Spekulatius

Probably dead money for 1 year, likely decent outcome in 2-3 years after they reshuffle all the different pieces. Not a fan of the pricing pressure talk today. What price did you sell for Spek? My blended price is about $55.8. I sold premarket before the clock struck 7AM this morning after flipping though the earnings presentation. The key issues were: 1) weak guidance for 2020, which looks backloaded 2) volume losses and pricing pressure (note they raise prices overall) 3) They worked really hard to make the Q4 number palpable, but all KPI’s seems to be trending the wrong way 4) wheels coming of from the Tefjin JV business (which they intend to sell off) I will look at this again after a month to follow wash sale rules, but I doubt I am going right back in, although that depends on prices. I definitely left with the impression that it’s not as good of a business than I thought when I bought in.

Wabuffo, you are probably correct. I looked at the 2018 10-k as the 2019 10-k isn’t ready yet. 2019 was an off year for elections, so thr Tv Station earnings are less. In 2018, the earnings were roughly $280M, but $120M were “non cash” from pension fund gains, so those cannot be counted to FCF. Other than that, it seems that Capex roughly matches depreciation and intangible amortization, so let’s call it flat and we have earnings minus pension fund gains as FCF. For normalization, it is probably a reasonable proxy to average over the last even and uneven years in terms of operating earnings although there are some moving pieces. The pension surplus and gains need to be discounted, but I am not sure by how much of a haircut (40%?). Some folks tend to discount deficits entirely which doesn’t seem prudent, but when doing so, the surplus would need o be discounted to zero as well logically, which imo doesn’t make sense. With a 40% pension surplus haircut, the valuation looks a bit less great than I initially thought. As for corporate action, I would like to put them the Kaplan business on its own feet. The earnings of this business have been unpredictable an while they seem to have some aspects of it with the Purdue deal, there isn’t much visibility on how it will perform going forward.

Sold mine before the open today. Took an ~8% loss. I will evaluate this again in a month . Thesis seems broken as I didn’t like blurb about pricing pressure at all. Looks like dead money or worse for a while. Live and learn. Sorry guys :(

For someone like Cenovus, the better way would be to boost the throughput of existing refineries using Capex. Small Subscale refineries are just inefficient for Large companies to operate. Also, if the WCS/WTI differential will be smaller going forward, this refinery would become a liability. US refineries are the best way to invest in shale oil or oil sands. Look at PSX, a first class operator. Buying back 5-10% of their shares every year and paying ~4% dividend.

I doubt that a large company like Cenovus will buy a tiny refinery of 25k throughout. It’s too small to invest much in it (refinery is a business where scale counts). If anyone buys it, it’s going to be a scrappy small operator.

Well, I don’t really have a value #, but I figure as a going concern, they generate ~$300M in FCF with a $3.05B market cap and that’s undeniable cheap. If broken up, it trades probably for 60c on the $. Going with $CABO was the way to invest in retrospect. Going though this thread, that wasn’t entirely clear to all at that time.

This thread went pretty quiet. I guess I am a sucker for owning conglomerates and the stock has declined recently, so I decided to take a look again and found it good and cheap enough for a starter position. I am not sure about management quality, the CEO Timothy O’Shaughnessy came from livingsocial (later Groupon) but I think his main qualification is that he is the son in law of the old man Graham. Jacob Mass also came from the same company (probably Tim’s buddy). I guess I consider them unproven. Perhaps the old man still looks over their shoulder. So far it’s too early to tell, imo. Anyone has an idea what caused the stocks recent decline ? Sympathy with other media companies?

What a roller coaster the past couple years have been... Great example why hodling for multibaggers is far from easy. I want to see a $666 close . I would take it as a sign.

It's great served with a slice of lyme disease. An ad for Corona beer went viral, so to speak.

They did take a hit on gross margin though. Gross margin was only up ~$3B, even though services (high gross margin revenues ) are up $2B and Product revenues are up ~$5.6B. I guess the lower sales average prices for some of the iPhone variants are to blame.

