Jurgis

Gross Financial Product? 8)

Apart from security checkpoint, security screening, and metal detector going into hotel? ::)

There is a thread on the same topic in Politics section that has some additional links. May or may not be useful. Just FYI.

Oh well. On Walmart.com: It's a food item. They shipped it to me before. It appears Amazon is not the only one with shipping problems.

Ah, now I understand your question. I don't know the answer. :-\

OMFG

In my very non-lawyerly opinion: company is likely to get class-action sued after releasing bad news anyway. If it made any noises internally (e-mails and all that), that "we will buy back stock when it drops after releasing bad news" and these would become known to class-action lawyers, they'd likely have even better case against company. So probably nobody in company says that explicitly although some people may think of doing it. Most companies though (as I said above) buy shares when things are rosy, and stop buying when they are not. So not many occurences of your scenario IMO. But some lawyer input might be interesting.

Never was there an out of stock mention until I inquired why it wasn't being shipped. We are in Alaska. One order was during holidays and the other wasn't. The orders were for DVD's and pet med's. The orders were from Amazon and I had had good results in the past. Sorry to hear that. I agree that it sucks. These shouldn't be categories that require weeks to ship. Maybe you are somewhat affected by being in non-contiguous state, but it still not good. Let's hope they resolve whatever caused this.

I guess we will see if that was a valuation call or if they are like other companies that buyback when things are great, but stop buying when business is not that great. Will be interesting to see Q2 repurchases. Thanks for posting globalfinancepartners.

This is more or less just a continuation of their mail coupon program. They used to sent 20% off coupons to virtually any household every couple of weeks, but no more. Moving this online rather than carpedbombing mail coupons makes sense, since they can track customers better and customize the program. Not completely just a continuation: I don't see a value of this for us. I agree with Spekulatius that this looks better for the store than postal mail 20% off carpetbombing. I don't know the second order dynamics though: do they have a lot of customers who won't go to the stores now that they don't receive 20% off postal coupons? who either don't know about online program or don't want to pay for it? I guess we'll see.

I am firmly in the camp of Buffett-key-man-risk. Looking at Munger though, we can possibly expect another 7 years +/- couple of Buffett. And the company won't deteriorate immediately after Buffett dies, so it is still investable IMVHO.

We don't use BBBY, TJX, DSW, etc. online at all. Even though we shop TJX and DSW - quite more often than BBBY - in bricks and mortar.

If someone's great investor's performance is crushed, it's obviously a bubble that's at fault.

If it's not a secret: are you in US? what did you order that had such long delays? Edit additional questions: were the purchases during holidays? was there any indication of "out of stock / will be available in ... " during order? Was the order from Amazon, 3rd party or 3rd party handled by Amazon? I think I've seen order delays with furniture...

I might be counterexample, but I am in totally opposite camp from oddballstocks and bookie71. Amazon was and is great. We buy a lot of stuff there. Yeah, some two day shipping is not two day, but I don't care mostly and IMO it's always disclosed when you buy. I may have one or two deliveries that took longer but most actually take shorter. Well, I usually also take the coupon offer for slower shipping and the slower shipping is faster than they promise. Yeah, for some items search is not easy. Trivial example: we were looking for magnifying glass. This is totally Chinese-made-low-quality-item-hell: tons of Chinese "brands", tons of (fake?) reviews, etc. Ultimately we chose something, ordered it and it seems OK. Similar experience with car phone holder. OTOH, you can find good stuff. E.g. I bought a high quality Japanese bread knife for a very good price. Was shipped from Japan. Took 3 weeks to arrive. It's top notch bread knife. Pretty sure it's not fake or knockoff and IMO way better than a lot of locally sold (or Amazon sold) American crap ;). Cut off half of my finger with it, but that's another story. ::) Yes, there are items that we buy elsewhere. Food pricing still varies a lot: from below Walmart/local-supermarket to 2x Walmart/local-supermarket. You either have to comparison price or just eyeball. We don't buy clothes on Amazon because it is tough to evaluate the quality and sizes. YMMV though. When we had to get a gaming computer within two days, we went with local Microcenter. We almost always price compare anything expensive.

Since there's a discussion on "what you are buying" thread, I'll add recent anecdotal experience. We went to BBBY store after not going there for half a year or longer. Bought some stuff from clearance bins. Did not have their 20% off coupon - I think they gave up sending them to us. Store was OKish. Clearance prices were around Amazon level. I kinda like their inventory and prices. I think there are still items which we might buy there, but clearly our infrequent visits won't make their business.

