pocoapoco

Wow you get a state tax deduction?! Nice I’m in California and don’t believe I ever did I would go $30k Front load that thing

You blame the lack of trust developing on scientists and media when everyday your boy gets on his own soapboax and starts lying and yelling. Has no medical experience yet does not take medical community seriously. What is his record here as an executive. He may be winning but in the end the con game helps no one, not even his own supporters. So the community is getting obliterated because peoples lives were saved at a huge inconvenience? Wow you talk about admission. How about the Big Daddy admits he fked up on this royally! Playing the Cohen book, he will never admit to anything. How he thought the geometric progression will work in the reverse direction as long as he is blustering. Not saying Trump is smart or has added value. The political side of this isn’t super interesting. The trust thing is real. When it it widely declared that we are flattening the curve to keep hospitals from being overrun, and the hospitals are empty and firing people.... how do you not at that point update the model to relax social distancing. You can change the narrative (“actually we aren’t worried about hospitals we just want to minimize total death count”) but then you have a trust issue because people can remember what the argument was from a couple months ago, the argument used to garner compliance and convince people to sacrifice their economic livelihood. Maybe making that sacrifice for a demographic they aren’t part of (elderly and ill) wasn’t sufficient motivation so the ante was upped by saying no this is everyone’s issue of the hospitals are fucked. But here we are and if we try to change the argument now it just makes it seem like the old argument was manipulative. If we don’t change the argument then we should be relaxing social measuring in areas with minimal hospital resource usage. You sort of have to pick one.

Perfect cop out. Now shift blame to the states. Trust has been lost. The scientists got on their soap box, pointed to their models, and made their predictions of doom and gloom. Nowhere in the 1-2million death model stated “If we shelter in place” then we will see the outcome that we have seen (empty hospitals, death toll 10-20 times less than expected). They are definitely saying that now, but it feels like an after-the-fact revision. And now there is a doubling down .... it will be later. I live in a community with 450,000 people. We’ve been shut down for 6 weeks. We’ve had 3 deaths ... a prisoner, a homeless person, an elderly person, all with extremely bad health prior. The hospitals are empty and the community is getting obliterated. Greg is right that New York is a special case as is anywhere with a high population density or public transportation. To apply a one size fits all model is like when homeland security gave funding to small towns in the Midwest to fight terrorism. Rather than accept that the models were flawed, or even just need to be revised, updated and more nuanced, it seems the scientific community and media is still doubling down on the terror and denying any error. The problem with this is that they are squandering the little trust left. You only get one shot at this. It’s like the boy who cried wolf. As more time passes and the predictions and models and hysteria stay diverged from reality, people lose faith in those leaders and in the models. Then, when they are right later, and say no really now it’s gonna happen .... no one will listen. Once we open up, if there’s a new alarm bell, people will shrug and say “well you say that before.” This happened in my community where there were fires that threatened our area and people were forced to relocate from their homes for 2 months, through the Christmas holiday. After people had moved back into their homes there was a fresh threat reported of mudslide danger. There was mandatory evacuation again. Barely a quarter of people left. The point is that the scientific community needs to update the models and provide more transparent predictions, region based, based on several courses of action, with confidence intervals. Government needs to quickly react to local data and course correct where necessary ... if you have high cases, the cost benefit of shutting down makes more sense than in places where you don’t. And lastly people need to stop taking the moral high ground on everyone who points out the very real trade offs that we are making between life, poverty, economic despair, and destabilizing the health care system. If anything, at the moment the fact that hospitals are firing doctors and nurses is working against the original (but now forgotten) agenda to keep the hospitals from being overrun.