$0.0 purchase price. These are all stock grants. Edit: some market buys from the CEO and others today ~$74

TCO is cheap too, their properties seem just as good as SPG, however their balance sheet is worse. Does it matter though - if malls go the way of bowling alleys, they are both screwed. In my opinion, we are not in 7-8th inning, we are in the 2-3rd. Online sales are growing to 12%+ this year and are just getting started imo. I would not be surprised if we are at 50% we tweet 2030 and 2035. That means they many malls will either have to disappear or will have to fundamentally change. My guess is also they the privet to restaurants may not work, with the pivot to takeout. Some of the malls can be reconfigured to community centers or work life places, but there just too much mLl space to go around to keep everything productive. It is also questionable to me they after all this reinvestment needed, the total rents of the new mLl hybrids will really be higher than they were before the conversion. So all this capital recycling may just be a defensive move may not improve cash flows much. My vote is that it’s a value trap.

Well I don’t have much original to write beyond what was talked about. I think DD is cheap, but it’s not extremely cheap. in the past, business like this have traded for 8x EBITDA at times. I agree on looking where the luck is going to be, but I don’t think Mr Market is giving them any credit for improvements that are yet to come. It’s a bit like LBTYA where you have restructuring and negative organic growth going on at the same time and the latter one seems to determine the price of the stock. It’s not just DD either that is struggling, BASF (which I have been following for decades) is struggling too with negative organic growth and also pricing pressure (in their commodity business). Since chemicals tend to be early indicators of economic activities, this makes me question a bit the positive economic outlook quite frankly, but that’s another story. As far as restructuring or JV the electronic matl unit is concerned, I considered this a hidden gem, as they have some very high margin business lines in their (40% EBITDA margins if I remember correctly), that should trade at nice multiples, assuming their are not cigar butts. So hopefully this will be a value enhancing move like the JV of the nutrients business. It just takes time and the market looks at this with a very sceptical view, which may not be thet surprising, given the fact that the namesake predecessor has been mismanaged for decades. Anyways, I added a few shares today.

Yes, IR presentation are helpful, but of course the metrics and the peer group are mostly cherry picked. Then you need to go to these competitors IR presentation so see which one makes sense. That process isn’t that quick any more although one can get some insight.

We looked at this in another message board 10 years ago - it was trading around the same price back then. Looks like profits have been essentially flat. This is almost a picture perfect value trap.

Atom finance has a “Peer analysis” button they does a decent job finding peers of a rock. yahoo finance used to have a similar thing, but it got lost somehow in one of their remakes. Example: https://atom.finance/quote/GOOGL/peers Atom finance is quickly becoming one of my favor the go to places for research, I use it more than Koyfin. If they only had international stocks...

A clue season Worldwide infects roughly 41M people with 57k death (roughly ), so a 1/730mortality. Just to put things into perspective. The news is certainly scary, but it is well possible that the episode is not much different than a severe flu outbreak. SARS was scary because mortality was high. I don’t think we have reliable numbers from the Soronavirus yet. http://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2019/04/us-flu-still-elevated-dropping-deaths-high-57000

It’s trading for $22 and change now. If you bought it for $5 in the mid nineties, wouldn't you have underperformed? I am not sure, but I am going to guess NO? Are you factoring in dividends/splits? You would be getting 20% on your initial investment every year. I also think there were a couple of stock splits along the way? 2 2 for 1's? So let us say that I bought 400 shares back when I first saw it for about $4.75/share ($1,900 investment)....I would now have 1,600 shares worth something like $36,800? That is a compound annual rate of return of something a bit more than 12%? Then VLGEA has been paying dividends for a number of years/decades? I would be getting very close to a 85% yield on my initial investment every year. I don't think they have been paying steadily since I first saw it. I know they have been paying dividends since at least the early 2000's. Surely that must add a couple few percentage points per year? So I think you would be getting a compound rate of return in the low to maybe mid teens? Finally, I think there were a couple of times that VLGEA paid a special OR abnormally big dividend? Let us say it is maybe a 14% rate of return. If that has underperformed the market, I don't think it is by much. You would also probably have a LOT less volatility when you factor back the dividends. I looked at the long term chart and if you bought it in the mid 90’s, you definitely outperformed overall. The stock had two 2:1 splits in the early 2000’s, so you have 4x the number of shares compared to your initial investment. the dividends only got relevant recently. The stock was a huge winner from the mid 90’s to 2007 and has been basically flat since then. Interesting enough, the revenues seem to be up only 3x since 1994. https://www.otcmarkets.com/stock/VLGEA/overview So the performance depends heavily on the timeframe of your investment in this “compounder”.

It’s trading for $22 and change now. If you bought it for $5 in the mid nineties, wouldn't you have underperformed?

