Spekulatius

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.

This is not a new thing and has been around for a while now, mostly local governments and state owned companies asking for their employees passports for “safe keeping”. It does seems like this policy is becoming more popular. Note that this isn’t just affecting teachers.

So e interesting posts from Ryan Telford “quant”. About 10% of all 10 baggers end up having negative returns:

They had the right guest to chat with in the semiconductor episode.

Anders makes some other points about Putin making lousy decisions when some in the west believe he is a strategic mastermind. Mearsheimer is one of those structural dogmatic historians who see all the events in a very narrow lens. He is making some bold productions about the Israel conflict now that I don’t think will age that well either. In the end, it’s just people who make decisions and unless you know how these people think, it’s impossible to predict what they do.

This is another good one from an analyst - the danish analyst Anders Lick Nielsen: He has been much more right about Ukraine than wrong, unlike Mearsheimer who predicted that there would not be an invasion just a few days before it happened.

Well Iran did some fireworks, so now the question is how Israel will respond and respond they will. What I find more surprising is that a couple of days into the ground invasion, there seems to be very news about what’s going on in Lebanon. Sadly, I think this conflict will not have a quick end, we are talking a conflict that is probably not going to end even in 2025.