plot line as if I have watched it yesterday,

I think the study presents current standard of care already. Administering steroids has been done for quite some time already (based on what I am hearing from my wife) as well as administering blood thinners (Heparin) and drugs to break up blood clots as well as some other things. This likely has reduced the IFR rate already compared to March. We likely will see more progress as our understanding of the disease improves.

I think the burn rate on stimulus is currently $1T every 5 weeks or so. A $1T infrastructure bill that takes years to work off is in monthly terms so much less that it hardly makes up for CARES. It’s still a good idea, but it will hardly make a dent except in certain industries.

OT? I am afraid that our expectations in both of these cases are too high. In fact, I am afraid that our expectations of human behavior in general are too high. Whether applied to young people in their 20s, or people in general, or "highly rational" investment professionals frequenting certain investment forums, or even people at the highest levels of business or politics. Yeah, that makes me a misanthrope. :-\ Also see my signature. This is nonsense....I’ve seen children (first hand) in third world countries have more responsibility and act more “adult like” than your average millennial. Notice the more laws we create to coddle individuals, the softer society becomes and the more coddling it needs. If you have low expectations of society and individuals (and let them know it), you’re pretty much guaranteed to get poor results. I’m a firm believer in the saying “Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And, weak men create hard times.” If I had to pick a point as to where modern society is, I would say somewhere in the bottom of the “good” inning. And when this doesn’t work, something evolution does the work. I a, not quite sure what to think of this. Is it Robinhood’s fault, or the parents or the individual himself. Is there anything that could not have happened if he had opened the account with Schwab or Fidelity or Interactive brokers? Anecdotally, my 14 year old son has friend from high school and one of them is in the “silver trade”. I am not sure what this teenagager is trading and perhaps it is harmless, but it seems to me that the parents should probably look at this closely. My son got interested too, so I let him open a virtual trading account at Investopedia. So far, his trades have been losses as far as I can tell. FWIW, I bought my first stock when I was 16.

I tried to get a sense of this too but decided it’s too difficult. What makes this tricky IMO is that in addition to whatever crazy leverage that Robinhood may be providing their users, there are the actions of other bigger players that are likely amplifying the market impact of small retail traders. For instance if a bunch of small investors try to pile into a hot name there are HFT firms and the like who will try to front run the orders. With options there are dealers on the other side of the transactions who will trade the underlying for hedging purposes. Also there are the price insensitive players like index funds who seem to be making prices more sensitive to small shifts in demand than they otherwise would be. And so on. I agree. There seems to be some amplification going on that exaggerate these moves that retail investor tries to ride. today’s fools gold is $CARV as there is trade for Banks serving black communities going on.

Bill is a friend of mine. But thanks for making it clear who's the real one here. Bill Brewster is not a friend of mine, but I follow him on Twitter and also follow Tobias Carlisle podcast. He wanted to bring the whole tragedy out in the open to shine a light on what’s happening here. Others stated that it will end in tears, but this is worse than tears. Bill B seems. genuine too me and I am baffled why anyone thinks he is deuche.

We will know by August. The Spek family spends less too, mainly because there isn’t much to spent on for us and Mrs. Spek can’t get vacation currently and is working more than we’d like.

Customer service of IBKR in a nutshell: 1) IBKR’s software is always correct. 2) calling customer service is useless 3) if <> 1) you are out of luck Their CSR will literally tell you to transfer your account and close it, if you are not satisfied. I have to say that their platform is pretty good and very reliable.

How did the main topic of this thread become the confederate flag and how did a Jewish person (Gregmal) accused of anti semitism? I know that sometimes creep sets in, but one also need to look at the current situation and decide if this makes any sense. As far as I know, the virus does not afflict the brain. I am guilty of causing topic creep as well but that’s just too much. There is quite a bit of useful info here, but it’s gets drowned out by more and more garbage posts. Those should go into the politics boards.

