Spekulatius

Sold some TPB - has been on a tear lately. I believe it’s due to them having introduced nicotine pouches but I am not quite sure.

Well, it’s Halloween, so if you want scared, listen to this podcast From Garant Williams with David Murrin as a guest : https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-grant-williams-podcast/id1508585135?i=1000674400029 China, Politics, Trump, Brexit - he covers it all.

XI Jinping doesn’t believe in frivolous consumption, He wants to make more stuff and to export it. Good ole mercantilistic ideology. Now the problem is that China is already the largest exporter so how far can this model go ? Most countries are pushing back with tariffs for Chinese goods, so this model is not going to work. If you want a more sinister explanation what’s listen to this podcast from Grant with guest David Murrin. Scary if he is even half way right: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-grant-williams-podcast/id1508585135?i=1000674400029

The is editor at TAZ, a very left leaning newspaper, so not even a politician. So yes these views exist but extreme views existing in the US as well

They probably can’t feed them so they may have decided they can out them to use as relatively well paid mercenaries. Peronally, I think the US and NATO should encourage South a Korea to enter the chat, because they have something that almost no western nation has any more: They can mass produce decent weapons alike ships, artillery, tanks, rockets etc like from an assembly line as was the case in WW2 on fairly short notice. My guess is they can do that because they are an in industrial powerhouse with deep supply chains within the chaebols. I do believe that with US and eastern encouragement, funding and maybe some tech help, they could do wonders to overcome the advantage the Russians have in material quantity. And while the SK we pans are not always top notch compared to US or European ones, they are overall much better then the Russian ones. They have already delivered some weapon systems to Ukraine as far as I know , but not in large enough numbers to make a difference. There is an added benefit that it would make Korea more resilient against NK and Chinese aggression.

Yes, it’s about Patriot. Havn’t read the book and most likely won’t. Too depressing.

Putin is an ice cold killer, He kills his opponents, Navalny, Yushchenko and a long list of others. By the way, Navalny’s widow just published a book that sheds some light about Navalny’s late days. He died in a Russian Gulag. The funeral on Moscow only happened because his Mom persisted in finding his body in Siberia and arranging a small funeral that ended up drawing way more attention than Putin wanted. By the way, the Orthodox Priest holding the service as well as the casket bearer were apprehended by the Police after ward. There is now an Russian arrest warrant in his wife too. Team Putin for the win. My mom told me the book was sold out in German bookstores. So it seems that some people care.

Here is the non paywall (at least for some) version: https://archive.ph/p2YaA These GLP-1 drugs really seems like a miracle to me. The ancillary effects seem powerful and compound in a positive way. Most of the time, you have positive and negative “side” effects but in this case, it seems like a lollapalooza of positive side effects. I think far more people should take them.

There is nothing new about this approach. This business model has been tried many times over. Besides, modern drug labs are highly automated with robots.

Interesting question that Putin really did not answer:

Has government employment increased that much? Looking at this chart, it looks like government employment has dropped in the epidemic quite a bit and then caught up the trendline. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/USGOVT Wages got a huge boost for lower paying jobs from ~$8 to ~$20+ for grocery jobs ( I have seen this with my sons summer jobs) but recently the gains have normalized.

Partisans always use human shields, that’s their modus operandi. That is also why they are generally treated differently than regular soldiers. Hamas and Hezbollah even less so are not Partisans. They have embedded themselves into the population prior to the open outbreak of hostilities. I am not sure why the population in Lebanon and the government let this subversion be. If Hezbollah creates their own command bunker beneath the hospital, if you work there, you know what his happening and what may happen if that goes sideways. So Hezbollah clearly subverted the Lebanon state since I assume that not everyone living in Lebanon sides with Hezbollah unlike Gaza, where the vast majority of people sides with Hamas. Israel may do Lebanon and the people there a favor in the long run, if they can break that de facto control that Hezbollah has but maybe I just drink my own cool aid here. Thats the only way for Israel to win this engagement but thats easier said than done. Foreign occupiers generally have a poor track record of fixing things.

Sales in assets often creates UBTI, which are a pain in the arse in IRA account to deal with.

I am curious - do you think the IDF spokesman is lying when he shows the underground facility of Hamas beneath the hospital in Beirut?

Europe government deficits are restraint (Germany is at 2.1% of GDP, USA is in excess of 6% and that with economy booming). Both candidates are inflationary based on their policies, especially Trump. I think chances are pretty good that we see some raises from the Fed after a few cuts this year. Depends on how the economy is going after the election.

Narrative violation- industrial power costs in Germany are lower than in 2020: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1050448/industrial-electricity-prices-including-tax-germany/

6723.T/ Renesas, Japanese semiconductor company that is producing decent numbers now. They were reduced by Japan Inc and most of those have or are selling their appreciated stake now. I think the best may still be to come if they continue to execute. They are in god markets (microprocessor units, automotive, embedded processing) and their business model is relatively capital light. This is not your typical Japanese co any more, they very much seems like they’d follow more and US style model. I believe the market is concerned about the relatively expensive Altium acquisition. https://www.renesas.com/en/about/investor-relations/event/presentation#analyst_day Unless the wheels come off, the stock is cheap (10x 2023 earnings). Earnings will go down this year though. .

Reducing $BAC and $LUV

$GPC down ~20%. Haven’t seen that for a while with such a stalwart. It actually starts to look attractive.

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.