LC

To echo and perhaps expand on winjitsu's point: This is the key point, isn't it? A couple of questions: 1) For most moat-y businesses, do they have to pay their customers to choose their business? 2) For the ones which do, in fact, pay their customers (perhaps just initially) - what do those businesses look like? In my opinion, for (1) most moat-y businesses do not need to be acquired. You are offering something so special that competition is limited. Either you have some special process to offer sustainably lower costs (i.e. best commodity producer) or you are so differentiated that you are offering a special product (brands, etc.) Now, yes there are some businesses where you pay to acquire. The question then becomes, which are successful, and why? I would argue therefore the response to (2) is that you are building yourself into long-term customer processes, with high switching costs/specialized service, and a high natural relationship length. It becomes uneconomical to pay for customers if they can just hop to a competitor (low switching costs) in a month (low relationship length). My problem with the VC world (and perhaps I am wrong) is that they over-estimate their competitive advantages. I am sorry, but food delivery is not a competitive advantage. And access to capital is almost never a competitive advantage. Real competitive advantages come from high skilled activities at least in most cases.

The President who didn't fill the US seat at the WHO, and who now claims the US has less influence than China at the WHO? The one who loudly praised the Chinese handling of the virus on Twitter in late January? Who ignored US Intelligence warnings about the virus? And now blames the WHO as part of a CYA compaign that includes blaming the governors for the US's stay-at-home response? Right... nice to see all of that. Didn't Trump and his administration make many of the mistakes he is criticizing WHO for? Reminds me of this Canadian classic:

From what little I've gathered, Youtube's policy is best described, "Anything you post that causes us a headache will get deleted and we'll make up the reason afterwards"

https://www.theverge.com/2020/5/18/21262316/doordash-pizza-profits-venture-capital-the-margins-ranjan-roy

This needs to be overlaid with reported cases (particularly now that testing is more available) to be truly useful.

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/05/18/softbank-ceo-calls-wework-investment-foolish-valuation-falls-to-2point9-billion.html Need to remove the "5" from this thread's title ;D

Littel PM, Brk, Cloudflare Sold 15% of Livenation that was purchased in the prior week.

Warren Buffett Abandons Traditional Investing to Become Full-Time Day Trader https://thestonkmarket.com/warren-buffett-abandons-traditional-investing-to-become-full-time-day-trader/

Likely not overcounted. NS is relying on excess mortality numbers but not adjusting downwards for traditional completeness estimates and not adjusting downwards (or upwards) for non-COVID death trends. The former is more important. Recent weekly reports of excess mortality are adjusted upwards for incompleteness, by determined by the %s of reports completed in a certain time t, compared to prior time t-1. This method assumes that excess COVID deaths are prevalent in all incomplete geographies equally - which is most likely not the case. Thanks, I know this is your area of expertise. These excess death numbers are not without issues either, but they serve as a good sanity check for the COVID-19 related death numbers . They revealed that the U.K. for example is undercounting (they admitted such pretty much), but Belgium (which has pretty bad looking numbers ) is over counting (since they count suspect cases as COVID-19 death). Honestly, the best guess at this point is to keep the baseline untouched (addressing Dalal's post) and attribute all excess deaths to the coronavirus. This gets us to around 65k US deaths through April 25. And my guess would be about 75k deaths to-date although I haven't looked at the recent week numbers or reports. Honestly I'm a bit burned out from all the coronavirus news, and thinking about the federal response is too disheartening.

Cherzeca, it may be prudent to recall WB's advice. Temperament is more important than intelligence in investing.

Likely not under**counted. NS is relying on excess mortality numbers but not adjusting downwards for traditional completeness estimates and not adjusting downwards (or upwards) for non-COVID death trends. The former is more important. Recent weekly reports of excess mortality are adjusted upwards for incompleteness, by determined by the %s of reports completed in a certain time t, compared to prior time t-1. This method assumes that excess COVID deaths are prevalent in all incomplete geographies equally - which is most likely not the case.

Pretty good with finance and tech. I’m a statistician so stuff with a math heavy slant I can usually pick up.

Not to mention we're currently led by a corrupt idiot.

Thanks for posting, Liberty. Good article to summarize criticism of America's response. Trump has Made America the Greatest (victim of coronavirus)

Did a zoom wine tasting tonight, German non-rieslings. Pfeffingen, furst, and Koehler-ruprecht

What exactly did Trump's administration do here? The article you posted does not mention anything.

The definition of lying to some of the people all of the time. So trashy. Well, they can't fake the all-count deaths, at least (yet). Of which we have ~65,000 excess deaths, broken down by weeks ending: 3/28: +4,300 4/4: +12,900 4/11: +20,000 4/18: +17,500 4/25: +10,900

Greg - not sure, my personal uneducated guess is relation to international travel. One outlier that baffles me is Louisiana. Here you can check the weekly excess deaths per state, check out LA https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm#dashboard I know there is a large Asian community in LA particularly for the fishing industry but that could just be spurious reasoning.

Sold all the WFC I bought yesterday - will take any profits where I can get them to lower my cost basis on this one.

I agree some really good posters have reduced or eliminated their activity. However I was reading some old threads from 2011-2014 (or so) and was expecting the dialogue to be at a higher level - but actually I found it very similar to recent years. I was surprised to be seeing personal attacks, political bickering, faulty logic (your returns sucked last year, your analysis must be wrong!), etc. I think perhaps there is some nostalgia at play :D

alwaysdrawing - Thanks for the counterpoints.

Mephistopheles - this is exactly the questions I am asking myself. If his reason to sell is WFC-specific, what is it? He mentioned in an interview prior to the Annual mtg that he was still confident in the WFC brand. Now that is just the brand - it doesn't speak to the cost structure, the loan book, management, or anything else. As to whether it is WB selling - this is a pure guess, partially trying to think of the "wort case scenario. As JRM mentioned the 13F filed in Feb shows 323.2MM WFC shares help by Berkshire which is a reduction of 15%. Combine that with the excessive selling in the past month or so (compared to other banks) , and combined with WB's comments at the AGM, this is my less-than-educated guess.

It is interesting all the people buying WFC whereas WB was selling. (And WB may be fully exiting his WFC stake - if you recall during the annual meeting he mentioned "We don't trim positions") Makes me fear I am missing something big and obvious.

Sold out of MO, bought PM with proceeds. Bought a little WFC and cloudflare

Interesting thread, thanks again for posting.