For those interested, here is a distilled list of best-evidence that has built up over the last few weeks versus prevention of transmission. https://academic.oup.com/jid/advance-article/doi/10.1093/infdis/jiaa189/5820886 https://www.ecdc.europa.eu/en/publications-data/using-face-masks-community-reducing-covid-19-transmission https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)31142-9/fulltext From a humble perspective, a detached and rational approach tends to avoid running into sterile debates and tribal drift but i often feel like an idiot. It's fascinating that this virus, which is somewhat benign from an evolutionary standpoint, stirs so much reptilian instincts and one has to wonder about the host (and its institutions). Maybe i focus too much on governance issues. Here is another one : https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/26/9/20-2272_article Runs a bit against my hypothesis that truly asymptomatic (And those that never show symptoms) younger people aren’t likely superspreaders. Well, it seem they can be. Whether one is truly asymptomatic or get some mild symptoms later is not that important. Its been clear for a while that there is asymptomatic transmission, which happens while talking. To some extent masks help but not eliminate small tiny droplets floating in air and its difficult to wear masks continuously. That is why Japanese say "ventilation is key". That makes everyone life easier. And now we know it works. I think we should copy what works. That is not to say not to use masks or stop washing hands or stop safe distance. But no need for enforced lockdowns. I agree on ventilation. in retrospect, closing down parks and beaches was probably a mistake, since with a bit of precaution, outdoors activities are pretty low risk. Also anecdotal, a significant outbreak In a nursing home in Montreal was at least partly linked to bad ventilation: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/vigi-long-term-care-home-all-residents-infected-1.5569178 As far as asymptomatic vs presymptomatic, I would think that the latter probably has a much higher viral load and becomes more likely a superspreader than the former. The problem for an individual of course is that one has no way of knowing in which group you are going to go beforehand. However, it might be of value when you look at populations. I guess more evidence is needed. It’s seems at least that kids don’t spread as much as thought, but there are probably socioeconomic and behavioral aspect as well that I am not sure about.

For those interested, here is a distilled list of best-evidence that has built up over the last few weeks versus prevention of transmission. https://academic.oup.com/jid/advance-article/doi/10.1093/infdis/jiaa189/5820886 https://www.ecdc.europa.eu/en/publications-data/using-face-masks-community-reducing-covid-19-transmission https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)31142-9/fulltext From a humble perspective, a detached and rational approach tends to avoid running into sterile debates and tribal drift but i often feel like an idiot. It's fascinating that this virus, which is somewhat benign from an evolutionary standpoint, stirs so much reptilian instincts and one has to wonder about the host (and its institutions). Maybe i focus too much on governance issues. Here is another one : https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/26/9/20-2272_article Runs a bit against my hypothesis that truly asymptomatic (And those that never show symptoms) younger people aren’t likely superspreaders. Well, it seem they can be.

Motley Fool tries to do that , but they have a bunch of momentum in their picks to, be it by choice or as a byproduct of their method. You can sort of get their thinking without paying when you listen to the MF industry focus podcasts, which are pretty good. I personally subscribed to their Stockadvisor service. Best of breed is a crowded bet and you pay dearly because everyone seems to do this nowadays or tries to, valuation be damned.

The economy is sort of open already here in MA and in Southern NH. Our son meets with friends outside every once in a while. I think we are going to do some local trips here in summer. , perhaps to the Berkshire’s or to Vermont (assuming they will have us). My wife currently can’t get vacation, but I think she ought to be able to get some this summer before the second wave comes in. Lots of restaurants here have converted to outdoor seating, which I actually think it is a great idea and I hope it stays even when this thing is over, of course this is weather permitting. Somehow we should try to make lemonade out of lemons.

Yes, near earth satellites still aus the line of eight issue. They also need to be more or less right above you, so a satellite System serving Latin America for example needs to have the near to equator orbit to serve it and likely would be designed to serve other continents as well. The ultimate scale game. I think it is a great option for rural/remote areas and Worldwide cellphone/internet operators - great for ships, airplanes and remote areas in that it can provide seamless internet likely with a few systems working together.