no_free_lunch
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Posts posted by no_free_lunch
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I don't really disagree with much of this. I think though that you underestimate what Russia is willing to do. To your points, its items 1, 4, 5, 6 in particular that they will use. There are pro-Russian elements, we saw that when regions were taken over. So these elements will be empowered. Russians will be encouraged to emigrate. As I said, they will try to intimitdate or liquidate any Ukrainian nationalists. They would try to wipe out the Ukrainian identity once and for all.
Far better to fight a conventional war than to get into that garbage.
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I think it's ridiculous to NOT compare it to Chechnya. That was only 20-30 years ago. Putin had a hand in that. Of course they will use the same tactics.
I will keep my ww2 comparisons, thanks. Russia is the same garbage pile ethically as the USSR. Human life doesn't mean much to them. Have you seen how they are treating even their own citizens, sending them to Ukraine with minimal training and coordination.
I am not saying there will be no resistance movement but it's wishful thinking that will mean anything. Sure somebody might use an ied here or there. Not going to stop them from controlling the country.
In the occupied areas they are putting people through filtration camps. Children are being separated from their parents. People are disappearing if Russia deems appropriate. I don't see how you get any reasonable resistance out of that.
Your last comments are thrashing nonsense. Ukraine will fight when they have half a chance. They are not all going to suicide.
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Castanza,
It's all part of the Russian playbook. I am not talking about some RU soldier randomly killing someone. The executions are carried out by intelligence units in an organized fashion. They target dissidents, former soldiers and anyone else else capable who is not wholeheartedly pro Russia. That is what is emerging from Kherson, now that its re-taken. If you go around killing enough people you are going to squish resistance.
It's also the same exact thing as in Chechnya. Putin was in charge of that too. It's actually likely to be more effective in Ukraine than Chechnya as Ukraine us culturally more similar than Chechnya.
There are already pro Russia elements of the population. The Russians would empower those elements, it's going to be tough to resist that for very long.
This was all done, multiple times in the 20th century. I don't mean to belittle but if you read the history, and I've read too much, it can be done. It's how the USSR was assembled.
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2 hours ago, Castanza said:
The West loves a good proxy war. Taking full advantage of the situation to make sure Russia ends up as a third world country. The West will drag this out as long as possible.
Everyone knows, even if Russia manages to win “militarily” there is no chance in Hell they would ever be able to hold Ukraine. The insurgency would be untenable. Also starting to look like the Chechens might seize the opportunity for some revenge.
What a bizarre conflict. You’ve got Chechens fighting for Russia and for Ukraine. Then you have the awkwardness of former US troops fighting for Ukraine working with the very Chechens they saw in conflict in Afghanistan.
I disagree and fear they could win and hold without western support. The soviets literally did this before in the 20th century. They can go and do mass executions and brainwash the remainder. You go kill 100k people and there will not be that many left with the will to resist. That was the Chechnya playbook recently and similar story in Poland during ww2, just to pick a few examples.
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I was under the impression that they simply needed to rebuild capital ratios and could resume share buybacks this year. The way I look at it, either the shares stay down and then C eventually vacuums at rock bottom prices or else it moves up.
The banamex sale is at a multiple of book while citi trades at a discount to book. Not sure how fair of a comparison that is but it provides some insight that the shares are quite undervalued. I think this could move up quickly at some point.
All that said, it is called shitticorp for a reason so it is about a 3% position for me.
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13 hours ago, FCharlie said:
One of the best, if not the actual best performing stock of all time is Altria/Philip Morris. A core business that endlessly churns out higher profits and constant share repurchases, while being cursed, (or blessed) with a mediocre valuation the entire time. For the most part, AutoZone also fits this description really well.
It would seem like the right way to think about this list is to ask yourself which of these companies are nearly certain to be better off ten years from now, and how does the market value them in the meantime as they are executing future buybacks. The DDS situation is impressive, but going forward it will be much harder for them to keep that buyback pace up unless the share price declines materially or earnings increase materially. I would imagine DDS would gradually fall from the top of the list towards the bottom.
