Spekulatius

This interview with Bullard is actually quite positive for banks, as he clearly states that they want to avoid negative interest rates: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/st-louis-feds-bullard-negative-interest-rates-would-be-problematic-in-us-134416313.html

What if workers start calling out sick at slaughter houses, processing plants, distributors, trucking companies, and most important of all perhaps, FOOD RETAILERS. There is no way I would be working at a grocery store stocking shelves, unloading trucks, working cash registers for $10, $12, $14 an hour. To an extent, that happened in the Detroit Post Office. We are not getting daily mail delivery in my city. The Post Office tries to do it, but some delivery routes can't be made every day. The distribution/sorting hubs sometimes had 90% worker outages. For a while, all outbound packages were being routed to Indianapolis for sorting/shipment. Many of my packages took 2-3 weeks to be delivered. 1st class letters were taking 1+ week to go across the city. There were simply not enough workers coming in. The Post Office was very close to collapse. In the past few days, things seem to have gotten better with the mail. I've also heard that more workers are coming back. Things are still difficult, but not like what they were. A lot of businesses won't function if workers don't show up. If there is a 2nd wave, that could be a real problem. They need to pay more and/or get rid of the $1200 UI weekly subsidy quickly. Worst implementation of good idea ever. They should have just bumped the UI benefit to a higher percentage of salary. With the current incentive structure , a large part of the American population won’t get back to work - a middle school student can do the math on that one.

Externally managed REITs are almost as bad as SPACS especially when the external managers are AAMC crooks.

Let’s hope they fly ;D

I don’t think these guys are great marketers either. The niche shops aren’t likely to bring in much cash due to lack of scalability and the SYTE operating costs are just high. This entities is worth more dead than alive.

Why Loews when you can get Fairfax about equally cheap and management not as bad? Vinod And why deal with FFH, when you can buy BRK with better insurance better utility ( ca BWP) operations, a better balance sheet and a better operating companies without any dilution risk. In the current environment, I take quality over a bit of a valuation edge any time.

Risk know them - avoid them seems like a good https://www.erinbromage.com/post/the-risks-know-them-avoid-them It’s quite shocking to read the case studies about how one person in a choir could infect many people in the church after a couple hours of exposure for example. On the other hand the risk to contract COVID outdoors seems to be vastly overrated, so politicians really should open parks and beaches.

This weekend, I trimmed my wife’s hair around her neck and now I am grounded for the week.

Seems like we need to close down the White House, quarantine the inhabitants and deep clean it.

^ Good comments from Broeb22 above. My company started to use Workday and it is for better then the system we had before (Kronos and some SAP integration) just from a user experience perspective. Another thought - most of the benefits of new technologies over time should accrue to the users over time. Maybe that’s already happening, but it doesn’t quite feel that way.

Kind of investment related and pretty good. https://twitter.com/justbrosef/status/1259266070759845890?s=21

I wonder what the USO day traders do with their K-1’s next year. I don’t think most folks realize that they get a K-1, much less how to deal with a K-1 on with their tax return.

Ye, and increasing infection rate is expected when you open the economy back up. Germany has opened up some schools, more stores are open and some factories (automobile) have started back up again. It is interesting to note that there was also an outbreak cluster in meat processing plant as well ( Coesfeld). That triggered a setback for this county in terms of opening the economy further son e a threshold of 50 new cases/100k population was exceeded. Almost logical. :o https://www.dw.com/en/coronavirus-outbreak-closes-german-meat-packing-plant/a-53374478 As in the US the meatpacking plant outbreak occurred with guest workers (from Bulgaria) with not that great working and living conditions. The virus is very good at finding weak spots apparently.

Everyone's an expert, I guess: https://i.redd.it/afazin874wx41.jpg Regarding safety a while ago on Twitter someone showed a pic of the SpaceX factory floor with workers and challenged to count the number of OSHA violations. I found about a dozen but another guy thought he would see 30. (must have been a TeslaQ guy ;D). So, I wouldn't necessarily trust Elon on safety. He is a kind of guy who does stuff and asks for forgiveness later.

Hmm, who could have known: https://www.channel3000.com/72-got-covid-19-after-being-at-large-event/

Well, it’s early days yet, but this gives us and idea what sort of real estate is impaired: https://www.reit.com/news/blog/market-commentary/nareit-member-survey-results-covid-19-and-april-rent-collections

Easier said than done. Don’t think they can move a car factory, but they will try to sue the county. I think there are constitutional grounds for them to win too. Local leaders are going a bit overboard with lockdowns. I think closing beaches/parks is also needless. The next Tesla factory will never be in California anyways. Doubt their current Fremont factory can move either. If Tesla HQ with all those high-paying jobs moves, then that's an ouch for the Bay and California. Yeah. Easier to move HQ than a car factory. They could even do what a lot of corporate America has done and "move" HQ to another country (when in reality the execs continue to work out of offices in the U.S.) to screw over American taxpayers...but TX is more likely. They will lose of a lot of talent when moving. For tech folks, it is easier to change the job than to change the location. Plenty of jobs in thr Bay Area, or at least it used to be until 8 weeks ago.