People on CoBF may want a definite answer, but IRL the answer is "it depends". Like vinod1 said, Buffett talks not about definite outcome but about tendencies and trends. As a lot of posters have shown, it is possible to get good (to great) results in so so business. If you don't look for (very) long term, it's even possible to have great results in very crappy business. Businesses (as well as managements) also change. Business may be great then become crappy and maybe even become great again. So can a company and management. If you look for tendencies and trends, there are businesses and business areas that tend to have more moat, higher margins, etc. than others. So naturally Buffett gets attracted to these areas and may talk about them as wonderful businesses. But he is simplifying and exaggerating that you might be fine with a wonderful business run by an idiot or that bad business will always trump good management. So it might be fine to invest in COST or WMT. But while doing so, it's probably worthwhile to remember what happened to Tesco. 8)

Maybe add ticker and move to stock forum?

My heavily discounted $.02 thoughts on this: on one hand, I'd think this should be approved; on another hand, I don't like that PACB is money losing IMO richly valued business. Running Kelly on this assuming .08 increase on success and .4 drop (a bit generous?) on failure, Kelly swings to gains at ~85% chance of approval. This might be reasonable expectation of success. Personally, I won't buy, but I'm probably not a good role model on this. 8)

Trillion dollar curse and Buffett curse strike again! 8)

Not sure I agree. iPhone unit sales have clearly plateaued. But I'd like to see a two year stack on unit sales (to account for S cycle). However, Apple has messed with pricing and product cycles, so it is very difficult to extrapolate. Is this just a temporary blip caused by aggressive price increases (or Chinese economy)? Are unit sales Signal or Noise? We probably won't know for another 12-24 months. I see what you are saying. You are making legit points. Yeah it's tough to know what would have happened if Apple went with different price points. Let's see what the numbers are in coming year(s). You frequently have interesting observations and insights. Thanks. 8)

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-01-03/questions-on-apple-aapl-earnings-strategies-after-outlook-cut https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-01-02/apple-s-iphone-warning-comes-years-too-late https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-01-03/apple-s-china-iphone-woes-foretold-by-japan-machine-makers Bearish slant articles, but with some interesting numbers and graphs. BTW, although I agree with KCLarkin a bit, I think that some numbers (not opinions) are not that great: number of iPhones sold is clearly not a positive. So it's not just opinions.

I think I disagree somewhat re: Netflix. I think I posted that I wanted to cancel Netflix because we have Amazon Prime and Amazon Prime has been improving and hosting a lot of similar/same content as Netflix. My wife said "no way". And not because she watches Netflix-exclusive or Netflix-produced content. I think it's mostly based on familiarity, UI, long existing watch list. Maybe somewhat based on content that is known to be on Netflix, but not necessarily exclusive: she knows it's on Netflix and she does not want to search/check if it's on Amazon (or will it ever be on Amazon). So IMO if service has a huge membership like Netflix has, they may have stickiness and moat based on existing relationship with viewers/subscribers. There is a pain point of moving to another service even if that other service may have some of the same content. And Netflix can even raise price and not lose subscribers like that. Whether this applies to Spotify, I don't know. I'd say that they need to grow a number of users a lot for this to apply, which is one of the points of OP. It also may be different for music services if the content overlap is very big: i.e. if every service has everything. In movies, nobody has everything. Netflix doesn't, Amazon doesn't. And the availability changes all the time, which BTW I think psychologically makes people more tied to the service, since there is this thought "if I cancel, I may miss movies/shows that might be there next month".

I wonder how pervasive that is. I mostly have Android/Windows products. (Samsung phone/tablet, chrome cast, windows laptop). A few years ago, I won an iPad as a door prize at a conference. We have used it, but it didn't have anything compelling over my similar age samsung tablet that would have cost much less if i had paid for both. I certainly didn't feel compelled to switch. I'm not a tech expert by any stretch, and don't have any particular affinity for Android, but I try to buy the cheapest quality product that meets my needs, which has so far been Android every time. I think it varies. I think Apple (and no-Apple) has at least 3 somewhat overlapping categories of users: - Geek Apple fans: mostly buy Apple because of features, UI, ecosystem, privacy. Usually well to do. Some upgrade frequently, some do not. - Influencers/fashionistas: mostly buy Apple because of cachet. Usually well to do (?). Upgrade frequently. Personally, I don't know people in this group, so this is mostly hearsay. - Regular Jane/Joe Consumer: mostly buy Apple because of ease-of-use, somewhat UI/features, mostly have no clue about ecosystem beyond apps, mostly have no clue about privacy. Not necessarily well to do. Usually do not upgrade frequently. I know a bunch of Lithuanians who are in this category. All these categories can abandon Apple (or even not consider it in the first place) for various/different reasons: - Geek Apple fans may abandon it for features/cost. Mostly does not happen though. No-Apple geeks never bought it because of cost or being tied into Android ecosystem. - Apple fashionistas may abandon it if it's not cool anymore. I don't think this is happening yet, but as I said, I don't know anyone in this category. No-Apple fashionistas may never bought it because it was too mainstream bling (everyone else has one...). - Apple consumers may abandon it because of cost mostly. No-Apple consumers never bought it because of cost mostly.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/31/us/waymo-self-driving-cars-arizona-attacks.html?partner=IFTTT