The stock that stands out the most to me for potential opportunity is Citibank. Sure it's near the bottom of the list now, but this is a company that has repurchased over a billion shares in the last handful of years and no one cares even a little bit. Also, I know they are inferior to JPMorgan and Bank of America, but it's hard to imagine a future where Citi doesn't still dominate credit cards and global corporate banking. The stock continually trades between 5 and 7 times earnings, and their #1 capital allocation priority is buybacks. I'd be really interested in revisiting this list in the future to see how things are going.
I continue to like C as well. I think they continue to mop up stairs and at some point turn the dividend on, the market would respond to a 12% dividend ir whatever it could be in a couple years.
Maybe they can get acquired too? Not sure if it would pass regulations, but perhaps could happen from some outside pool of investors. Yiu can see how if you bought it at 9 or 10x earnings a good team could perhaps do very well. This scenario is knd of wishful thinking admittedly.
I think ultimately it may rise when international does well.
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The US will increase artillery shell production 6 fold over the next 2 years. The US is covering dual contingencies of a long war in Ukraine as well as a possible war with China.
https://www.businessinsider.com/pentagon-increasing-production-of-155mm-artillery-shells-2023-1
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Thanks bluegold. I see it as you describe. They are just parroting Russia propaganda and to slander an entire country to get a fu king sound bite does not sit well with me.
Nevertheless wait 1 week and the same garbage will resurface.
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There are nazis in America too. See Charlottesville, the kkk, that is reported in the media too.
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A nazi country with a Jewish prime minister? Hmm...
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On 1/19/2023 at 9:41 PM, ValueArb said:
So I had lunch with my developer friend who is using ChatGPT and it was pretty enlightening.
He has a chat setup where he shares his code with the AI so it can model how he does things. Then he asks it to generate boilerplate code that would take him hours to write for dozens of classes and it spits it right out for him based on the attributes of his classes that he's shared with it. Essentially he's using the tool to help automate production of the most time consuming but least intellectually challenging work. He still has to review and fix occasional errors but its saving him a lot of time.
So what I learned is that you can customize ChatGPT in your own chat by giving it your data, and as it learns you can make it more powerful and useful for your problem domains. He's also setup a separate marketing chat where he's training it on all his products marketing documents and asks it to spit out marketing copy for his new release with emphasis on specific features he tells it. He said it reads great.
He also said he'd be happy paying $500 a month for it. It's main problem is performance, its slow at time and sometimes he gets cut off for rest of the day because he's made too many queries.So this makes sense to me. It's a pattern matching tool with enough intelligence that you can train it to do tasks for you. The idea it's going to write code on its own or that the code it writes is going to be perfect quality are both ludicrous. I'm betting people are creating startups right now to leverage it across very narrow domains (customer support for plumbers, traffic court advisor, etc) where they can polish it by training it on specific better curated data to make it far more trustworthy in those domains.
Thanks for this, some good insights.
I tried to get it to work on 10k info and it struggled with the size, the complexity of tables and then summarizing at the level I was after. It also would at times just plain make stuff up. I have no idea what I'm doing so could just be me but I'm still skeptical. I think, as you said, it needs to target very specific use cases. For now.
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2 hours ago, Dinar said:
Left unsaid is that we can't handle another 12 months of the war in Ukraine.
We can afford it. Its less than half a percent of gdp for most countries. Meanwhile we are building up our armaments industries. We do need European countries to carry a greater load but yes its quite doable. The alternative of course is to sign some peace treaty and Russia and allies learns they can get away with this shit.
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2 hours ago, Dinar said:
No. Look at US or USSR in Afghanistan or US in Vietnam, or China in Vietnam. Or go back to in time and look at Mongols, Arabs in 7th century AD, Ottoman Turks, and the list goes on.
Those first 3 examples, Ukraine is the equivalent of Afghanistan / Vietnam. The defender with nothing left to lose. In those cases to actually achieve superiority of production (if it happens), would further the gap. Also note that those were all guerilla wars, this is a conventional war.
What we learned from ww2 is that when armies start to adapt similar tactics it does come down to some multiple of quality x quantity.
