Jurgis

Edit: Long list of pre-deal SPACs getting below 10.10. Couple below 10.05. Most below 10.20. Likely end of party? Start looking for those <$10 buys. 8)

Elon has tweeted that he bought Dogecoin for his son's account. So he does profit. Assuming his tweet was not a joke but who knows.

WSB! ???

OMG the questions... ::)

01:13:36​ - Etsy vs Redbubble Thanks for the link. Regarding Etsy vs Redbubble, he does not really talk about the dangers of Etsy or others dominating the category. He pretty much says that Redbubble valuation was way lower. He was buying at 200M AUD (or so) while now Redbubble is trading at 1.3B AUD. So not as cheap as before - though still possibly OKish. I have mixed opinions about whether the inventory of independent artists is ultimately a good thing or not. Andrew is selling the vision that "independent artists create quirky designs that express who you are and so this is huge runway". My counter would be that 90+% of independent artist creations are crap. And if I want to express who I am from the corporate side, I'd buy Star Wars merch (which is BTW being sold without license on teepublic.com - where are Disney lawyers?). If I wanted to be quirky or funny, I'd buy from https://www.lightinthebox.com/c/men-s-tees-tank-tops_35211?prm=1.1.51.0 or https://www.computergear.com/funny-tshirts.html I don't want to get into a big discussion on this, but I think that this sales vision is not as great as it is being sold. Though TBH I have the same issue with ETSY. We bought couple masks from ETSY, but it's unlikely we are going back (ever?). Edit: I browsed a bit more teepublic and redbubble. I still think that redbubble looks way better than teepublic. I think I understand why they haven't merged the sites. It is probably not that trivial to port everything to redbubble including users/social networking features, etc. But still it hurts both sites IMO by splitting the designer and customer base. redbubble site looks professional, nice social networking features. teepublic looks pretty worn down. I wonder if they are just going to let it die. No easy decisions IMO. Disclosure: I have a small position in ETSY. I may or may not buy or hold position in RBL. Disclaimer: RBL may go multibagger despite my thoughts. Don't blame me for not buying it. 8)

Donate for St. Jude's hospital, win a seat on Space X space trip: https://www.prizeo.com/campaigns/l/inspiration4 I donated. Maybe I shouldn't advertise this so that my chances to win would be higher, but screw it. Charity is more important. 8) If you donate and win, can we has a dinner/beer/something after the trip? 8)

Most of the major media companies and tech companies post whole articles...not just links. I don't think you should have to pay for links, but if you're cutting and pasting, or copying whole articles, yeah...I think they should be paying the writers or owners of the content. Cheers! Sanjeev, not true. I haven't seen a whole article on FB ever (I think that's also true for GOOGL). It's links and maybe abstracts. And, yeah, I would agree that there's some legal ground to fight about abstracts. But it seems the demands are about links.

At 70M AUD FCF, let's say 15% growth, and 1.3B AUD market cap, this looks pretty cheap. Questions/issues I have: 1. Is the business gonna fall after Covid? Was this a mask business bump? 2. Does it have eyeballs/traction? E.g. as a customer why this and not Etsy? 3. I took a look at https://www.teepublic.com/t-shirts - first, there's nothing very attractive. Second, there's at least 2 copyright violations (Garfield and Kermit) - possibly more - on the first page. I guess lawyers don't care? Yet? 4. https://www.redbubble.com looks better than teepublic.com Why not merge platforms and use the better one? Didn't they have 2 years to do it? 5. https://www.redbubble.com still invites the question: how this is going to compete with Etsy? Yeah, I know Redbubble does the item manufacturing, while Etsy does not. Pros/cons. It's interesting at the current price. But as anything retail it's very hard for me to evaluate direction and growth. I really don't see a sustainable advantage. I can see Etsy offering similar terms and crushing them. Or VistaPrint. Or almost any other e-commerce brand. Yeah, they have creators. But if the other brand has other products and brand name/presence, they can start by subsidizing and luring creators with bigger market/name. Maybe Redbubble is big in Australia, IDK, but it's not a brand in US/Europe AFAIK. I'm feeling a bit like evaluating VistaPrint years ago when people were predicting rosy future and then close to zero growth and returns happened. ::)

I risk to sound like a broken record, but personally ANGI "inserting itself" has had zero value to me as a customer in the past. I'll believe it when I see it. ::) Curiously enough I (still) have a position in ANGI. Mostly because of (mistaken?) belief in IAC owners/management and somewhat cheapish valuation. I'm gonna be very positively surprised if ANGI manages to multibagger from here.

