mcliu

Restaurant, theatre, concert/public-gatherings?

Uh.. what about China, Iran, Italy, S Korea, princess diamond?

Pretty crazy sector. Apparently production is still going up even as everyone's going bankrupt?!

Uh oh. Time to move to politics? ::)

But SPCE is disrupting both travel & space industries!! ;D SpaceX + Booking.com for only $7B market cap?

My guess is that because you don't need the land for the reservoirs. I read somewhere that new hydro developments are discouraged now due to its environmental damage from large area flooding (dam) & carbon release (drowned trees).

Interesting, that's an early retirement.. Thought he was a successor since taking over the conference calls only a few quarters ago. Anyone have insights into this? Q4: https://www.fairfax.ca/news/press-releases/press-release-details/2020/Fairfax-Financial-Financial-Results-for-the-Year-Ended-December-31-2019/default.aspx Underwriting pretty good. Some decent investment gains, hopefully there's more left. Non-insurance seems to be struggling. Would be nice to see more stock buybacks.

Coronavirus is looking increasingly contained. Logarithmic scale shows the rate of increase is tailing off. https://gisanddata.maps.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.html#/bda7594740fd40299423467b48e9ecf6 At most, coronavirus could impact the 1st quarter of 2020 for just about any global business as a fraction of sales. Will it really harm any business models? Of course not. Hopefully that's the case and not because of the definition change. https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/3874490 "China changes counting scheme to lower Wuhan virus numbers" China stops counting confirmed asymptomatic patients in Wuhan virus statistics

Have nothing to add to the topic, but just wanted to echo this sentiment. Having spent some time as a junior in IB/PE, I realized building detailed financial models add very little, if any, value to the investment process.

Cause we naive westerners?

It's still nice that BRK has to option to hold WFC instead of selling it to maintain the threshold (due to buybacks). Especially at these prices.

Maybe, in the past few years, insurers were hoping for higher interest rates as the economy recovers, but have now realized rates will stay lower for longer.. I think part of airline rationalization is a result of consolidation, whereas insurance is still very fragmented.

I guess one difference is that there's more money & liquidity after QE 1,2,3,4.. Also, with negative interest bonds & certain European countries charging interest on deposits. People are forced to spend or buy assets. Things could get much crazier than 20 years ago. 8)

Interesting thanks. Any thoughts on the excess capital and ILS that's contributed to soft pricing in the past? Has this dissipated? Is the capital still flowing but investors are just getting more cautious?

Isn’t Cramer usually a contrarian indicator?

Better infrastructure would be nice too. But apparently more expensive houses and stocks win elections.

If what you said is true, that makes this virus far less deadly than we think today? On the investment side, these type of event usually marks the end of a long bear market. Just think about how the end of SARS marked the end of a long bear market in Asia. Is it possible they're hiding deaths as well as infections?

Same here. The prices on Walmart also don't change as dramatically like on Amazon. If you use CamelCamelCamel, you can track prices on Amazon and see how much it fluctuates. Also, Walmart seem to have a more comprehensive selection of branded products and less 3rd party garbage. Amazon still has faster shipping, but even there, recent shipments of household goods have been sub-par (damaged/defective).

Weren't there plenty of cheap stocks during the dot-com bubble? I think stocks with real earnings and value started doing well after people tried to turn their "Pets.com" shares into real money and realized there's nothing there once the greater fool is exhausted. At some point the cycle will turn unless maybe central banks step in big time and start buying stocks.

Koyfin.com has consensus estimate graphs for sales, ebitda, eps.

It's pretty insane how big the regulatory differences are between managing an investment pool and managing a real estate corporation/private-mortgage lender. One issue with a corporation may be the higher taxation of passive income, especially from the foreign interest/dividends.

Thanks for starting this thread. This is a really important documentary that all investors should watch. More than just investment lessons, it also helps to paint the big picture. It's a reflection of the systematic failures in regulation and the ability of Chinese fraudsters to exploit the system. While the documentary is a few years old, the content is even more relevant today with larger Chinese listings ($2 trillion market cap?). Meanwhile, investor protection still remains weak as ever. And it's not just frauds, but also legitimate companies but "owned" through offshore VIE structures. Minority investors really need to think whether these structures will protect or exploit their interests.

Clearly companies like FB, Google are making tons of $ off of their user's data. In exchange, users get to use their search/map/social-media tools for free. But is that enough compensation? Should they be paying users to use/sell their data? Thoughts?

I beg to differ somewhat. I don’t condone restricting investing in China, but I can understand to forbid the nefarious VIE structures via letterbox holding companies in tax havens for listed companies. The fact is that as an investor in BABA and all these listed companies, you do not own these companies directly, own a contractural right (anyone ever seen these contracts, because I haven’t ) via a multilayered hold8ng structure while in realty a Chinese person or entity really owns this. This was done to get around the problem that the Chinese government does not allow direct ownership of Chinese companies in many sectors to foreigner. It is also a structure that is ideally set up to scam foreign investor out their money without any recourse. so, I think a case can be made that the US should not allow this structure for US listed stocks and the Chinese have a choice either to change their ownership rules ( just like most other countries) and allow foreign ownership and essentially open their capital markets, or those companies delist and trade in the OTC markets. Agreed. There's zero recourse for these structures. It's a trade based on hope. It's unfortunate so many shareholders are seduced by the fast-growth of these big Chinese listings. I wonder if there's a study that summarizes how much capital Chinese firms have been able to raise in the US vs how much capital actually returned through dividend/buybacks to investors. The China Hustle is a good documentary to watch. Most of the firms were smaller and were outright accounting scams, but it highlights the lack of recourse to investors and repercussion to "management". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_China_Hustle

Cigarbutt's post makes sense. The conventional wisdom is that when you buy a negative-yielding bond (pay a big premium to par), your return will be negative. That's only true if you hold to maturity. In the meantime, with the ECB/BOJ buying ever more and more bonds, there's opportunity to flip bonds to them for a positive return. (Which is probably the intended effect.) In essence, the central banks are bailing out bank shareholders by inflating asset values instead of doing a restructuring/capital-injection like in the US/UK.