Spekulatius

The spy ballon that wasn’t:

Pretty interesting video about Shanghai and how it has changed: The fellow used to live there and left early 2020 with the Covid-19 outbreak. He noticed some changes and the very few things that stayed the same.

The ultimate battery uses matter/ antimatter annihilation. Might be a few years out until commercialization and safety issues need to be worked out.

Largest deposit means little, the devil is in the details. For example Germany has a huge lithium deposit in the Rhine valley , but progress to mine it is pretty slow: https://www.mining.com/vulcan-energy-to-mine-60-more-german-lithium-than-planned/ Lithium is not particularly rare and there are actually quite a few deposits allover the world. To mine them economically is the harder part.

Wagner is still in business and the boss is Sytii: https://www.wsj.com/world/africa/wagner-africa-sytii-prigozhin-gold-12a45769?mod=trending_now_news_3 Quite well diversified - security muscle, media business (misinformation, troll farms, political advertisement beer), gold mines and who knows what.

This is correct. You could use the same logic for a janitor job. There are many issues. Studies have shown that high CEO pay is actually correlated with worse stock performance. Second issue is that boards are not independent in that US and mostly run by the CEO and it’s the board who sets comps, so essentially this becomes circular. In my opinion, boards should be indepedent.

Since we are comparing workers pay with BYD, why not compare CEO and top management pay. this is 2 years old, but it looks like the highest pay in BYD is 8M RMB which is a bit more than 1M USD. GM CEO Barro pulls ~$29M annually. So if workers only ask for 3x more than comparable workers at BYD, management is getting a bargain, relatively speaking. By that measure, Barra should be getting no more than $3M or about 1/10 of what she is paid currently. One could say Barra and co are only a few people, but I think these salaries are pulling up all the salaries for the people underneath, so they are contributing to the bloated cost structure. In addition, they are arguable doing a lousy job as far as creating shareholder value too.

I actually agree with this. Should be done via profit sharing, same indexing for everyone.

I don't know if that's still the case, but at automobile companies, Engineers got overtime pay, just like hourly employees. That was about 20 years ago and probably rank dependent.

Why now?

Here is a study from the Focusedcompounding fellows: https://focusedcompounding.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/2022-spin-off-transaction-study-.pdf This confirms the underperformance of the Spinco population that I have seen in another study recently: What I did not know is that remainco's also underperform:

My Costco in NH would work, I think. Current Gold price is $1940 so $1980 is just a ~2%markup. Pay this on a Costco CC and with the cashback credit you are buying this below FMV of the Gold essentially. Item cannot be returned unfortunately - otherwise you would have a short term out option with it for free as well. https://slickdeals.net/f/16931002-costco-members-1-troy-ounce-gold-bar-rand-refinery-new-in-assay-1969-99?page=7#comments Not available for me at my warehouse unfortunately.

As far as I can tell, the economy and the banking sector are still alive.

My guess is that Mike Burry is also more of a trader than investor now.

Trudeau can't make open accusations but then has nothing to show. If he can't share intelligence, then he can't go public either and needs to work diplomatic channels only. Seems like a very elementary mistake.

Refinitv and tikr (which pulls consensus) has AJG at ~25x earnings. I think the 45x PE is backwards looking and may be GAAP not "operating earnings". I think AJG trades in-line with BRO, if not a bit cheaper.

I just added a little to RTX this AM. While the engine issue is an overhang, their defense business with a lot of exposure to electronics, missiles (hypersonics) is very well positioned to grab more business. it also does not seem that the military engine business from P&W is affected.

I will say this much. Chinese don’t care about strangers but they would much less likely steel from a family member than in most westerns societies. This applies even to a work environment generally. I never had anything stolen at work while I worked in China. If they know you well enough, they won’t steal from you. It is also noticeable that the US does not look that great in this chart either.

LOL - percentage of lost wallets returned as a measure of honesty by country: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aau8712

I have not listened to Chitchat AZO podcast, but you likely get better info here (Acquired Podcast): https://podcasts.apple.com/be/podcast/autozone-exemplary-capital-allocation/id1559120677?i=1000542928430

For Chinese stocks to work, 6% GDP growth or taking over the USA as the largest economy is not needed and I would argue even that looking at these things is mostly irrelevant. For Chinese stocks to work, XI needs to leave the economy alone more and let it do what it (or the people) wants to do. Whether it growth by 3% or 6% does not matter all that much, especially if the extra 3% growth may come from prestige projects with very little economic utility.

@longterminvestor thank you for your incredible work. I was looking at BRP too and went into the too hard pile. I simply could not understand the financial statements and it is obvious that there is not much FCF, but the exact reasons (other than debt service costs) were not clear to me. I have no a much clearer picture of what exactly is going on there without having to do any work.

I listened to the Discover episode - it wasn't very good and I think they got the business wrong. These Chit chat guys are not very good analysts and paint these business in very broad strokes. I personally think you can find better work (Deep dives) elsewhere and you are wasting your time listening to them. The name says it all - it's chit chat.

The higher long yields are an indication of the economy doing better than expected. Looks like we have no problem with 5% interest rates, at least the doom and gloom that was predicted did not happen.

$DFS does not do car loans. I think you are referring to $COF. $DFS is a very simple business - i hope they dump the student loan business as they seem to be contemplating - it has less return and there are a lot of regulatory issues. What people missing with these cannibals is that for a cannibal to do their work (buying back huge chunks of their own shares), they need to have a low multiple. A 5x PE gives you a 20% earnings yield, which means you can buy back 20% of the outstanding (assuming no re-investment) while with a 20x PE, the company can buy back 5%. That's why the $JXN, $DFS or $BTU and similar cheap stocks are better cannibals now than $AZO.