Spekulatius

MPC is one of the most aggressive cannibals I have ever seen. They started buybacks in early 2021 with ~650M shares and are now at 332M shares and still aggressively buying back. Stock has fallen from the peak, but is still almost a ten bagger from the COVI-19 panic lows. I have owned it before quite a while ago but not recently. Putting it back on my watchlist.

It seems to me that people in Europe should move more: https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/eu/top-personal-income-tax-rates-europe-2024/#:~:text=Among European OECD countries%2C the,have the lowest top rates. The range in income taxes is very wide. I think Czech republic, Slovakia, Hungary are nice, except there is political risk in Hungary. Some countries like Belgium and Croatia have low LT gains taxes which works well if you are just retired investor. Not everything in Europe is the same.

This is a repeat of the SS20 / Pershing 2 discussion during the 80‘s. The Russian were placing SS20 at their borders and in Poland believe. They were mid range nuclear missions. The counter was Pershing 2‘s. There was a piece movement in Europe and Germany if the sake be countered for the sake of piece and de-escalation. Well, Breshnev was no Putin and whoever is going to be elected in November is no Ronald Reagan. Europe may have to get its own nukes eventually probably via France ( force de frappe)

Should be great for him. He runs a hedge fund who goes long undervalued stocks and shorts overvalued ones supposedly. He really should go to CNBC and say “I feel like an oversexed dude in a whorehouse”, if he believes in what he says.

Since I am dual citizen, I guess I have two dogs in this fight. I can say that overall, the EU is much better now than before Schengen. There is now a free exchange of goods, services , a common currency. You can work pretty much in any country you want and I have several colleagues from school who took advantage of this and work in Spain etc. Go in any larger company and see many different nationalities from the EU working there next to each other. 30 years ago that wasn’t the case. I lived in a town 50 km away from to the Luxembourg border. To get to Luxembourg you had to go through a border crossing m sometimes get your trunk searched or wait if there is a line, exchange currency for a 2% fee (some stores did except German DM other didn’t ). Then if you wanted to go to France from there (another 50km or even less) you had to do it all peer again. It’s like living on the east cost and going through a border control and exchanging your money every time you cross another state. I rather have the cure t system with the Euro where I just drive through the border, can get a rents, and not worry about different insurance in differnt counties. That said, the bureaucracy aspect is crazy. It what I call the French approach of bureaucracy with the eggheads from their elite schools (Lagarde is a typical example of this ) trying to be really clever about how to regulate big strategies (climate change) and companies and make the world a better place one regulation at a time and worse telling how to do it instead of just setting goals and let the market and the people figure out how to do it. That said, I would take these warts any time if the alternative is to go back 40 years.

lol, I was breakeven when exiting. Glad somebody else makes money from it. My timing on entry and exit was incredible bad. Looks like an activist is coming from them.

Mc Master-Carr. One of the best in class e-commerce companies:

But they generally were soldiers with real experience and not a paper strategists moving figures around on a table like a chess game.

If by bank you mean a community or regular regional bank, I recommend the Bank Investor handbook from Nate Tobik: https://www.amazon.com/Bank-Investors-Handbook-Nathan-Tobik/dp/0692990208/ref=asc_df_0692990208/?tag=hyprod-20&linkCode=df0&hvadid=693310352361&hvpos=&hvnetw=g&hvrand=3643512216823082451&hvpone=&hvptwo=&hvqmt=&hvdev=c&hvdvcmdl=&hvlocint=&hvlocphy=9193068&hvtargid=pla-416269198694&psc=1&mcid=141e485f723c3853be1def45580d676d

I just don’t see the attraction of a business that has been flat more than a decade. Looking up older annual reports, they made $72M in net earnings in 2005 and they only really beat this earnings number in 2022 with revenue more than double the 2005 #. And now, to break out of this runt, they have done a merger that years 4 years to work out: In any case, trucking cos tend to have strong earnings about a year after a recession and then the profits seem to fade. Thats not much of a runway.

Yes, I am referring to the trucking company HTLD. I was wrong about the fund owning it - it used to be Palm Valley , but they seem to be out now: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/why-palm-valley-capital-disposed-141831946.html In any case, I sort of doubt that the acquisition is a game changer and will improve profits margins. For the time being, it seems like a worse company than before the acquisition.