Very few futures are closed out with physical delivery. Even if there is physical delivery, all of the futures costs are settled daily (marked to market) so whoever bought the future basically paid up out of the required margin. Edited to quote the question. Still getting used to the new format. Thanks for trying but you didn't answer my question. Is someone going to take delivery at negative cost? Or is that not a right question to ask? But I see the WTI spot price and it is normal around $20, so do we agree that the spot price of oil is around $20, it will never be negative? Ok so I do trade Emini futures so I know how it settles everyday. But what would prompt a person to sell oil at -$35. I wouldn't. Suppose I bought a future on a barrel for $40, then coronavirus hits us and I know I am hosed, ok I'll get out by selling $20. But if it goes to $10 I won't sell, I know that one minute before expiry I can unload it for $20 (the above minimum price I gave). Now I imagine maybe I really want to get rid of a barrel of oil, so I have the "original" contract..... and no one has taken the other side of this contract. I need to get rid of the oil cos I have no place to put it, so I am willing to take a loss on the barrel. But if I just hold on to the oil, on expiry I know I can get $20 / barrel. So in what scenario will a sane person sell oil at -$35? Am I missing something? like a margin call? what? please help! I believe that the futures contract specify physical delivery. It’s not cash settled like your Emini futures. So come expiration, you don’t just get some dollar amount for the contract (like a $20 spot) You get a barrel of oil (or however many the contract specifies) If you do not have the ability to take delivery of the oil, and put it in storage, then you will be forced to close at market. I’m guessing that you as an investor don’t have the ability to take delivery of physical oil. That is why people roll the futures a day or two before expiration. Liquidity is provided by those that can take delivery, store the oil and short a further out contract, pay the storage fees, and make the spread. If there’s no storage available and storage costs skyrocket then the spread between the months blows out.

Does anyone have decent statistics on survival rate after being put on a ventilator? With all the urgency to get ventilators perhaps we take it for granted that a ventilator will save people but there’s a moment when you decide to use a ventilator on someone At that time , if you (1) choose not to put them on it (or don’t have one available) then they have a certain mortality rate. If you (2) put them on one they have a certain mortality rate. I would like to know how these compare to evaluate the marginal benefit of having a ventilator. I’ve seen bits and pieces anecdotally suggesting only a very small percent of people who go on a ventilator come out the other side alive, and if they do come out, many are seemingly permanently impaired (aka still need some sort of life support). That’s why I’m seeking more concrete data.

Don’t forget Dividends that you forgo That’s another $10 to add to the $14= $24

You have to separate the price of the door from the install. You can get en entry door for $300 or $6000 depending on how fancy it is or the size, material, thickness, detail, quality, brand etc And some garage doors are 10k as well. Install should be about $400-500 if it’s a single door and it’s by a pair of decent carpenters because it will take them 2-3 hours, assuming it’s prehung and prebored. Longer and more $ if they have to do more (mortise, etc). For $2.9k I’m guessing this is a pretty high quality fancy door. My entry was like $1.4k for a nice stain grade solid pine door with glass panels from a reputable manufacturer. But the catalog had stuff much higher. I’m building a guest house so been quite involved in these details. It’s not fun.

Hopefully the new CEO won’t do write downs, like many new CEOs like to do. Yeah, or set the future bar low, so he can easily jump over it. FWIW, I don’t like banks right now - potential for lower NIM and higher loan losses. Greg, why the 45s? Just leverage ?

Think of the strike as what you have the option to pay to get the deliverable (usually 100 shares of the stock). So, pre-spinoff, by owning 1 contract of the $70 strike calls you have the option to pay $7000 (there's a 100 multiplier) to buy 100 shares of EBAY. If EBAY spins off 1 share of PAYPAL for each share of EBAY, the deliverable of the options contract will be adjusted to represent 100 shares of EBAY -plus- 100 shares of PAYPAL. So, you would have the option to pay $7000 to purchase 100 shares of EBAY and 100 shares of PAYPAL. Within a day or so, they will then list a new series of options contracts that will just represent 100 shares of EBAY. At this point, if a person wanted to buy options on just pure (post spinoff) EBAY they would be able to do so. But the old series of options sticks around, so there will likely exist two EBAY $70 2017 calls - the old ones (100 EBAY + 100 PAYPAL) and the new ones (100 EBAY). It will be important to make sure you are trading the right ones if you want to do new trades.

