Spekulatius

Pretty good article on the recent market swings and narratives: https://www.wsj.com/finance/investing/whats-behind-the-markets-wild-overreactions-cae05ade

Does KW look good to you? It looks terrible with all that leverage and all those development projects. I had some unsecured bonds for a while and even felt uncomfortable holding them so ditched them for a small profit.

Seems to me that Ray Dalio ran a huge business very successfully so he must have done a few things right, be it salesmanship, macro calls, hiring the right employees or something else. His book "Principles" which I tried to read as a pdf is terrible imo and I don't recommending wasting time it.

Sold some $STNE in my IRA. Around a 45% gain on the few shares I bought weeks ago. Go figure. Wish they all did so well.

Check out Bill Gates or WEB tax rates. The US tax system is very degressive once your income is not through working for somebody else any more. These guys own business and for larger business, the tax rates are at all time lows. Just check out the tax rate for any large business , it’s probably in the 15% range. Tax advantages galore for real estate (Trump tax reports are an example), private equity, venture capital etc.

Best trade was just to by the QQQ and chill. Ignore Powell, ignore doomsters, inflationista's or everyone else. Up ~45%.

MP basically has become the Dave Ramsey of stock investing.

Watching “ All the light we cannot see” on Netflix. Beautiful storytelling and great cast:

the bank likely does not own your mortgage - certainly not if it is a conforming mortgage. The mortgage is owned by by some MBS fund with thousands of other mortgages packaged together. That construct makes it probably not feasible to buy out individual mortgages. Even if a bank does own your mortgage fully, i don't think they would buy it back because they would immediately realize a loss which would create a hit for their equity. Better to extend and pretend as this does not impair their capital (from a regulators perspective).

I know people who retired and own zero bonds. Most people were just holding cash or sometimes short term CD's, since bonds were yielding almost nothing. What was the point of holding bonds in 2021?

More consistent results and property insurers trade at a higher multiple than re-insurers generally speaking. A blue chip property insurer like RLI trades at 4x+ book for example. A mediocre re-insurers like AXS for example trades around book and often below.

Insurers tend to benefit from higher interest rates, as do pension funds. The market to market losses don't matter in 95% of the cases, but he availability to invest the float into higher yielding securities is beneficial to pension funds and insurance cos. I have yet to see a single person who is affected by the bond selloff. The higher interest rates for home purchases is a factor but if you own one and refinanced in 2020/21 you stay put and don't give a damn. I think the lower interest rate from 2009-2021 were real poison.

This seems odd - $137B in sovereign bond sales completely suck out the liquidity and crowd out other issuers that live on day by day financing it seems. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/chinas-latest-stimulus-effort-unintentionally-023709357.html

Complexity is an issue that reduces valuations in general. A simple business will be valued higher than a complex business, all else being equal. What @SafetyinNumbers call social numbers is what Aswath Damadoran call’s the story. I think the story is getting better with FFH but as an insurance holding stock, it is unlikely to even become a stock that has much of a story value.

A swill of DEO this AM.

Palestine for once. The terrorism and the conundrum of other countries getting involved. Communism being “cool”. There were several episodes in Tatort as well about the Baader Meinhof Bande. Monhaupt was probably the most infamous one during the 70‘s. Her picture was found in virtually every Post offices and Railroad stations. I do remember the Stammheim Drama

Sounds like ChatGPT had an outage. Could be a huge problem in the future when AI stops working and the whole world goes dumb: Articles won’t get written, news sources go down. Schools go down because students can’t write their assignments and teachers can’t rate them anyways. Office work snarls to a crawl. Elections needn’t be postponed if they happen to be around the corner. Luckily, the government is expected to continue working unimpeded :

REY.MI and OUT. Both turned out alright. Edit: Sold remainder of $JXN and trimmed NTDOY just a little bit. $JXN turned out to be nice money maker.

Watched Baader Meinhoff Complex. I remember many of the events as a kid. Some of the issues that led to terrorism have been around since the 1960‘s. Depressing to think about it. The Movie does a great job to recreate the 70‘s era in Germany.

Never a dull moment in energy with crude futures down 4%+ today. Has anybody an idea why?

It is possible. The rational is that they want to have all the liquidity in one exchange and the US seems better than Italy. The stock certainly looks cheap but that does not mean it can't get cheaper. I am pretty sure that Exor has a strong say in how they allocate capital. My thinking is that they want to do something about their subscale and less profitable Case construction business - either sell or merge it with another player. They spun out Iveco already which is also a somewhat subscale and much less profitable than the core AG business.

Yes, this one looks interesting, as it is a fairly stealthy security.' One needs to take into account the political risk since Prime Minister Victor Orban is quite something.

Ouch. Down another ~13% premarket. Earnings report does not look that bad to me though. I am going to add some shares here.

I know these mortgage rates can work, but to me, it almost seems like picking up pennies in front of a steamroller.

Loved it personally. Very nice Hommage.