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  2. Interesting interview from Karpathy (one of the AI luminaries) on what makes Elon unique
  3. Today
  4. Capital allocation skills have a moving goal post from era to era. For instance buybacks are very popular and a like a big pair of tits to the "above average" investor, Its all we can focus on. Shrinking equity will have a time and a place and but doing it constantly is not going to land you in the time or the place every time you purchase shares with the shareholders money. The guys today who are the best capital allocators are the ones who are building. If Jeff Bezos doesn't go down as the best of all time I am simply perplexed. Using money to make more money should be the constant goalpost and nobody has spent more than JB at amazon to create more. I'm going to shout out Mike Pyle of Exchange income corporation for some pretty interesting acquisitions lately. He bagged a couple big fish at the start of covid but he may have swallowed the lure himself with BV glazing at a cycle high in curtain walls ( unlikely due to shit tons of housing and retrofits needed but the current gulch must be traversed). Lower rates need apply. Brad Jacobs is another who deserves honorable mention and while certainly not unknown nor camera shy he is still in the building stage of his CA Career. Buffett mapped it out to all of us. He may not have been the first but he was the most generous with his knowledge and now we can all think and hopefully act more efficiently with our money.
  5. Shipping is such a shady industry, I guess dirty fuel gets sold every now and then and is a known issue… this article notes that typically the charterer (Maeresk) is responsible for fuel. Maritime executive link
  6. That’s seems nearly impossible to prove. Wouldnt that be like someone having a heart attack and then suing where they just had a burger and fries. how do you know the contamination wasn’t already in the tank? I don’t down that they might have gotten bad fuel, but it seems like the defense will easily be able to blame it on lack of maintenance or something similar.
  7. Canadian PMs still treat Fairfax like a hedge. They buy it when they are bearish banks and sell it when they are bullish banks. Bank stocks are doing pretty well lately. I think that’s part of it. There is also probably concern about owning FFH if they announce the IDBI deal or another acquisition that might cause a drawdown even though BVPS will presumably grow faster if they do. No PM wants to own FFH when the market decides Prem made another mistake. Even though we won’t know that for years the next time it happens.
  8. Yea, stocks are supposed to be volatile. Its a feature, not a bug.
  9. Zoom out… and BTW the stock was up this month.
  10. Yesterday
  11. Yeah but because of that there are sometimes nasty contaminants mixed in that will clog a fuel filter and then you lose power to the generator. I also believe that they actually run on slightly cleaner fuel when they are in the harbors and switch to heavy fuel oil or whatever bunker fuel is when they are out at sea.
  12. That's surprising. The stuff that they use for ships, bunker fuel, is literally the crud that is right above the asphalt in a cracker when they break petroleum into other stuff. It's literally a solid at room temperature, so it's hard to think that it could be even lower quality than that.
  13. Kestenbaum and STLC come to my mind. Lousy industry though.
  14. Reducing $C more and sold a bit of $DFS too in tax deferred accounts.
  15. Sold the small position I had in NEP for about a 20% profit since the end of last year. The dividend is yielding 12% and if interest rates go down it could do really well. But if they don't, the new solar projects will be more costly and they will have to finance them at a higher interest rate, so I took the quick win and added to my other positions.
  16. TransDigm Group (TDG) was mentioned in the book and has since continued to perform very well. There is a thread on it within the Investment Ideas forum.
  17. Instead do them at a too big to fail bank
  18. The Silk Road admin sentenced to 2 life sentences. The Alpha-bay admin committed suicide in a Thai detention center. The Welcome to Video admin got 18 months in a South Korean jail. The BTC-e admin sentenced to 25 years. Don't do illicit things on the blockchain.
  19. IIRC they are investigating if dirty fuel was the reason for the power loss
  20. SBF sentenced to 25 years oof
  21. Teledyne is still thriving. Robert Mehrabian used same playbook as Singleton, basically.
  22. I think LLMs is only one of the benefits of AI. For short-term for LLMs, moat is in data and existing user experiences that carbon based neural nets (humans) are trained on already. Tech itself will spread around with good engineers getting high bids from those who have the moat. META has already benefited from it in increasing relevance of its ads. Nvidia's customer base are companies with big pockets and when those customers are paying 10s of billions of dollars, they can easily spend a few billion dollars each to continue to invest to try to create their own AI chips. Will one of them be successful eventually? Time will tell. I think probability is significant that at least one of them will be successful eventually. Next huge value-add won't be in increasing relevance of ads, but it will be in another scenario. One of those will be to reduce # of hours of high-hourly rate knowledge workers. If you can save 50% of hours of 10M workers getting paid $100K per year, you have created $500B in value, and that is per year. At 10-20X multiple, that is worth $5-10 Trillion. To enable this scenario, you need access to data that those knowledge workers are consuming and producing already. You can deduce from there, who has access to that data and who already owns the user experience that these knowledge workers have been trained on. Longer term, who all will benefit is a little like trying to predict which 3 car manufacturers will be winner out of 1000s of car manufacturers in 1900, where almost all went bankrupt. LLMs is only a start. Another big industry to be disrupted is biotech, in discovery of new treatments and drugs. Counterintuitively, I think value of drug exclusivity rights will actually go down if innovation starts to happen at such rapid pace that a better drug is found by someone else that doesn't infringe an existing drug's exclusivity rights. Autonomous driving has been talked about a lot, but when level 5 really arrives, it will cause a sea change. Entertainment is ripe for disruption with AI generated short-videos, movies and even games. Longer term, innovation will continue to happen. Some assets will be bottlenecks and will continue to get valued higher, e.g. energy, and even commodities that have a monopoly controlling the limited supply, e.g. oil. The demand for these commodities could rise to unthinkable levels in terms of multiples of today as commodities will still be needed by the remaining 99% to increase their standard of living to match top 1% of today, when labor is no longer bottleneck. But, the value will only accrue to those commodities that have a monopoly over controlling supply.
  23. Some interesting tidbits from "Tracers in the Dark" 1) 2021, as per Chainalysis - $14 billion of criminal transactions - 0.15% of crypto transactions are illicit - 400 employees - 600 customers (law enforcement, tax agencies, financial institutions, exchange companies) - Chainalysis' valuation $8.6 billion - Their competitor - Elliptic 2) During the takedown of Welcome to Video, a South Korean run child abuse darkweb site, it was discovered that a US homeland security border agent was an active participant on this site. He was abusing his girlfriend's daughter and posing as a moderator for the site to steal login/passwords of other users to obtain videos. He plead not guilty because he argued that his BTC transactions were surveilled without his consent and violated his privacy. Courts turned down that argument because all transactions on the blockchain are public and therefore not subject to privacy laws. 3) Ransomware gangs are trending to the use of Monero and Z-cash where "privacy" is much harder to break using more traditional blockchain cluster analysis techniques. This got me thinking about Jason Lowery's Softwar book and how BTC given its transparency and proof-of-work protocol, could help impose a real-world cost to ransomware gangs to access centralized database system.
  24. Just a hunch that bad fuel caused the problems in the first place
  25. I would be nervous if I was the company that had just filled that ship up with fuel.
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