Past episodes seem to indicate that those epidemics don’t have much of an impact: https://twitter.com/renmacllc/status/1220761911610019843?s=21 I do recall SARS had some impact on the HK stock market at that time, but it tended to fade away quickly. There was some impact on travel related business in the area that was quite real, but even those recovered within a year or so.

Anyone knows what's currently in Rule Breaker portfolio? I believe that Netflix, Shopify and Amazon are in, based on what I heard in their podcast. AMZN and NFLX are their ancient picks - not that this disqualifies them as great picks. Apparently though Rule Breakers have way more picks than the ads seemed to imply. I found this: https://daytradereview.com/motley-fool-rule-breakers-review/ . Seems like a new recommendation every 2 weeks ::). That's way too many Rule Breakers IMO. This also explains why they can claim stratospheric returns on famous stocks: you pick 26 growth stocks a year, you have 260 stocks in 10 years >1/2 of SP500! You gonna have the 10x results on some of them ( here they also claim huge returns on BIDU, TSLA, ISRG: https://www.thestockdork.com/motley-fool-rule-breakers-review/ ). Looking at the 2016-2017 recommendation list, it's mostly known cos. Though perhaps they recommended them earlier than I looked at them. I'd have to look at my (nonexistent :) ) notes to compare. And I can't claim that I bought (substantial) positions in the winning ones. Anyway, it might be a good hunting ground, though I'm not sure I'm gonna subscribe. 8) Well, it is correct that they have a pick every 2 weeks, so they can be 26 picks a year (unless have repeat recommendations which is certainly the case), so it is a wide net as Gregmal correctly stated. I do think they caught some pretty big fish in the past, so to me, the MF Rulebreaker or Stockadvisor seems like a pretty good starting point. It seems they based on the review site you posted, the Stockadvisor actually has outperformed the Rulebreaker. I personally never had been much of a growth investor, but have been thinking about changing my approach a bit (call it New Years resolution!) and while I probably could find and figure out all these stocks myself, it is probably more efficient to have someone else present a bunch of predigested opportunities to me. I am thinking of subscribing.

Plenty of photos here collected by abyli. Empty supply bins for masks, gloves and eye goggles. https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/r0MgCEtpYRocZECSPcpDXA I also have photos of dead bodies on the ground in the hospital for hours with no one taking care of. They are covered by white cloth so I can tell they are already dead. While at the same time, I have a photo of the Provincial Governor on TV saying that they have plenty of supply and there is nothing to worry about! Best of wishes to your relatives. My wife (who speaks some Chinese) also looked at some news and told me that it looks quite concerning and that I should look into 3M stock. APT is also a bit interesting Well some traders have noticed. however, the business has been around forever and has gone nowhere. most or the revenue is related to construction. Of course 3M is so large that there isn’t much real exposure either, but I notice that the brand recognition caused the stock to be relatively strong on an otherwise down day. My own bet will probably be on the rebound of some travel related stocks like airlines or hotels. I am watching IHG for the latter, which is a well run asset light hotel international franchise business.

Plenty of photos here collected by abyli. Empty supply bins for masks, gloves and eye goggles. https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/r0MgCEtpYRocZECSPcpDXA I also have photos of dead bodies on the ground in the hospital for hours with no one taking care of. They are covered by white cloth so I can tell they are already dead. While at the same time, I have a photo of the Provincial Governor on TV saying that they have plenty of supply and there is nothing to worry about! Best of wishes to your relatives. My wife (who speaks some Chinese) also looked at some news and told me that it looks quite concerning and that I should look into 3M stock.

Perhaps related to above, I feel that DFS could be a great takeover target for A Fintech company like SQ. They would acquire a substantial customer base, a profitable business and Discovers Pulse network that they possible could use to nudge transactions over Pulse rather than Visa or MC and/or enhance it with their tech layer.

I have been following DFS for a while , but haven’t owned the stock since 2007 , but decided to buy a starter position after today’s drop. Itis interesting now this has evolved since the last post in 2015. Card losses are indeed up in thr 3% ish rate from the 2%, but it hasn’t hurt their performance. DFS has had ~25% ROE and bought back a significant amount of stock from ~450M shares in 2015 to ~315M shares now, while growing their receivables in the mid single digits. It’s all unsecured credit of course and definitely will get squeezed in a decision, but the cash generation is quite impressive when times are good. I consider the stock cheap, even baking in some headwinds from CECL (current expected credit losses) accounting, which forces to build a reserve when a loan is created - my understanding as I am no expert. http://www.rocketfinancial.com/Financials.aspx?fID=5705&pw=188223