Jurgis

OK, let's be controversial: ARK ETFs FTW: https://ark-funds.com/ 8)

Very timely thread. I was thinking where to post this and voila. 8) Dimensional issued active ETFs: https://us.dimensional.com/etfs Dimensional are highly regarded mutual fund shop. Their funds are accessible only through an advisor. Now their ETFs are accessible to everyone. Maybe that's a sign that they sold out and don't expect to outperform. ;) I bought token amounts to keep them on my mind.

Most days I drink their plain sencha and it's fine. My fave is Harney & Sons, but I feel bad paying that much for tea + the shipping to Canada.. Yeah, their plain teas are OK. Just - with some exceptions - mostly not worth the price IMO. I liked Organic Thailand Black, but pretty expensive. Most of the ones I ordered on Black Friday are plain teas. Will report here when I receive and try them. 8)

Anecdotally, even though I buy from DTEA sometime, I still think that most of their teas are overpriced and most of their flavored mixes are crap that I would not drink for free. I'm guilty of getting sucked into trying some of their stuff though. ::) JMO.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/01/science-covid-19-manhattan-project/617262/?utm_source=pocket-newtab

I'm still doing my job to support David's sales. Ordered a bunch on Black Friday and they still have not delivered it. Apparently they were swamped with orders. Have been slowly going through the ones I ordered and mentioned before. Plus sheng pu'erh - it's not bad, but I'm not very much pu'erh fan. You guys should send me tea donations for single-handedly keeping up the sales of this poor company. 8)

Partially OT: Harlan Ellison is (in)famous in writing long personal and philosophical introductions/prefaces to his books. I've recently read his 3 (yes, 3) prefaces to a single book spanning from the 1960s to 2000s that are quite relevant to today's political situation and events. For anyone interested, this: https://smile.amazon.com/Paingod-Other-Delusions-Harlan-Ellison-ebook/dp/B00J90EMRY/ref=sr_1_9?crid=34ZWO87GZAY1&dchild=1&keywords=harlan+ellison&qid=1608047822&sprefix=harlan+ell%2Caps%2C185&sr=8-9 ( Kindle edition has 3 prefaces, paper editions may vary ). Edit: Harlan actually also prefaces every single story in the collection with shorter or longer intro, so total number of prefaces in the book is 10 or so. :)

I'm pretty sure he was talking about Sequoia Capital and not Sequoia Fund when he said that.

We should book your car on SpaceX to equal out the numbers somewhat.

I think this is a great question. IMO Space colonization on large scale won't happen until we have either AGI or humans uploaded/merged into space/extraterrestrial-friendly containers/bodies that can live in space or on Mars and other planets without making conditions human-squishy-body friendly. Edit: There is also a question of human population growth trends. It is likely that human population growth will stop. Even without this, there is already a marked decline of frontier spirit or conquering new territories. If population growth stops, that would be additional factor against space expansion. There are some romantics, but it is unclear if there are enough of them for large scale colonization. Similarly like there are not enough romantics for large scale North Pole collonization. 8) Space is a harsh mistress.

Chuck Akre partially officially retired: https://www.mutualfundobserver.com/2020/11/manager-changes-october-2020/

So... according to your math someone who had -50% return first year and +100% second year would have 2 year 25% annualized return? ::) Maybe you should calculate what real return in this case would be. And then you might be able to calculate real return of PIF3. Oh, baby, baby, how was I supposed to know That something wasn't right here?

I heard he and Guy went out to first nations' land, drank a gallon of ayahuasca tea, and heard the universe as it whispered, "buy more Sears" ;D In reality universe whispered "Britney Spears", but how were they supposed to know that something wasn't riiighht...

I'd guess that most companies will not give a damn about small shareholders and may do subpar capital allocations for various reasons (though that's somewhat true everywhere, but it's likely more true in Eastern Europe). Some companies may try to actively screw small shareholders. You may be better off with companies that don't have large controlling shareholder. Outright fraud is probably 2x-5x more common than in US, but that's still probably 1-2% of all companies. There's likely going to be more grey area activities where companies bribe politicians, break laws/regulations, use inside connections to get preferential treatment or screw competition. These can be positive or negative for company and shareholders. Things have gotten better in last 30 years AFAIK, just not completely to Western European or US standards. FWIW from a cynical Lithuanian.

Doesn't any price raise automatically go 70% to music cos?

"Someone has to sign for the wine" is a bad headwind IMO. Is that UK or US restriction? It might be OKish during Covid, but it's quite a negative going forward even assuming some percentage of people will still work from home.

Looking at trailing 5y even without 2020, ONEX hugely underperformed SPY, KKR, BX. Looking at trailing 10y without 2020, it's more neck to neck and who outperforms depends on exact dates. This does not include dividends/spinoffs/etc, so possibly is quite broken comparison.

I so rarely get to pontificate on alarms :( You can do that for all the dinner or beer. 8)

5xEBITDA, wow, I owe you a beer or a dinner. That was a ton of value post. 8)

Share buybacks are all fine, but the stock has gone nowhere for 4 years+ before Covid. Is that due to West Jet purchase? Overall, how do you guys value this long term? How do I know that they have done well in the past and may do well in the future? I am not interested in short term mean reversion trade. Looking at financials on TIKR it's all completely f'd up, so can't make heads or tails out of it. :-\

Anyone has deep(er) insights into this one? Looking at their latest 10Q, their growth is slow: ~8% YoY. Earnings are negative. 9mo OCF and FCF are positive though. At ~210M 9mo FCF, it seems to be trading cheap at ~4.3B market cap. There is ~2.8B debt, so EV is higher at ~7.1B. So then it depends on what one thinks about debt in these times. Should I be skeptical about the OCF/FCF numbers? Or is this an underappreciated buy in an expensive market? I guess counterargument is that if they slow grow, they can’t really pay off debt anytime soon. Also the space seems to be very competitive and it's unclear to me how much brand/moat/any other advantage they have. One thing is that I get a lot of fake/fishing/spam that claims to install/provide their products cheap/free. Similar to ADT spam though, and it doesn't necessarily mean that ADT is a great company/investment. But spammers think that there is some name/brand recognition... 8) Disclosure: I have warrants that are 10x from my purchase.

Index funds do not all buy on <to be added date> at open. They can and they do prebuy earlier and/or buy later. Depending on a fund they can use other strategies including options, etc.

OKi. Disclosure: I bought INS sometime in September after looking at Alta Fox report. And I sold it pretty immediately for a wash due to Wirecard. Customer concentration is a big issue as Arski noted. Wirecard may have been 2nd or 3rd biggest customer IIRC (please double check ::) ). The probability of GS/AppleCard dumping INS is low, but if this happens, it's likely gonna go down 50%+. And since they lost Wirecard, they should have capacity for new customer(s), so there's a bit of a question how capacity constrained they really are. I also think that companies/CEOs that claim "customers are beating on our doors, but we don't grow faster to sustain our quality/brand/virginity" are likely full of s*17. Anyway, this could work out fine. I'm not a bear, I'm just in too-hard-piler for now. Have a great one.

I think this is rather big misrepresentation of the actual situation. Can you provide any evidence that INS actually turned away customers?

I'm somewhat Amazon fanboy, but we have finally disconnected Amazon Alexa/Echo. We've had it for 2+ years and we just don't use it at all. So I hope that Amazon got all the data about our secret conspiratorial conversations. It's not getting any more. (Actually it's still gonna get data from our 3 Fire tablets, but who's really counting). 8)