Spekulatius

Correct. Maybe it’s even the right thing to do, I am just putting this out there because it’s not a free lunch and some one is on the losing side of this, which in this case are the banks. China is also aggressively lowering interest rates which isn’t great for the banks either. I think XI is willing to sacrifice the banks for here greater good, most are state controlled anyways. This is probably a sector to avoid in this context, since so much of their performance is driven by central bank decisions as well as the economic environment.

This CT40 40mm gun looks extremely impressive to me. It’s a whole new system development BAE and I think a Thales subsidy. Looks like GD may have the US license for this.

The banks are taking a bath here with lower interest income, possibly followed by cuts in principal later. I think China going to japanize their financial system.

I don’t think it’s going to winner take all either. GOOG has a $2T market cap and if Waymo gets commercialized, they are going to offer either the driving as a service or a suite of hardware and software as a kit for OEM to build and design into cars. I think GOIG will struggle with this because they are not customer focused and hard to work with. MBLY has a $11B market cap and $10B EV. They work with most OEM anlread and their safety systems are already on dozens of models at high volume. Their approach is to make incremental improvement that step up from Level 2 to Level 3 driving. Each step up will require much more complex systems and they state that ASP goes up ~4x from to L3. If they also gain volume there could be huge growth eventually. You get much more bang for the buck. I also think that if INTC sells their controlling stake, MBLY will get acquired. I have no position yet, but the recent decline makes this now a reasonable bet, albeit risky.

I think it’s wrong question to ask, because Mobileye product is only part of the solution and most systems currently are still just safety systems. But they have plenty of crowdsourced mapping data. In a way they want to make the shovels for the self driving gold rush. https://www.sec.gov/ix?doc=/Archives/edgar/data/0001910139/000110465924026792/mbly-20231230x10k.htm

If you want to make a bet on self driving, MBLY is probably the best one and can be owned for $11B in market cap. It’s still majority owned by Intel. They probably have the OEM solution with the highest market share by far.

I see no way that self driving will not be a monopoly for many reasons. If communication with other car is the issue, industry standard will do that. I don’t think it’s going to drive viability because most of the cars are not self driving and will not talk to anyone for at least a decade to come.

Some insiders are great indicators but then there is Dustin ($ASAN)

You can justify anything with history especially if you go back for enough.

From that bunch, I keep my eye on Netdragon 777. HK. It’s a gaming company. Seems or have plenty of cash on the balance sheet and they pay a bi- annual dividend (almost 8% yield on those) plus a special dividend which pushes the yield above 10% but that is probably variable. I love companies that pay special dividends as it shows they pay attention to capital allocation and rewarding shareholders. 777.HK reports entering later this week, so I will take a look at those and might buy sone shares. It’s really quite cheap, has been growing and pays out very well. It’s my kind of stock.

Since we are discussion LIDL in another thread, I guess most people don’t know that LIDL owns also a cloud business that they started from scratch. https://www.irishtimes.com/business/2024/08/23/how-lidl-accidentally-took-on-the-big-guns-of-cloud-computing/ Almost $2b in revenue according to this article. Would be funny if LIDL comes at Amazon AWS with “Your margin is our opportunity” .

Local TAM is too small. I like the LIDL stores but they seem more geared towards urban or suburban shoppers that like bargains. If you see one buy the German Weißwurst and some Pretzel from the Bakery - they are pretty good and both are some vintage Germany meal right there. There are some other awesome deals to be found there like a good Sopressata for dirt cheap.

I am with @Dinar in this case. Hamas will be reborn. War on terror does not really work unless root causes are eliminated and in this case they are not. The USA was in Afghanistan for 20 years and never got fully in control. Fought the Taliban, then Al Quaeda , then ISIS etc then the Taliban again. As long as the general populace supports a terrorist organization nothing short of destroying the entire population will destroy the terror organization either. If the general population stops supporting the terror organization then the terror organization will wither and dies out, but that’s not happening here.

Yes, Ripley is an excellent miniseries in vintage film noir style. Very much recommended. I watched Predestination yesterday on Amazon Prime. An excellent SciFi movie that I have not heard about before. I recommend it too if you like the time traveling genre. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2397535/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1

Quite a bit of R&D spent is already capitalized. https://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~adamodar/New_Home_Page/datafile/R&D.html