I don’t think that correct. He got very difficult things to work too many times to be lucky. I don’t think he did the design or engineering, but he put the team together , the funding, the vision and he has enough engineering knowledge to lead the business in the right direction. These are tremendous accomplishment second to none. There are a lot of smart people or even rocket scientists, but it takes the right team, environemt, vision and outside thinking to make it work. There are some pretty good teams working on space and taking an outside approach besides SpaceX - Rocket Labs or even some German ones like Main Aerospace and I expect so see great things eventually, but they are all far behind SpaceX at this point. I think Lockheed probably has the engineering talent to do something as well, but they would need to spin off any venture because it won’t work within a defense contractor organization.

I have looked into HTLD a while ago. I think it was Hearland value fund (or similar) who mentioned it in a podcast or investor letter (don’t remember). I guess is the pitch is that the merger improves their profitability. HTLD does not have a great track record of value creation, so I am a bit sceptical.

He is not overrated. He clearly is instrumental with SpaceX that does things that other entities that get government funding too can’t do. Then again he is gaslighting at the same time as well, as seen with the Robotaxi event which was all vaporware. You can be a genius and shill at the same time.

That’s a winter in low tax NH. Other than that, the state is great.

@Luke views pretty much line up with those from the AfD leadership, which is a German right wing party. For those that care: AFD believes that everything will be fine if Germany leaves NATO, the EU and makes deals with Putin and Xi Jinping.

I think we are seeing a lot of data that Berkshire execution is slacked off. BNSF, Geico, PCP all have lost relative to competition. Perhaps Lubrizol as well. We may also have a succession issue with Jain possibly on his way out - he is 73 and has sold quite a bit of stock. He will be very hard to replace. Abel is going to have his hands full and probably will run a tighter ship holding managment or subsidies on a shorter leash if they don’t perform. Things will change at Berkshire very soon, because I don’t think WEB will be in his current role longer than Munger. I could see him ceding all operational responsibilities to Abel. He may have done this already de facto, but it will be easier for Abel to bring the hammer down, if it’s official.

The demographic trends show already a slowdown in migration to Florida. It will be interesting how the insurance angle is going to play out. I think the Florida backed Hurricane insurance capacity (which is pretty much a credit draw backed by Florida) is pretty much depleted after this season (I think). So my guess is that Florida will have to issue more bonds and raise insurance rates. If you have a home that gets flooded or destroyed by a Hurricane every 30 years or so statistically, it should probably cost 3% of the homes value to insure it, give or take. For a $500k home, that’s $15k a year. This alone can pretty much negate any state income tax advantage you may get from moving to Florida for an average family. Then you have the hassle to get through the inevitable scares every couple of years, the disruption and cleanup and power outages. That doesn’t seem like such a great deal any more.

The most important thing about Navalny is that he is dead. He basically surrendered himself to Putin when he flew back into Russia. Putin tends to kill his opponents. Something to think about when recommending to surrender to Russia.

It does seem like some people have enough : https://www.wsj.com/us-news/they-came-to-florida-for-a-slice-of-paradise-now-they-are-packing-their-bags-41d7275a?mod=trending_now_news_1

They say Russia is a gas station masquerading as a country:

Me when I see ESG investing:

Belated answer. On stock buybacks, they only seem to buy back shares in size when SEB trades below book. First time you am aware of they did this is was around 2002 when they took out 200k shares (they had 1.49M shares outstanding in 2001) and now again another ~180k shares. The last buy was from family members who apparently wanted out and did so at a discount to prevailing prices back then and around current prices a tad above 3k/share. Yes, the business is crummy and hugely cyclical, but they do make decent money over the entire cycle it seems. The way they do buybacks tells me that they are stingy towards other family members which tells me that minority investors don’t get screwed here. I actually find the annual shareholder letter refreshingly honest and straightforward. I also point that the pork business is turning around and earnings should be much better than last year at least. I bought a few shares to keep me interested. It‘s a classical Graham stock play, imo. I do not think the stock has ever been cheaper in terms of price/ book since 2002 at least.

Added some Evolution / EVVTY.

Just make sure you put all your buys and sells in the CoBF threads here for that purpose. We will take it from there.