LC

Brokers in general seem to be good businesses. Financial products, insurance, cars, real Estate/mortgages maybe the latter is prone to cycles re: interest rates

Merry Christmas everyone!

Elon is going to have to make some real promises to get someone to take this off his hands. Hope his hair plugs are in tight.

On the 70-80% figure: I mean, mortgages I believe are going to be under 42% LTV? And I doubt the other 30% is food costs…

This is a problem with any machine learning/ data-driven approach vs. a statistical/ mathematical approach.

I owned in the past- thanks for bringing it up, I’ll take another look. Generally I was successful buying as it approaches 10x earnings and selling as it approaches 20x. I also thought it would be a decent takeover target for Berkshire.

Yeah I've noticed this over the past month or so and have been trimming the energy component of my portfolio.

For sure, but 50 years is a long time. Microsoft and Apple haven't even been around 50 years. Do we expect businesses which are currently printing money to continue earning outsized returns through 5 decades of competition, changing technologies and demographics, etc.? And do you expect businesses with such poor economics as you describe to remain solvent for 50+ years? It's possible (and has occured!) but those are rare cases. Competition is a real thing and over 50 years it's super difficult to beat. A lot of the surviving companies have a real benefit that others can't replicate. And in many times it's as simply as government protecting their national industries. Just points to consider!

Every time I contemplate this I think the more important question is, "What business will still be around in 50 years" I think once you can shortlist that group, you can make some educated guesses of which ones will over/under perform. I mean, Dinar mentioned L'oreal, for example. I have a lot more confidence that MSG or Wells Fargo will be around in 50 years vs. L'Oreal.

How the hell does someone like Cathy Wood get hired? Well, it's a rhetorical question but at what point does one say, "maybe 100x earnings is too much..." And for those making predictions about the unpredictable, it goes both ways. For every BTC=1MM$, there's a guy calling for 200$ or 300$ oil. It has definitely been an amusing year - Global Financial Stimuli ends and half the world licks its wounds while the other half parades in triumph. I'm up a whopping 6.5% YTD so I'm just wondering if there's anyone left in the middle, or is everyone else either broke or billionaire?

Well I’ll just say that (in the USA) 1- shouting fire (falsely) in a crowded theater is in fact legal, and 2- this was the argument used to jail those objecting the country’s draft of young men to go fight and die in WW1. We can’t have it both ways and nor should we! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shouting_fire_in_a_crowded_theater#:~:text="Shouting fire in a crowded,Supreme Court case Schenck v.

Yeah I agree. The guy said repugnant shit. Sorry but so what?

I went with 'deep recession' Why? I dunno.

The fun part was reading this post prior to looking at the news/market reaction. I was thinking - "Ok, JPow says what we thought he was gonna say, SPY must be dipping into the 3800s?" Then I look and its RALLYTIME GOGO. This is why guessing at macroeconomics and the market reaction is right up there with "pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey" as a top tier game.

Happy Thanksgiving all

Definitely a talent of Buffett that doesn't get talked about enough - he is a great judge of character.

Love it. Dipping below the 170s? I use bear spreads and then buy a crazy OOM put for cheap, in case it really crashes hard.

Sorry if a dumb question, but how does bitcoin solve for extending credit and managing the associated credit risk?

Thanks - appreciate the context. Looks like when WB mentioned a few years ago he’s be buying as many SFHs as possible….he went about it in a Berkshire-appropriate way.

To my knowledge tax credits are purchased in advance by a bank (state street being the biggest at least as of a few years ago). The developer needs access to cash at day 0, not over the next ten years. So they sell the credits. Now once State street or whomever owns the credits, they probably make a market on them. How those credits are bought/sold around in the secondary market, and how they are valued (and to whom they are most valuable) is more of my question.

Wow - yeah they did. Do you know the broad strokes of the underlying economics? Is it just that they buying these tax credits for say 80cents and redeeming at par? Some brief research on Lihtc's indicate they are computed annually? based on the underlying property's performance (occupancy). So is BRK also making some underlying bet on affordable multi-unit housing?

(sold) covered calls on LPX

I’ve got an open mind for sure and I wish blockchain would solve some obvious problems (property title is one that always jumps to mind- title insurance is such a racket). But the flip side is it’s not 1983 and technology disperses at a much faster pace today. Perhaps an era of high interest rates will focus efforts towards productive/realistic use cases, rather than pipe dreams.

Bitcoin has been around for 10 years+ now. Forget as a currency- I still haven’t seen a popularized use case for blockchain in general.