Spekulatius

I highly recommend a days trip to Vancouver Island / Victoria. I have rented a car in Seattle and went over to Canada and back to Seattle without issues. I don’t think doing this the other way round would be a problem.

Early happy hours drinks or are you talking about stonks?

I agree with @gfp here. Removing 10k of longer term debt wont have the same effect than giving 10k of cash to the same amount of consumers. There won't be much of an impact on spending.

Blockchain tech is inherently slower than a centralized database which is essentially what an exchange is. I don’t see blockchain disrupting exchanges. The Twitter user HideNotSlide has good info on exchanges. I recommend following him:

Probably. You should take what every source states with a huge grain of salt. Xi has a tough decision to make - on the one hand, they want to make owning a home cheaper to help out young families and perhaps the demographics in the long run, on the other hand lower home prices may de-stabilize the financial system and cause unrest with existing home owners. We know there is financial stress in the system, because China lowers its interest rates and seems to do some sort of quantitative easing while the US is tightening. This is interesting because China has their currency pegged to the USD so it generally means that monetary policy in China has to track the US. That means that we will likely see a devaluation of the Yuan relative to the USD.

It has to do with the field, but more so about the specific job. I work in engineering and had a job where I was both individual contributor and had to lead a group of engineers as well. Than add a bunch of travel to the mix as well. The money was good, but it wasn’t worth it for me.

That’s essentially the broken window fallacy implemented as a public policy, on a large scale: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window

The tax credits for kids don’t amount to much when you are ~$250k in combined income or more. I think we got $1200 or so combined and I had to pay this back even after filing my tax return. On the retirement issue, my son is starting college next year and after that we can consider. I am in my mid fifties right now, my wife a bit younger. I highly recommend having a nurse as your partner. In addition, the key is to have a job that’s not stressful. I don’t mind working, but I do mind jobs that are incredible taxing. Those jobs can eat you up.

The deal works for me. I bought when it dropped to a bit above $40 and then more when it went to $37 recently. I learned about this business from the focusedcompounding podcast. I think they had a position in it years ago and sold. The stock got very expensive in 2019 but with the crash in Fintechs, the price got down to a pretty reasonable valuation again. This is just one of those boring business that keeps plugging along.

CVX is very stingy.They won’t buy OXY. Warren knows better than to mettle and sitting in both sides of the table in a self dealing manner could reflect very badly, if he were directly involved.

Sold CSVI in my tax deferred accounts after they received a buyout offer. Another one of my buggers gone.

Well, Gazprom reduced the flow to 20% anyways a few weeks ago, so I don’t think that reducing it to zero matters all that much. I mentioned already that Germany’s storage is 75% full ahead of time and Poland for example is almost filled up. There is a lot of doom porn going on about next winter in Europe, but the data suggests that Europe should be OK. Be t year, the jig is up on Russian NG and the gas will be stranded , so no more Euros in Putins Pocket for that until 2027 at earliest, if he is able to build new pipes for new to China etc.

@joka I think one issue why cloning doesn’t work is the information lag. It’s up to 3 month on entry and exit, if you are talking about using 13F. When a manager is actively promoting a position ( basically pumping a stock where he has a position in) it’s even worse because you might be buying what he is selling. This is what happened with many FinTwit small cap and mid cap stocks that were and still are handed around. If you are using the 13F’s as an source for ideas, that in my opinion is not cloning. I do this as well and get ideas from it every once in a while. I do think that in this case you need to understand what you are buying, there is really no shortcut around this. if you want to shortcut due diligence, you need to invest in their vehicles or just do index investing.

This is not a consumer play, this is a Momo play.

Think about this - somebody is on the other side of the table and has lost $110M. It’s most likely lots of small retail investors. BBBY isn’t really worth more than a few month ago. It’s likely a ball bouncing down stairs.

Shameless cloning = brainless cloning. I think the likes of Guy Spier, Seth Klarman and Prem Watsa have underperformed index investing for a long time, why would you want to clone them? I think looking at what other investors are buying and why has value but you need to put your own thinking behind these ideas and then It’s not cloning (cloning means carbon copying) any more. I think cloning in a strict sense does not work in most cases.

I think a quick look at the index charts tells you more about Mr Market than any of the indicators (fear and greed). Looking at the VIX charts tells you a lot about the fear part. The headlines from CNBC are often mean less chatter, imo. How often are they obsolete when they show in the website just 2h later? I have seen it endless times that the CNBC headline shows “ Market is down because of XXX” and 2 h later the market turns green and yet the headline is still there. These explanations of short term movements are superfluous and worthless but apparently create enough interest and that’s what CNBC and other care about. i think charts are actually better market indicators than any of the headlines as they represent what all the market participants are doing in aggregate.

I agree that Belfast is a movie worth watching. There is nothing wrong with the cinematography and the acting is great.

I am currently in Europe and talked to my brother (living in Germany) about the energy situation and he thinks that Germany is on track to have the NG storage filled before winter, the reduced gas flows from Russia notwithstanding. In fact right now, the storage is already ~74% full. Also, Polands storage is already full right now and the first (out of 5) LNG terminal (Brunsbüttel) on the German coast will be completed in Dezember 2022 and could actually help to alleviate the shortage for this winter. He think power prices will stay high until next winter and then drop a lot. He watches this more than casually, because the company he works for (lumber mill) also operates a cogeneration power plant with wood chips as fuel and it‘s making a lot of money now, but he doesn’t think this will last past this year. He thinks that the German government spreads a bit doom and gloom to force some savings that may not be necessary and think by next year the crisis will be over.

Add NG gas to it, as well as other energy sources.

Seems to be working so far. Selling into this oil spike was the right decision, imo. The US is energy self sufficient and does not need a strategic crude reserve currently. This was not the case when the strategic crude reserve was started in 1975.

Core CPI needs to come down from the 5.9% rate before declaring victory here.

this is not correct. to have the same life style than I currently have in China, I would need to earn much more money than I do currently in the US. Just a simple example - to own a free standing house with one acre of land around it 30 miles of a larger city is virtually impossible in China. Many other things are more expensive as well (cars etc). Then there is still pollution, lack of freedom and many other intangibles.

@tnp20 fair comments. I don't think Xi is out to kill the tech sector, but he was certainly out to get back at individuals (like Jack Ma). The whole crackdown then spread affected the whole sector, whether that was intended or not (See DiDi, education sector and Alibaba / Tencents) My views on China were way more positive in the past and maybe they are too myopic now. I think some bets in Chinese stocks can work out well , but I would rather try my luck with non-tech stocks (China Postal bank being one example) that are less likely to be in the CCP's crosshairs than with Alibaba and others. I just think there are easier ways to make money investing than trying to make money with Chinese stocks that have huge (imo) tail risk.

This does not sounds like a big deal - 2.8k cases and no death. It also does not seem like simple touch may transmit the virus that easily- otherwise we would have seen more cases in the general populace. Monkeypox does look mainly like a STD disease to me. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/monkeypox-outbreak-uk-may-peaking-health-officials-say-rcna41803 It could still develop into something, but chances are that it won’t get transmittted in schools.