If this was the Mongolian invasion then it would for sure be over already. We have already seen that these 2 armies are at least roughly comparable.
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15 hours ago, cubsfan said:
^^^ Excellent post. And likely the reason Ukraine has such a strong chance against Russia. Much as I hate to see USA dedicate $100B a year to this war, then along with Europe adding billions for weapons - tough to see how Russia can not get buried, like Reagan buried them in the 80's. Russia has manpower, but with a defense budget of $80B - they are in real trouble.
The wild card, of course, is nuclear weapons, which, in the hands of Putin - who the hell knows.
And my other fear - is just how much of that arms aid gets stolen by the Ukrainian corruption.
The best way to keep track of the arms is to send more advisers to Ukraine.
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Given the discussion is on ww2, let's consider the rapid increase to weapons production during that period. In the US, aircraft production went up close to 30 fold from 1940 to 1944. This while increasingly the quality and complexity of the planes at the same time. For instance, heavy bomber production actually went up 500 fold.
I don't see why a similar production curve (possibly much larger) cannot happen for equipment such as autonomous drones. In prior conflicts, what you usually see is this refinement and mass production of weapons that already existed at the start of the conflict. I think this will happen here as well and drones seem like an obvious candidate.
This type of tech could change the importance of troop levels or at least act as a multiplier.
US combat aircraft production WW2
1940 plane production: 3,611
1942 plane production: 46,907
1944 plane production: 96,270
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_aircraft_production_during_World_War_II
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Well some Afghanis are helping Ukraine. The CEO of the company behind the switchblade drone is an Afghan refugee.
QuoteWhen he was a young teenager, Wahid Nawabi would go to the roof of his family’s home in Kabul and watch the Soviet helicopters flying in the distance.
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In 1982, Nawabi and his family fled. Nawabi, then only 14, led his three younger sisters on a harrowing 48-day journey to escape the war-torn country to reunite with their parents in India.
Because of that experience, Nawabi said he feels a personal connection with the more than 5 million refugees who have fled Ukraine in the wake of this latest Russian invasion. Now as an American and as the chief executive of AeroVironment, a leading provider of military-grade fighter drones, Nawabi said he has a moral obligation to aid the Ukrainian defense effort.
Last month, the U.S. government sent 100 of AeroVironment’s Switchblade drones to the Ukrainians, part of a massive weapons package. Switchblades have been described as “kamikaze drones,” because after they lock on to their target, they fly in and explode. The Switchblade 600, which can fly for more than 40 minutes with a 25-mile range, is designed to take down tanks and other armored vehicles. The smaller Switchblade 300, which weighs less than six pounds and can be carried in a backpack, is meant for smaller targets.
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Russia can't get by without the west in a proper sense but I don't know if they have a choice . They dont have the tech industry and so will stagnate decades behind. Even the USSR couldn't come close to matching the west and now Russia is a fraction of that.. during the USSR period we got by just fine without them, can be done again.
These posts to me just echo Russia. Just threats. Give us what we want or else.. You never give in to terrorists or bullies. Sure, armistice with condition of leaving Ukraine.
Im convinced the west can neutralize the threat with sufficient tech. In the first gulf war the US and allies defeated Iraq with just a few hundred casualties. Iraq had a huge army too but technologically inferior. Tech matters and that's our edge. I realize Russia is not Iraq but it still kind of rhymes. We need to apply tech here and fast. I'm not a mil guy so I won't try to get more specific but I know revolutionary things are happening in ai and robotics. We need to get to the point where these threats of mobilization are just a humanitarian concern for the conscripts.
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14 hours ago, Xerxes said:
Go after India !!!?!?
Are we talking about the same West that pivoted to China post-Vietnam war during the Nixon-Kissinger-Mao-EnLai rapprochement in the 70s. With the very same Red China that fought bloody war with India near its border.
The same West that supported Pakistan during the Cold War. Pakistan and the US were so close that U2 missions were even flown its soil. In fact, Kissinger even flew from Pakistan for its secret mission to China before it became public.
The same West that keep subsiding Pakistan’ general and ISI, during the Afghan war.
