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@Sweet I wish! Sadly I am a long term Nintendo bagholder ever since they announced the change to become a platform and expand into movies/amusement parks/etc..

It helps that equity is probably understated by a third as well!

Everyone loves free healthcare and a lot of vacations. The problem is when Genghis Khan or Vladimir Putin come to take everything away because you suddenly find you no longer have economic heft or technological capabilities to defend yourself and also lack citizens willing to fight for said defense. And no, guys fighting to defend the country won’t have access to “work-life balance”. They’ll have to be ready to work hard. It is looking increasingly likely that high-end technology, notably AI, will be absolutely crucial for military supremacy, not to mention industrial capacity which Europe seems intent to diminish. Europe has been living in a fantasy thanks to the USA covering for its defense since the end of the Cold War…

I'm going to merge this thread into the Political Posts thread. Cheers!

Sold my PPLI position

New starter position in CBOE

My point was that this sounded familiar.. AI parallel. To your point, yes it was indeed happening. AWS went from growing 40% YoY to 20% and then 16 and it's lowest ever at 12% in the span of a year in 2023. Same thing in that timeframe with Azure from 50% to 30% and MSFT's CFO even warned on the earnings call that further slowdown is coming and remember the stock tanking on that. GCP went from 45% to 32% also, slowest ever since they started reporting that segment. What happened according to Jassy's words was that FinOps became a thing and since people were spending too much on cloud, they started optimizing within cloud very aggressively. Sell-side notes, and I recall Barclays or Goldman reporting that over 80% CIOs planned on moving workloads off cloud to see how it goes while IDC found ~80% expecting to repatriate some compute or storage within a year. Then, magic happened. AI came in, total market grew, server lives expanded increasing margins by couple hundred basis points. None of the points identified in the article are wrong. This paradox they mention simply moved a layer up. Why pay NVDA or frontier labs money, when AWS/GCP/Azure give you access to the orchestration layer? That's going to be the thinking going forward imo.

All I can say is you dumbasses in the U.S. stay out of Canada and Greenland! Enjoy your margaritas in Florida, Texas and as humid as my crotch on a 105 degree day...Louisiana! Cheers!

CBOE and NDAQ Thanks Lance

Free speech, as others have noted. But also freedom of how to spend your money if nearly 50% is taken off the top.

This probably belongs in the Olin thread but here is the summary of my thinking. The merger is going to get you a poor man's OxyChem at much lower prices. This is similar to RTO/ROL dynamic. At some point, RTO was just too cheap. I think this is the dynamic with Olin now. It's just too cheap. A little longer version: Olin sells raw chlorine and caustic soda on the markets so they are exposed to the swings of the raw material markte. OxyChem has a chain all the way down to PVCs where they eat up a lot of their own chlorine so they aren't as exposed to chlorine cycle and depend more on PVC which is a lot more measured. On the cost side, OxyChem is tighter integrated in the US Gulf Coast so they get access to cheap NG and oil (cheaper than Olin anyway). In short, OxyChem has better product margins, and lower input cost which is how you get better margins for OxyChem. Huntsman merger will help Olin because it will make it poor man's OxyChem. 1) It will take away the Chlorine volatility. Huntman has a huge presence in methylene diphenyl diisocyanate (MDI) and that eats A LOT of chlorine...which Olin has a lot of. 2) Olin will now be supplying its own raw materials to its own end products (Huntsman makes things for the likes of BMW, GE, etc.) so their margins should improve considerably. I think the $400M they want to synergize is very optimistic. I'm keeping my number at $125M (the value of NOL that will get utilized). So if you put it all together and assign it EV/EBITDA of 7, you get roughly $40/share or a double from here.

It's the slow move to the suppression of political dissent and the move toward totalitarianism. Worse yet, try it in an Islamic country and you'll end up dead. Much of Europe will learn the hard way. The USA is fighting its way out as we speak and it's ugly.

Bingo. This is the whole game.

Interesting. Thanks for putting this back on my radar. Have you spent much time doing valuation comps against the OxyChem purchase by Berkshire? On a number of metrics this appears anywhere from 20-50% cheaper currently. I can’t get past why OLN, despite having much more scale, seems to have consistently lower gross and operating margins. Also, thoughts on the Huntsman transaction?

Don't try and make any sense out of it. You do you.

Freedom of speech. What will happen to me in France, UK, et all if I say that Islam is a threat to European civilization and Islamic immigration is incompatible with Western values?

I think there is someone far more deserving of LQDA credit than I.

This article was published over 5 years ago. Surely that's enough time for companies to move workloads off the cloud en masse if that is beneficial, right? The article concludes thus: "either the public clouds will start to give up margin, or, they’ll start to give up workloads". Has either of these things happened? Or are you making some other point that I missed?

Here's an update on how the CoBF 2026 picks from the end of last year are doing so far. The arithmetic mean of all picks is up under 3%, well behind US indexes. These are the five best picks. Dividends are not included, but I doubt that makes much of a difference. Security Ticker Proponent Current Price In USD Price On 12/31/2025 In USD Return SanDisk Corp SNDK kh812000 $1,988.69 $387.81 412.80% Entravision Communications Corp EVC shhughes1116 $12.69 $2.93 333.11% EQ Resources ASX:EQR shhughes1116 $0.193 $0.056 244.39% Liquidia Corp LQDA Rainier, InofeIsOne $73.33 $34.49 112.61% Garrett Motion Inc GTX hasilp9 $35.05 $17.43 101.09% Fortinet Inc FTNT Rainier $156.53 $79.41 97.12% Using an arithmetic mean of picks, the three best stock pickers are: kh812000 117.30% shhughes1116 117.20% Longnose 75.60%

Thank you both ( @SafetyinNumbers and @djokovic1) for pointing us to these charts (and I will agree that I happen to like the formatting with the green bars better as well)! It appears to me that the actual catastrophe dollars displayed on the charts are not inflation adjusted, and are relatively similar in dollar magnitude for the last 9 years, while the equity base on which the cat tolerance is calculated has been growing significantly. We’re seeing the power of the business model at work I believe. If we look out another decade or two, if we are fortunate enough to escape the big 1-in-250 year or even rarer type year of really bad catastrophe years, I can envision a future where this risk continues to moderate and becomes almost as much of an afterthought as it is currently for Berkshire Hathaway. Berkshire most recently appears to want to retain about $20 billion in cash against the possibility of a mega catastrophe year. That’s less than a half year of their normalized earnings, and much less than 15% of their shareholder equity. Similarly, management of Fairfax seems to have developed sufficient underwriting and risk management discipline to continue to reduce the probability that catastrophic insurance losses might represent a “company killing” event in the future. While the holding company is just over 40 years old, at least one of its subsidiaries (Crum & Forster) has been “alive” since it was incorporated over 200 years ago in 1822. That’s a good example for the holding company to want to emulate, and all indications are that they are on the right track.

Plus hasn't South Korea instigated a baby boom with their generous birth subsidies? That should be domestic consumer spend positive too.

Adding to BN, Fairfax, and bought a restarter in OLN. I had OLN at $40 that I was able to sell at break-even through help of some option plays. It's now at $20, chlor alkali markets are stabilizing, and they are merging with an end user of their raw materials. Worth another shot.

But I am curious: what is your prediction of what won’t end well with me?

Excellent point. Should also note the inference/API costs which the AI bulls say are coming down 1000x are not really calculated costs. It's cost to reach a benchmark. These benchmarks have been public for a long time now and it's very easy to train future models or existing models to optimize for the bench. Like the folks on Shitter say, "benchmaxxing". So inference/token costs coming down is an illusion.