Liberty

Cool. I'll be having some drinks with a few people from this forum and Twitter on the day before (Thursday, april 27) at the 'C'est What' pub downtown, not far from where the AGM is taking place. Feel free to join us. Not sure yet exactly at what time, but probably not too late in the evening. I'll try to post on my Twitter and maybe here when I know more. I need to go eat first and drop my stuff at my AirBNB when I get off the train.

When prices go up 33% in a year, it totally discourages sellers with a different kind of FOMO. Those who considered selling are thinking, if I just wait a bit more, I'll make hundreds of thousands of dollars more of this free money, everybody tries to time the peak, that's why people weren't selling their Nortel stock that had gone up hundreds of percents in a short period of time.

Scott Galloway - How Amazon is Dismantling Retail

It's in the proxy, first paragraph:

Lots of people called a bubble for the dot com, but even more people kept buying stocks. Same thing is happening now with real estate, but it's just in the recent past that there's been more agreement about the bubble...

https://beta.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/ontario-considers-housing-tax-for-non-resident-speculators/article34731629/?ref=http://www.theglobeandmail.com&cmpid=rss1&click=sf_globe&service=mobile

btw, for a longer-form interview with Cohodes, check out episode 7 here: https://www.grantspub.com/podcasts.cfm Not saying it'll change anyone's mind, but this is better than a BNN segment...

Yeah, Cohodes' interviews are pretty meh on the details, but that's TV for you. Good interviews are rare, and it's quite obvious that he doesn't want to go into any specifics for legal reasons (he's been sued multiple times already). Every time he's pushed to go there, he goes back to more general things. Wherever he gets his info, I think lately he's been good at pointing out rotten apples, and that's a valuable skill to have. Once he points them out, you can have a look and see what you think. It's not about blindly trusting his work, just like you shouldn't do that on the long side, even if you have fave longs that generate good ideas for you. Most of the people I follow are longs, so I like to get a dose of something different in my diet.

I have no problem with shorts talking their book as longs do that as well (although I don't like that practice). I do have a problem with spreading misinformation and deliberately misleading insinuation without any support. This is the double standard again. He's not a prosecutor, he's an investor. He doesn't have to prove everything he says anymore than a long has to prove what they're saying. They're sharing stuff, and you do your own thinking and diligence and decide if you agree or not. You happen not to agree because you trust the company's financials and have some views on the Canadian real estate market. I have different views. Cohodes, like many, is pretty good at publicizing his wins - but what about his losses? And you think he intends to do that just because he says so? He was on the other side of me on EBIX years ago, and he still talks about it as a loss ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ I don't have to agree with everything he says, he's not my god, I just think he's making good points about a few companies lately. As far as doing what he says, who knows. Same question applies to any long who talks about what they're doing. How do I know you're not secretly short HCG and you're just saying all this to confuse me? How can you prove anything that anyone says? You make your own calls and develop judgement and try to be right more often than you're wrong, that's all that anyone of us strive for in this business. I'm a lot more suspicious now of a long like Donville who has been praising some stocks on TV at the same time as he was selling his stake... And who often praised HCG without disclosing clearly that he had been on their investment committee in 2007 and had a paid relationship with the company. As far as a I know, Cohodes hasn't done anything like that, he's just a chicken farmer who likes to do multi-year shorts and get sued by CEOs who think all their problems come from short-sellers. http://www.homecapital.com/press_releases/2007/Home%20Capital%20Group%20Appoints%20Jason%20Donville%20as%20Chief%20Investment%20Officer.pdf Concordia was another Donville top pick at $43, iirc.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Someone asked, and I thought it was an interesting thought experiment.

AWS doesn't depend on Amazon.com's retail operation, but Amazon.com's retail operation does depend on AWS. Define "depends". If you mean that it currently runs on it, then yes. If you mean that it couldn't be hosted elsewhere, then I don't think so. It is hosted on AWS, and as a very large operation, it would be hard to migrate. But if Amazon for some reason told MSFT or GOOGL that they wanted to host their sites on their platform, it could be done as long as there's enough advance notice and migration time.

Funny how shorts always have a higher burden of proof and draw more suspicion with regard to their motives than longs... Be wary of that premise. There is no reason to suggest that shorts in general do more work than longs, although in general they seem to broadcast themselves more audibly. That's what I'm saying, they're no better and no worse. There's a million articles by longs saying that everything is great and will go higher. But when a short says things are bad and going lower, well, that's judged differently! Look, I've heard things from both sides and I happen to lean more toward the short side on HCG. It's an opinion. It's not high conviction and I don't short so I'm not putting much time behind it, but I also have opinions on lots of other companies, so it's not a big deal. It seems like a pretty crappy company with crappy management and crappy culture, they've been riding a wave for a while but now the cracks are starting to show. These are a dime a dozen, especially here in Canada. Cohodes was pretty right on Concordia and Valeant, and HCG so far. For every Cohodes, there's a thousand longs who pump things the other way, so why is he singled out? That's what I meant by double standards. If I agreed with a long instead, nobody would tell me to "be careful listening to longs". Cohodes has been short HCG since 2014 iirc and seems to plan to ride it into the ground, similarly to CRX and VRX, he's not a trader going for a quick market manipulation. That's as admirable as a long-term investor, IMO. I'm not wired to do that kind of things, but I think the market needs more people like that to balance things out.

