Spekulatius

These seem like very serious declines in the far outskirts of Toronto. I would expect houses to fall first in those newly discovered WFH communities. https://www.ctvnews.ca/business/where-have-home-prices-dropped-the-most-across-canada-1.6070565 But the biggest declines were in the communities that were within a two-hour drive from Toronto. The benchmark price of a home in Cambridge fell 24.5 per cent in the same period while Oakville, London and Kitchener-Waterloo saw declines of 23 per cent.

Sten Nadolny wrote a fantastic Novel about Franklin. I read it in German, but the English translation seems very good as well: https://www.amazon.com/Discovery-Slowness-Sten-Nadolny/dp/1589880242 I agree on House of Dragon - the script is very good. As for Rings of Power, Galadriel get's stuck a bit too long on this Island for my taste. I like the other storyline with around Arondir the most. I feel they could do more with the Dwarves.

So, Biden made it clear that the US would defend Taiwan, if China would attack the island. https://www.cnbc.com/2022/09/19/biden-says-us-forces-would-defend-taiwan-in-the-event-of-a-chinese-invasion.html

It‘s interesting to note that NG prices in Europe have collapsed since they spiked due to Putin shutting down NG supplies at the end of August. They are still extremely high though. German NG Storage is now 89% full, following the plan, despite the pipeline closure. Putin played his best card and it looks now that it was a huge mistake. The fear is often worse than the actual result.

Yes, the refineries will be reconfigured. That also means building new pipelines. I don’t know the plans because I only read some bits in German news sources so far.

The refinery won’t get oil from Russia- it’s going to be reconfigured to use other oil and new infrastructure is going to build (pipelines ) to do so. This is really not that difficult and I stated this a few times before - we and Europe are at war with Russia. We just haven’t declared war yet, but economically it is already a war. If you want know how this end, just look at how German assets did in the WW1 - All these companies with German sounding names like Bayer US, Schering etc ended up being US companies.

The show is living proof that mining is a lousy business. They probably get extra revenue from the TV producer to keep the whole thing afloat.

Florida seems to have worse inflation than the US in general, so I don’t think De Santis knows how to solve the problem either. https://www.bls.gov/regions/southeast/news-release/consumerpriceindex_miami.htm Consumer Price Index, Miami-Fort Lauderdale-West Palm Beach — August 2022 Area prices up 10.7 percent over the past 12 months

Some of the economic sanctions will remain in place for decades. As for the Rosneft seizure the assets are technically moved to a trust fund. The matter of seizure was considered a matter of National and energy security for Germany as those refineries had trouble to stay in business for a bunch of reasons with the Rosneft ownership. I think the main lesson here instant investing across political fault lines is extremely risky and that applies directly to investing in China.

@SharperDingaan I haven’t seen craft beer pricing going up. At least the larger regional craft beer players product still can be bought in my local supermarket for $13.95 per 12 pack. That’s surprising given the higher packaging transportation and input (hops) cost. I am guessing that margins here are shrinking. I do see some movement up for wine prices, especially at the premium side.

Sternlicht talks his own book. Look at what his business does. Higher Interest rates are poison for him. It always makes sense to understand the interest of a speaker.

You also have the strange thing going on that gluts and shortages for differnt items exists at the same time, which screws everything up. Some of this has to supply chain managers yanking orders on and off like crazy. That‘s really bad for productivity (see the Fred’s productivity chart which has gone negative ). One of my buddies working on the semiconductor equipment industry told me that they cancelled all their for supplier that are out more than 6 month because they are no concerned about demand, That’s after years of shortages and double ordering. now imaging these suppliers doing the same thing in Panik and you have another shock way running though and other value manufacturing value chain. Those things are happening now all over the place. As for @Gregmal assertion that inflation is on the retreat, i think partly it is as it pertains to volatile raw material and perhaps energy, gas etc, but it’s not true for core inflation. Core inflation is around 6% and I think it’s higher for producer prices. I know my company targets high single digits and that after years of 2% or less increases. The lousy productivity means that unit costs are higher and manufacturers try to pass those on. Those things have entrenched themselves and won’t go away easily. I am in the process of shopping for a new car and if you want to have fun check what car manufacturers are doing as far as MSRP prices are concerned for their 2023 models. There might be something going on here that car manufacturer are miffed about dealers selling cars for thousands above MSRP and now trying to grab some extras margins raising the prices. The new Honda CRV is a case in point, even when you look past the point that the base model won’t even offered any more for the 2023 model, they raised the price for a like to like car by the high single digits for their 2023 model. Does anyone really believe that this is going to be reversed? I think that’s what entrenched inflation is looking like. and it’s just one example amongst many here. Ironically the only countries immune from inflation seem to be China and Japan. China has seems heavy dose of inflation but they are back to 2% and change.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/scotts-miracle-gro-shortage-glut-inventory-fertilizer-11663261193?cx_testId=3&cx_testVariant=cx_2&cx_artPos=0&mod=WTRN#cxrecs_s Interesting story about Scott's Miracle gro but there are some general things you can learn from this. The COVID-19 epidemic pretty much screwed up every manufacturing value chain I am aware of. How exactly depends but in all cases it's either a huge boom or bust in demand followed by the opposite. I have seen this in the company I work for, where demand for certain components went from hero to zero in mid 2021 all of a sudden. Be it toilet paper ,energy, lumber ,semiconductors, cars or even gasoline and crude or lawn fertilizer in this case - we are seeing ripples that originate from the epidemic and that are still moving though the economic value chains to this day. I think every boom will be followed by an equally severe bust and vice versa. Fun times.