As always, there is the self-centred, all-about-me West, that remember what it wants to remember (through Hollywood), and forgets what is convenient to forget.
India will get close to West overtime as their own pace. We need India. We want India. The only obstacle is West acting like it always does. Self-entitled and all-about-me. Relationships are hard to built and easy to fracture. It needs to be nurtured overtime. Folks in the West may go Aeroplane mode when it gets boring, but the world doesn’t stop turning.
PS: general comment and definitely not toward you.
Point taken. India is not the hill I will die on so to speak.
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Thanks for that spek, I didnt know all this, but could tell from the narrative shift that Europe would make it. I still have serious long term concerns about Europe energy supply. They are still very dependent on the Middle East and the US. The US drew heavily on the SPR to keep energy in check. Meanwhile the energy companies in North America are being disincentived to produce. We are not out of the woods.
Even though Russia has a larger population, they will run out of the capacity to lose soldiers first. They are not automatons, this is not some theoretical where they can endlessly feed their population to slaughter. I've said it all before but I feel it will lead to revolt. To accelerate that, the west needs to keep sanctions on max, which they will.
I think the next step is to go after India for their continued support of Russia. Why should the west do business with them? They need us as much as the west needs them.
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2 hours ago, Luca said:
TIKR Premium gives us Analyst estimates for a few years, what do you guys think of these estimates and are they worth anything?
Whats your take? Do you use them for your thesis? Do Analyst know better?
Would like to know what you think
I use analyst revenue and earning estimates as an upper bound while I am learning about a stock. That's it.
I've heard they are very accurate predicting about one quarter out, FWIW.
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20 hours ago, Spekulatius said:
The tripple net landlords will get destroyed when higher inflation persists. Their rent escalation is typically 2% annually which means you are buying a bond more so than real estate.
I don't mean to argue with you but for my own benefit, where do you get this from? When I look through Realty Income's reports/presentations they say increases are either fixed percentage or inflation driven, but they don't provide any details. They also say that cap rates tend to follow interest rates with a 1 year delay, although perhaps that only applies when properties come up for renewal.
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Dinar, these REITs that you suggest are certainly more in the spirit of the site. Clearly more reward potential than say AVB. However, it's hard to wrap my simple mind around them and assess the possibilities. I will take this in consideration and try to dig into them as I have time.
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Thanks ourkid. This is reassuring. I am still not sure exactly how to compare that against say a nation-wide housing bust but I recognize those ratios are higher than what existed in the US pre GFC.
LearningMachine, as i understand most provinces in Canada the banks have recourse for the mortgages. However, if things go ugly I have to think the feds or provinces will step in. They did in the early 80s when interest rates went parabolic. There are just too many homeowners and they vote, something would be done.
It's hard to weigh it all out for me. I would need at least some OTM puts to feel safe with these. You could probably use the dividends to pay for the puts and hope for capital appreciation.
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REITs are really starting to get their prices hammered. Apartment ones in particular seem very compelling to me given their relative safety. I think either we have inflation and rents move up to offset the rate bump or we don't have inflation and rates move back down. Either way, this seems a decent entry point for the space.
I like Avalon Bay (AVB) an apartment REIT with properties mainly on the east/west coast. They have a long history of slowly raising the dividends (not all REITs have this kind of history) and are not particularly levered. They have also traded substantially higher (up to 60%) from where they are today.
Does anyone else have a fav REIT? Are there any stand out REITs with a secret sauce that manage to get alpha over their peers?
Russia-Ukrainian War
in General Discussion
Posted · Edited by no_free_lunch
Not well but they would provide something. If you watch RU propaganda they really pride themselves on this sort of thing.
Note that in Russia there is not really a significant resistance movement. It would eventually be the same in Ukraine.
Castanza, trusting what the CIA says is madness. Of course they will try for a counter insurgency and I don't doubt it will exist if that's the argument. I just don't see it being effective once RU deploys all their tools. Far easier to fight a conventional war and if it's lost let's burn the country down and get as many people out as possible. Scorched earth, deny it to the beast.