Funny how shorts always have a higher burden of proof and draw more suspicion with regard to their motives than longs... I'm just a casual observer of HCG because it's tied to the Canadian RE market, which interests me. For years I've read what the longs say about it, from Donville to the people on the FEB, so I'm familiar with the thesis. So far it's been wrong, but time will tell. I don't really want to dig deeper because, frankly, I don't care enough about it. If you do, and have conviction, as I said, feel free to invest in it and make a lot of money. If Canadian RE corrects big time and defaults start to go up, it'll be interesting to see what happens when regulators start digging into all the paperwork and supposed due diligence that had to be done by lenders and find boatloads of irregularities... There's always the theory -- securitization reduced risk in the US, insured mortgages protect lenders in Canada -- and then the practice when shit hits the fan. Taxpayers won't be happy about bailing out lenders who gave huge million+ mortgages to regular folks so they could buy overpriced condos and shacks just because our system happened to have incentives that created huge moral hazard (lend to anyone who has a pulse and keep the upside, but the downside is supposedly capped because CHMC will take care of it...).

Thanks, this is what I've been trying to find. I'll look for this presentation. I think it was this one, but I could be misremembering: Update: Oh wait, maybe it was this one: Update 2: Yep, it's in the James Hamilton presentation. I got my numbers slightly mixed up, but it was also for 2015..

At the AWS conference keynote they mentioned that AWS was adding as much server capacity daily now as the whole of Amazon.com used in 2008. Amazon.com is certainly a big customer of AWS, but at this point, the thing doesn't depend on it in any way, IMO.

Geoff was one of the first online value investing guys I followed back in the day, I'll definitely listen to this one, thanks.

Liberty, it's probably not a good idea to get your information from twitter short-sellers - they're not exactly a very fair source. It's also probably not a great idea to base your view on a company by how its stock is doing on any single day. First National is the largest monoline lender in Canada by far and handle substantial underwriting and origination for the Big Banks - in fact, they are so good at underwriting, originating and servicing that their arrears rates are even lower than that of the Big Banks and that the Big Banks even outsource those functions to First National. Home and Equitable are the two largest federally-regulated lenders after the Big Banks and occupy dominant positions in a niche-type market. Check out their NPLs and loss rate history if you're worried about their underwriting. It's no wonder that short-sellers love these stocks - the float's small, they're not liquid and they're all pretty easy to manipulate given the narrative and fear over anything related to Canadian real estate. I'm sure it's because of the shorts that fraud and lax lending standards were uncovered, the second CEO in a short period was fired, insiders have been selling rapidly, and the company can't even earn decently in a huge real estate bubble in Canada. Based on what I know about the company, I don't trust their financials, so looking at them to be reassured isn't an option. But if you think they're so wrong, I expect you can make a lot of money with your variant perception by buying it hand over fist. Time will tell who's right. Meanwhile, the stock is at almost 5-year lows and falling fast... Personally, I have no position as I don't short.

HCG, First National Financial, and Equitable going down the crapper... Canary in coal mine?

A few recent Musk tweets: "Tesla Semi truck unveil set for September. Team has done an amazing job. Seriously next level." "@SamGonzales Next gen Roadster will be convertible" "@NoahMagel Pickup truck unveil in 18 to 24 months" "@elonmusk timeframe for Model 3 final unveil?" "@gucci_mau July"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4G2carVhVJk Trailer for the movie based on this book about Bernie Madoff: https://www.amazon.com/Wizard-Lies-Bernie-Madoff-Death/dp/1250007437/ Looks promising, IMO.

https://electrek.co/2017/04/09/tesla-solar-panel-panasonic/

Meh. It looks pretty good, but looks aren't everything. Starts at $136k and not even a full EV: Probably will be produced in super low volumes. It's basically a show car to get PR at this point. 10,000 sold in a couple years...

Hybrids (HEV and PHEVs) are the worst of both worlds in this case, because both the electric and gas sides lose efficiency and they both have to lug each other around, so that the empty battery has to be pushed up that hill by the tiny ICE struggling in the snow and cold.

The cold is just part of it. There are many other factors in places where winters are cold that affect range. The roads tend to be less flat (there's snow and slush and bumpy ice), which increases rolling resistance. Cars tend not to be as aerodynamic because almost nobody will completely remove all snow and ice from the exterior, etc. These factors affect gasoline cars as well as EVs, obviously. Which also means that if you live somewhere that gets decently cold but doesn't get snow, you won't be affected nearly as much. But as I said, Norway has the highest number of per capita EVs in the world and they're doing just fine.

Have you tracked your MPG on those really cold days? There are many factors, but fuel economy on gasoline vehicles can easily drop 20-30% on decently cold days, and even more on the coldest days. Older gas cars also become less efficient with age. A 10-year-old car won't get the MPG that it got when it was new. So while it's true that cold weather can affect range, there shouldn't be a double-standard where people constantly talk about it with EVs but never do with gas cars. I suspect what will happen is that as there are more EVs on the roads, people realize it's not a big deal. Esp. less of a big deal now that there are fast-charging stations popping up everywhere, and there's going to be thousands more within a few years.