Also, by giving Ukraine Access to Starlink, he might have done more helping them than many governments. https://www.wsj.com/articles/ukraine-leans-on-elon-musks-starlink-in-fight-against-russia-11657963804?mod=Searchresults_pos10&page=1

Turkey is a NATO ally, but what they are doing with Azerbaijan is not sanctioned by the NATO, its Erdogan going it alone because of Turkey's local interests. Same in Syria and the Kurdistan conflict. Armenia aligned themselves with Russia, perhaps because they felt they had no choice. That means that no help from NATO will be forthcoming however (imagine giving Armenia weapons and they end up being used by Russia in Ukraine?). So this is one of those regional conflicts (there are literally dozens in the world) that are getting fought on and off. According to Putin's thinking, Ukraine should have played out the same way but it did not turn out that way. I also agree with @Xerxes that Zeihan has the Russian Iran relationship wrong. I have paid a little more attention to his youtube videos and while he is pretty good at identifying trends (his specialty are interactions of demographics/ geography and history) he seems to often paint too broad of a brush and get's nuances wrong, imo.

it's interesting that the Azerbaijan - Armenia conflict has flared up again right along the Ukrainian offensive and I don't think it's coincidence. Armenia has been backed by Russia and Azerbaijan has been backed by Turkey. I think Azerbaijan smelled blood in the water and that's why they attacked Armenia when it became clear that the Ukraine had a huge success with their offensive. The underlying thinking is that Russia is busy and can't help Armenia. As with the Ukraine conflict - Azerbaijan used Turkey's Bayraktar drones to hit the Armenians. Just another case where seemingly unrelated conflicts have an interaction. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/9/15/azerbaijan-says-71-soldiers-killed-in-armenia-border-clashes Another notable fact is that Xi visited Kazakhstan before meeting Putin. I think this visit may have more than a symbolic value because Kazakhstan ahs been distancing themselves from Russia with this Ukraine conflict and Kazakhstan may try to improve the ties to Beijing as a backup so to speak. https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-putin-health-japan-china-72f848530e0b16d2cbd80d38e74fda03 I think these all are early indications that Putin's empire building (or rebuilding) ambitions are unravelling due to the attack on Ukraine turning out to be a failure.

Bought a starter in WRK. I think it's cheap and less cyclical than Mr Market thinks.

Thanks for your perspective. I am not convinced that MCY is a good value. The way I see it, they operate mostly at a combined ratio of 100% , so the result comes from the investment return. I think they operate around 2x premium /equity and their (mostly bond) investment are a bit higher than premiums so with this short duration portfolio, the returns on equity have been mostly below 10%. They did better than that in 2020, but that’s because accident frequency was way down due to less driving. I think for a stock that earns less than 10% on equity (and in fact barely 8% over the years) valuation at book value is about fair. So for me MCY doesn’t look all that cheap.

I suspect it’s that one: https://www.thecity.nyc/2022/4/14/23026076/state-approves-electricity-transmission-lines-power-climate-goals This one seems to be backed by politicians but I think the issue remains that local groups because of simple NIMBY can slow down or kill projects like this. That’s less of an ideological issue rather than the simple fact that most people don’t like these huge lines nearby. Not that it makes much difference.

Sources? I have not seen all that much hate against transmission lines, except the regular NIMBY syndrome.

So, they have been in real estate since 1337 (Duchy of Cornwall) and 1399 (Duchy of Lancaster) as well as a 25% share of Crown assets worth $20B. i guess they made the laws of compounding work for them.

This episode from masters in Business with bill Browder (Red Notice) is incredible: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/audio/2022-08-19/bill-browder-on-high-finance-murder-and-justice-podcast

This feel like a circularity or singularity has been reached. On a side note, when you asked google the question" Should I buy XX stock?", you get some interesting answers and links to look at. I actually started doing this as part of my research process. Same with $XX (XX= ticker symbol) in twitter.

Well, we know the answer - the economy tanked in 2001 and 2008 and the the stock market went down with it. I would say so that in both cases, the interest rates weren't the root cause of the decline as they were lowed when the economy was weakening. On the Zack's podcast, one economist stated that interest rates <5% have never really caused a recession by itself, which I found interesting.

Tiktok really is not a replacement for FB or Instagram. It’s not a social interaction platform. Most users just passively watch short form video there, which is different than interacting with other users or uploading your own fotos etc. In my opinion, Tiktok is more a competitor for YouTube than FB and IG. That said, they all compete for eyeballs and attention. With Zuck’s Metaverse Adventure, there is a real risk than Meta becomes a rapidly melting icecube. For that reason, I would be reluctant to average down to no end. When network effects start to unwind, the underlying value can become extremely squishy. I own some shares, but I am reluctant to add more. I need to see some tangible progress on the product development from Meta here to add more to this bet. I decided a while ago to switch ~80% of my Meta allocation to GOOGL. I would much rather add to GOOGL than to Meta at this point.