Why doesn't VistaPrint/Cimpress do this and crush the category? A bit rhetorical question... I know old-cos are slow-cos. ::)

Agreed. The founding principle of the internet (the free flow of information) is being assaulted on many fronts. Did you read the piece Liberty posted re: Apple/App Store a week or so back? It is a similar vein. Corporations are carving out chunks of the internet, building walls (and/or paying regulators to do it for them), and charging entrance/exit fees. A rhetorical question to debate internally (at the risk of over-politicizing), if the internet was not created by government and academia, would it ever have looked the way it does? If corporations "invented" the internet, would it ever have been so widely adopted, or would their tollgates have prevented adoption in the first place? Yep, I have read and commented on the Apple/App Store article. I'm not going to comment on rhetorical question. IMO it's very hard to say and discussion would likely cross the political line. #FreeTheWeb

Canada is planning to do Australia next. So basically WWW is dead. Cause hey, Sanjeev, when are you gonna pay Canadian and Australian media companies for all the links to their pages on CoBF? And in case CoBF ever links to my website - lol that would be first - here is my BTC wallet: <censored> so you can start transferring BTC for every link from CoBF to my websites. This is f*cking complete destruction of the WWW principles. (If this is too political, please remove KK Thx OK) Disclaimer: I have a large positions in FB and GOOGL. I am buying more. But it is possibly one of the biggest risks to both companies - and not just to them. F*ck media companies.

I was not aware of this company and to be honest with you I am not sure what to make of the market, its potential, etc at this point. Thank you for bringing to my attention though, looks like very interesting. The founder is a doctor and they are using providers (doctors / health care institutions) as a way to get to the end customers - so using existing healthcare system. At this point I don't know of the dynamics of how all this will work within the existing system. I will do a diligence before I comment on it further. Actually I will be interested in your thoughts on this company. One thing that did catch my eye (in a positive way) while cursory browsing their website is the following - https://www.actx.com/info/services "Only actionable genetic conditions and medications are covered where there is evidence that there is something that you and your doctor can do" https://www.actx.com/info/talk_to_your_doctor "ActX is a screening service and not intended for the diagnosis of high risk patients. The Service looks only at selected variants (DNA variations) for the targeted genes and not for all possible genetic variants. The ActX Service is not intended for the diagnosis of patients at high risk of serious genetic conditions (such as a strong family history of breast cancer)." ActX is a private startup company. I have looked at it multiple times, but did not invest. Valuation was (is?) way way lower than 23andMe. They (mostly?) sell their service to medical centers at enterprise level. They have few customers. Big question is adoption/penetration speed. In a way they have the opposite issue than 23andMe: since they are selling to medical centers, the value of their service would be (way) higher if a lot of patients already had their genetic tests done, since then the doctors could check the risks without ordering a genetic test that costs money and takes time. Now, they are piggybacking on 23andMe result data - i.e. patients apparently can import 23andMe data to be used for ActX services. There is still a chicken and egg issue somewhat since a patient can only see benefit if their doctor (or their doctor's organization) has purchased ActX or if the patient buys ActX and persuades their doctor to use it. I don't know how useful the service is for doctors when patient has genetic info. ActX claims it is with some large percentage of patients having at least one or few common drug risks. I don't know if they have public info on percentages/drugs. I can only talk about the information that ActX discloses on their website. If interested in more in depth info, PM me and I could introduce you to the company management. Disclaimer: I am not a doctor. I don't have any financial interest in ActX at this time.

Yea, I don't see how any lawsuit is successful against him. 1.) He's a Legend. and 2.) This whole episode is just entertaining to watch unfold. Your honor, I am not a cat and the defendant is a Legend. Case dismissed!

I think you misunderstand US legal system (IANAL LOLZ though). House is not in the business of suing people based or not based on the hearings. There are other governmental or non-governmental organizations that can sue him. In fact, there is already a class-action lawsuit against him and his employer from people who lost money on GME. Finally, pretty much anyone can sue anyone in US. This does not mean that the lawsuit will be successful. IANAL again.