Never dealt with Carvana before. I do agree that a haggle free experience and return option may be worth something. In haven’t dealt with Carmax either, but Heard- that it’s actually a good source if you looking for some rare vehicles that may be hard to get at locally. Just poking around my beloved late model Subaru’s, it is clear I can get better deals locally than I can get at either Carmax or Carvana. One deal here is just a dozen miles from me and offers even home delivery, ~5% below Carvana prices. Of course mileage (pun intended) varies across location and model. Looks like it is actually a great time to look for a used car right now, as prices look better than they used to be.

Big mistake going after booze and cigarettes during the pandemic. Pick your battles carefully. Booze stores are essential business in the US and I actually think that a smart choice.

I also think mortality rate will come down because we will learn how to treat patients better over time. That’s why I personally think it is better to get infected late rather than early personally. I also know for sure they Germany and many other European states try to avoid the herd immunity route. Germany and opened schools again and some business and does test and trace to contain new outbreaks. Same with other Scandinavian states. Perhaps Italy is too far in and Spain in some areas at least to try this, I don’t really know. I do think that the US has lost the optionality to avoid the herd immunity route, because the shelter in place were were lifted early, so the case load is probably too high for test and trace to work. We will see how it works out, I don’t really know what the best route is. I hope the best for Sweden, Germany, the US and all other nations to obtain a workable solution with a manageable human cost, but some area quite clearly doing much better than others for a variety of reasons.

https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/health-environment/article/3083627/coronavirus-hong-kong-records-no-new-cases-covid While these are success stories now, I'm afraid once they open up the borders/businesses again... Boom. Boom? They'll keep screening people at the border and international travel will be pretty low until there's a vaccine or at least better therapies. Any time they gain now by crushing the curve and containing it is fewer deaths before a vaccine. Well, let's see what happens. I'm just very curious to see how these countries start to easy the lockdown measures, and how they will handle potential 2nd or 3rd waves... Just look at Singapore, and now S. Korea where a single club goer has caused another possible outbreak... which led the government to shut down bars/clubs again. Seems like they will have to go back and forth with measures, for the next 12+ months... At some point, I'm afraid that the whole society will lose its patience/integrity. The whole society will lose their integrity because they can’t go to bars? C’mon. Also, we keep talking about lockdowns, but the US and Europe never had any “lockdowns”. We had “shelters in place” that are quite leaky, in some countries/ states more so than others. In my state, many stores were open (hardware, groceries, liquor and of course drugstores), parks open, takeout food available and many business declared essential etc so people still went to work as usual. That’s not what I call a “lockdowns. lockdown is what the Chinese did when they prevented people from leaving their apartment for any reason. We never had a lockdown in the US or Europe.

I don’t know about investing, but personally after reading this thread, I am more interested in buying a bike than before.

Yes, while the fed keeps the credit markets open. Agreed. Edit: BTW I tried a DCF. If they have zero cashflow for three years and then starting from 4% FCF yield, to justify current price, they need to grow at 10% for 20 years and then 5% for the next 30 years. discounting at 10%. People are confident of that sort of growth rate for a 10Billion company? or people are happy to accept a lower future return? Discounting at 10% in this interest rate environment doesn’t seem reasonable. I think something a lot of investors have struggled with is anchoring bias on valuations. If interest rates stay low for an extended period of time discount rates of 5-6% can reasonably be used and nearly everything is cheap. Very unusual times we live in today. My out er would be that if interest rates stay low for such a long time, it also means our economy and growth is going to be dogshit for a long time and you are unlikely to get 10% revenue growth either.

The Swedish models isn’t different than the US model effectively except the Swedes do with intend what the US does wby accident and of course the Swedes have a much better outcome (no collapse of their health care system in Stockholm vs NYC). What I do not get is - even if Stockholm reaches heard immunity until fall, that’s only 10% of their population (Stockholm has ~1M people vs 10.3M Swedes), so they still will have 10x more cases overall when Stockholm is done. NYC probably reaches some level of heard immunity too, and possibly some hard hit areas in the NE (Boston, Connecticut), but again that’s only a small part of the US population. There is still a lot of uninfected humans in both countries to work through. If that’s our strategy anyhow, how about estimating some numbers. US 340M people, let say we infect 60% with a 0.75% mortality rate and get there without crashing the health care system somehow. That’s 1.53M dead by my math which needs to be seen relative to the ~2.8M natural death rate in the US. Maybe that’s what it is, but I have not seen this spelled out in a WH meeting - this is our strategy and that how much it’s going to cost us and that is how we minimize the damage and the risk of the health care system crashing etc. Instead, the WH says, we are going to have 100k dead and we are winging it and see what happens. ??

I don’t think it’s a mutation of the virus causing this. It’s more likely that with so many cases and 100 thousands and of infections, some people or kids in this case have a different and adverse reaction to this virus, one of them with similar symptoms than Kawasaki’s disease.