rmitz

Interesting. Amazon finally exercised their warrants. I wonder why now? https://www.cnbc.com/2021/03/08/amazon-takes-minority-stake-in-cargo-contractor-atsg.html https://otp.tools.investis.com/clients/us/atsg_inc/SEC/sec-show.aspx?Type=html&FilingId=14781360&Cik=0000894081 Looks like they're holding themselves under 20% ownership.

Dang, you pipped me on the medium link--I think the distinction between commercial and residential supply chains could be key here, and the fact that there may not be much headroom to trivially increase output...

I bought some ATSG for the first time in many years. It was down ~50% from the high.

Just for another anecdote...I went to a Chipotle for the first time in about a year. It was a new location, but don't know how much that matters. The chips were terrible; no crunch at all. The food was bland. Not sure what was going on but it was nothing to write home about. BTW, those 3 double cheeseburgers at McDonald's constitute about 1300 calories...

Agreed. Same situation - mortgage, car payment, refi'd student loans, and any other loan i can get below 4%. We have the entire world to invest in, and the hurdle is 4%. Well, you won't go broke doing this, but when we actually hit a serious downturn, I can say from experience that it really feels shitty to be in the situation with your equity decimated and all these loans hanging over your head. It does work out in the long term (assuming you haven't done something really catastrophic on your investments) but it doesn't feel good at all.

It wouldn't take you long to read the history--there hasn't been much activity about this company on here for years. And I wouldn't say that "people" were contemplating it; it was purely my own speculation. To me ATSG seems fairly valued, and this is still a cyclical industry. I get angsty about this every so often as it makes up the vast majority of my taxable account. I probably won't actually do anything though.

Well, I think the buyout of WFM by Amazon today should dispell any notions of a significant buyout by Amazon for ATSG. It's an all-cash deal, so the possible speculation of getting Amazon shares at a really low cost basis via ATSG holdings should be considered dead. At this point all my holdings are taxable so at some point I'm going to need an exit strategy...

Welp, that was quite a day yesterday. Seems like this is now a forever holding for me (except for charitable donations); or at least until Amazon buys them out...

2016: 45% over 10 years: 15.9% My large legacy ATSG position wags the dog this year. I haven't done much for a while now and all new funds are invested conservatively due to lack of time.

Gotta post on this due to all the negativity. I certainly have had some issues over time with IB but they are by far my favorite broker. All of my personally managed large accounts are there. Their main drawback is that they have been working in certain spaces and are not focusing on a lot of these deep interface issues. Also they do not handle niche account types because their philosophy is so heavily tilted towards automation. Over time they will support more and more, and we've already seen this. The most recent example is them taking over IRA administration from their previous third-party advisor and hopefully allow better integrations over time. I love the smartphone two-factor authentication--they've finally gotten that working smoothly. I've not had any trouble with configuring the reports interface to get done what I need to. I've actually had good experiences with customer support in the past, but this definitely seems like another area for improvement. I have had the annoyance with the IRA conversion as I do a yearly backdoor Roth IRA, which is much more painful than via other brokers. But while it's annoying it is straightforward. (If they would just let me keep open the traditional IRA as an empty stub account with no fees it'd be just fine). I think a lot of it comes down to your particular needs and how much they've focused on those particular needs so far. I wouldn't open any small accounts there (<100k) for example, unless you're going to do a lot of trading.

The 5x appears to just be for airfare. This is much less broad than the Chase Reserve card.

Jurgis - how were you able to get a mortgage with no fees? Appraisal, underwriting, title insurance, legal fees - all mandatory as far as I know. Would love to know your secret. In reality they eat the fees so it’s effectively lowering the interest rate slightly.

It's not quite as insane as it looks. The difference is in that Coke had continued to push more, more more via advertising of all sorts, even when Americans drink vastly more than they really should anyway. There's no problem in Europe as far as I saw where you don't really have fountain beverages (or at least no free refills) and you often get a traditional 8oz serving. Here in the US, often 20oz is now a "small", 32 very common and even 64 available. Should it be illegal? No, of course not, that's a straw man. There's really no issue with making it available in general. I think a lot of this was incentivized by the emphasis on the # of 8 oz servings metric. Even Buffett used to tout this metric in the annual letters. This created vastly larger drinks in the US. It is entirely possible that with a different focus, economically Coke could make just as much if not more money with a higher price paid for fewer servings--I'm speculating on this point though.

Yo. I use it every day and it’s handy. I don’t find it to be lifechanging or anything but it does save me time and effort. I’m looking forward to it having more power and speed in the future.

Fugly. Not at all what the apple car would look like.