The federal EV credits might come back too. ;) Yeah, $7K would be a large benefit. Although that assumes that Tesla won't raise prices if EV credit is approved... ::)

Sad to hear about the problems and damage in Texas. Hope most of you all are doing OKish. :-\

I'm still out couple years before buying a car, but Model 3 and Y pricing is rather attractive. Standard range prices were cut.

There is not much value in full dna or exome health panel for general population. In-fact, one could argue its negative value. I will do a thought experiment here. Let's make reasonable assumption that a fraction of US adult population falls under "worried well" category - people who subscribe to certain diet plans (weight watchers - WW) or buy multi-vitamins / protein shakes (GNC) to improve their health or feel better. There is a market for that. Here is the catch though. For a given person trying out these things these are almost always positive benefits (in best case) or no benefit (in worst case) situation. Now think about people going and getting entire exome/ dna sequenced. What kind of information will they get? They will almost always get information that is reflecting of mutations in their dna/genes. So what is the significance of this information? In overwhelming cases the answer is we don't know. In a very small subset of cases it has highly negative feeling, even though the clinical consequences may be nothing (e.g: say there is a mutation in the gene BRCA implicated in breast cancer - the science suggests that most of the mutations in that gene are harmless and only some are meaningful and even then they increase your risk from say 0.1% to 1% or something like that). There is almost no situation I know of where such information is positive (e.g: it is impossible to say - you will live for 120 years or you will be resistant to Alzheimer for a set of mutations) So now we have a product that does not give out feel good information in any case, mostly gives out information that even doctors/scientists don't know what the significance is and in worst case makes people unnecessarily worried or does harm. Imagine someone acting on a false positive BRCA information and getting mastectomy. That is not a consumer product. It is a diagnostic test that is carefully administered in the presence of other information such as family history of a disease or clinical symptoms. That is why FDA closely monitors such products and in the past a cease / desist letter to 23andMe long time back (https://law.stanford.edu/2013/11/25/lawandbiosciences-2013-11-25-the-fda-drops-an-anvil-on-23andme-now-what/) I agree with what you wrote mostly. :) What do you think about the services that ActX provides: https://www.actx.com/ ( in essence checking prescriptions against genetic data for side effects / efficiency )? They claim to have pretty significant library of scientific data for various diseases/drugs/genetic data.

8.6bb investment in Verizon. $4bb in Chevron. That doesn't seem like as good a use of capital as doing buybacks to me. Exactly my sentiment. If I was told I had to choose between owning BRK or VZ+CVX it is not a hard decision. +1

Capitalism works or maybe Screw-it-there's-no-point-to-invest-TSMC-is-gonna-eat-our-lunch-and-make-all-our-chips-anyway-fck-R&D-hire-McKinsey-for-financial-engineering really works

I'm gonna kvetch about IB again. Just completed their annual investor info gathering form. They require you to provide your employer's website. It's like WTF dudes. Is this really in KYC or did some idiot put that into your "let's ask more irrelevant questions" package? What if I work for a company that does not have a website? Is www.notyourfingbusiness.com fine for you? And then there's the "did you really stop beating your wife" question about backup withholding. Anybody knows if the answer should be yes or no? They phrase it in a way that makes you really not sure what "yes" means and what "no" means. It's something like "Are you not subject to the backup withholding?" (sorry can't get to the actual formulation anymore). Their form answer defaults to "no", which would seem to indicate that "no" means that you're not subject to backup withholding. But for someone who reads the question "yes" seems to indicate that you're not subject to backup withholding. I marked "yes", but WTF really.

I'm just gonna repeat myself: $BTC for $TSLA. 8)

It's funny. Everyone piles up with doomsday negativity and dismissive comments on ARK ETFs. But there's a lot of backslapping and cheering "value" investor reports from 2020 with 50-100%+ returns where said investors hold the same or similar names to ARK ETFs. It's a disaster in the making if Cathie Wood holds overpriced nifty-fifty-great-brand-great-growth stocks. But it's a prudent long term value investment if "value" investors hold them. 8)

Serious question, if you feel you have no 'edge' (which is a quantitative concept i.e., better odds than average), why are you picking stocks at all? There would be no point. Because people are overoptimistic about their abilities and therefore they think they have an edge when they really don't. ....... On the other hand, as someone has already mentioned, Kelly's does not really capture the time dimension. A good/great business may be "efficiently valued" for today, but still provide a good/great return if held long time. Market often undervalues (not "always" like Gorilla Game claimed, but "often") undervalues long term compounders.