Now priced at $21 (was 14-16) And selling 575 million in IPO vs 500 million Could be hard to justify that valuation...

The points you've made make it seem pretty compelling to stay. I'm actually a little surprised that your wife is "very supportive if it would be better for my career". To be blunt, it would be better for your career, but it would be worse for hers (she is the major breadwinner, and "quite established and very highly-regarded in her current office"). So, why is your career more important than hers? That is clearly implied. Do you complain a lot about your current job and she's hoping this will make you happy? Or perhaps is it a cultural thing (to be a supportive wife)? Because rationally it doesn't seem a net positive and that's just taking into account your combined job situation. Once you throw in: "my wife's family is in the area where we live now" "We just bought a house that we love" "We have great friends who live in our area" "our toddler daughter is in a great child-care situation" "she [my wife] does not want to move" .. then it seems like a slam dunk to stay. It would have to be a ridiculously amazing opportunity to offset your wife's career and all of these things and maybe it is but that's not how you sell it. Yes, lets assume it's a better hospital and more interesting. But you confess "we serve a very poor population and that is incredibly rewarding" so obviously you are getting some utility from your current situation. You can afford to wait, since you are still accumulating experience where you are and your value is not diminishing. There will likely be more opportunities in the future and you can assess the situation then.

Nate, what types of local businesses would you recommend? Where I grew up, there was almost nothing of any scale except retail. That, and an absolutely incredible ice cream shop chain. So I've got nothing to go off of. (Off topic, I always thought it would be fun to own that place, because I'm positive it's a See's-like business in every way you can think of. It's too bad it's named Whitey's. I'm guessing that might limit it's scalability...) I think too many people are looking to "kill it" on a business and would pass over something decent that doesn't have eye-popping numbers. A family member works for a manufacturing company, they have maybe 100 employees, most likely a 5% net margin or so. Given the numbers I've heard the owner is taking out $250-500k a year and leaves a little for reinvestment. Is that a money printing machine, nope. But anyone who can make $250k-500k in the Midwest can live like a king. There are a lot of light industrial companies, or just small companies in general that aren't very profitable, but pay the owner nicely. Ice cream stands can do well. A former co-worker's neighbor lived in a solidly middle class neighborhood on the back of the earnings from his ice cream stand. He works all summer and takes the rest of the year off. Sure he doesn't have a house in the Hamptons, but it is only working about five months as well. There are a lot of local business ideas that can generate a nice income but don't scale. So you have to settle with being comfortable rather than rich. My guess is not many on this board would make that trade, too many trying to the top. For the rest of us it spells opportunity. Nate, I appreciate your input and you bring up a great point about, rather than investing in stocks, investing in local private businesses (or perhaps a bit of both). Do you see in your area opportunities to invest in local "small manufacturing or service company with nice margins, good earnings and low capex requirements" that pay 7-10%.? When I look at local businesses that are for sale I see restaurants, laundrymats, gas stations, mini-markets, and more restaurants. I'm not seeing a lot of solid businesses of the kind you describe at the multiple you describe. Maybe you are saying one should start a business, but that's not really apples to apples. Sure I'd love to build a business and take home 250-500K a year. No I don't need a mansion. But is that really a fair alternative to buying shares of stocks? I think that's a different beast and presumes the skills and opportunities (and a little luck) to do so. So, I'm inspired by your comments and your advice, and I'm a willing buyer of local businesses at those levels. How do I find sellers?

Glad to head everyone is healthy

Like Packer said I guess the worst case would be existing shareholders would be forced out at a low price. I presume they would indeed have to reduce free float to structurally prevent non Russians from acquiring shares. Or perhaps another alternative would be a dual share structure where there is an exchange for "b" shares that foreigners can hold with the same economic rights but no voting/control rights. Not sure if that would satisfy the legislation I like the price here economically but who knows what you'll end up with. I guess that's the bet.