Spekulatius

Well, if this weren’t is closed end fund, he probably would be in business any more: That’s not to say Mr. Kidd has never underperformed. Over the past 10 years, according to Morningstar, Central has lagged the S&P 500 by an average of three percentage points annually as giant tech companies have raced ahead. (So far in 2021, Central is outperforming again.)

What problem does this solve? The centralized exchanges seem to work quite well and are very fast. If this would run on a decentralized exchange the trades would be much slower and you likely get killed on gas fees like when you try simple transactions in Ethereum. I think Coinbase charges 3% for transactions?

I am hearing some crazy stuff at the company I work for. Some raw material prices like special qualities of fused silica have doubled. Other glass qualities are up 15-20%. Germanium prices are “through the roof”, whatever that means. We are thinking about inflation clauses in sales contracts to protect against input cost inflation. Quotes binding only for 30 days instead of the customary 60-90 days. Crazy. In my 20+ years in business , I have never seen something like this, not as broad based. The dot.com boom also caused some crazy stuff in my line of business but not inflation like this.

Value stocks were later hit in 2001 because the economy was hit. There were multiple things going on resulting in quite a few bankruptcies. the telecom boom ended and took several telecom companies down into bankruptcy - Global Crossing, Williams communications, Montana telecom, Worldcom etc. then independent power producers started to collapse - Enron, Mirant, El Paso (they didn't collapse but were seriously impaired) and many others. This all happened in 2001 before 9/11 and then 9/11 delivered a considerable blow to the economy and confidence but with credit getting tighter due to risking spreads, the impact of the Fed was limited. The accounting issues lead to credit spreads going up which tend to hurt many indebted companies but also smaller caps with less access to credit. In other words, I think the analogy to the dotcom bubble shouldn't be overplayed. There were multiple causes for the stock market decline from 2000-2002. Some of them may also be a factor now, others likely not. History rhymes but it will never repeat itself.

To get this back on topic, and I recall this only loosely from memory , it is interesting to compare the "Archipel Gulag" with another book that is only available in German - "Der SS Staat" from Eugen Kogon. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugen_Kogon Similar to how the Archipel Gulag describes how Stalin's system worked, the SS Staat describes how the German NAZI/SS system with their concentration camp network worked. When you read both, you realize there are a lot of similarities and I would in fact state that Stalin and Hitler had more in common than they were apart even though they later ended up fighting each other. Same methods different goals, but the goals didn't really matter much in the end. Now you can circle back to Orwell's Animal farm

The tweet is just an example how unnecessary polarizing he is. As for cancel culture, I defer to the following excerpt from wikipedia (with a link): So if he suggest to defund women's studies, he uses the same language and method that the left uses (defunding the police BS etc ). I don't think it's a good way to go about matters that one personally disagrees with.

MELI is another growth brother darling with deteriorating margins: They went into many adjacent business (logistics, payments) with lower margins than there core market places business. Bulls are pointing out that their P/S has declined recently but I guess it should decline when operating margins go from ~30% to ~0%. This margin decline isn't necessary bad but on needs to look under hood. Bulls are using the revenue increases to justify valuations but not all revenues are the same.

The bigger issue is that now anyone who held positions in meme stocks at that time when Robinhood restricted trading can now sue Robinhood as well because now there is a precedent. This is going to be quite a headache for Robinhood.

I don’t get why a 72 year old investor would be 50% on BTC. It’s not quite betting the farm, because he can afford to lose 50% and still be fine, but what exactly does he want to accomplish here? FWIW, I do own a little gold ETF and would rather own gold than BTC because of the Lindy principle. It’s more of a cash substitute than an investment for me.

I am going compounder brother: GDRX, CRM, FROG, TWTR, and a bit more LBRDA and TMUS.

LOL:

With returns going down, it becomes a more winning strategy to trade and exploit the volatility vs just buy and hold. I think traders might beat the compounder buy and hold investor going forward. Of course trading right is not easy either.

Since I am a sucker for crime stories, I enjoyed Wind River a lot: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5362988/

Another angle to find good music is to look at records produced by Russ Titelman and Lenny Waronker. This duo worked together a lot and they had musicians like Randy Newman, Ry Cooder, James Taylor, Ricky Lee Jones and so many others. What they all have in common is that the records sound fantastic and in the 70’s or even in the 80’s that’s not something to take for granted.

80’s music & Cobra Kai - are you team Eagle Fang or Miyagi-do ? Me:

Same with GDRX. They have pretty much performed to expectations since their IPO @$33 in September 2020. Since then, their revenue run rate has increased from ~$140M to 195M, up ~40% while the share price (from IPO) has decreased by ~23%. It felt like an overvalued stock at IPO (even had a substantial one day pop from its IPO price) but that’s a 52% haircut based on the P/S metrics counting from the IPO price and given them credit for the growth from then. Those are the kind of cases that are interesting to look at on a 52 week low list, because it’s clearly more the narrative than the fundamentals driving the price here.

Granted my hypothesis that there could be a recession in 2023 is pure speculation, but it’s some themes fun to think how this could happen. I believe a recession is a possibility but if it occurs, it will not feel like regular recession. For once, I don’t think we will see high unemployment in such a recession as a decreasing GDP will just reduce the labor market tightness. I believe the most likely reason for a recession will be either and unforseeable event or an asset value deflation probably caused by rising interest rates. We are seeing already some of this with tech stocks, but what happens when it goes to crypto, real estate and even the board stock market? I think one of the reason the Labour market is so tight because people have made a lot of money in stocks, real estate and crypto. It has pulled forward the retirement a couple of years or his enabled others to got from full to part time employment. If this funny money evaporated, some of the people might have to go back to work. I have seen this happening after the Y2000 tech bubble as well, but this time, the asset inflation is broader, so the impact of wealth disappearing could be much more severe.

I added some shares as well.

Yes, but first they went down by a little bit. This whole thing is just speculation anyways. Oh wait…

I think we could get a recession while the Labour Market remaining relatively strong. A recession is just 2 quarters of negative GDP. It doesn’t take much to get to that point. Could be just a consumer strike due to eroding buying power for example.

Funny thing is that even after this bloodbath, all of these stocks are still overvalued.

GDRX is another one I believe.

Sold DISCK on the rip today.

I feel like TPB get's a free ride on the growth in weed use, no matter the regulatory framework. I don't have to deal with weird CEO's, lack of FCF, community adjusted EBITDA or low weed prices, greenhouses etc and all that nonsense. While not egregiously cheap, i could see TPB becoming a multi-bagger in a few years and maybe even just a solid double digit compounder in a more baseline scenario. I guess the one issue that is hard to handicap is the exact nature of the Zig Zag licensing agreement with Republic Industry (which produces the paper).

You can’t stay home with a runny nose, you need a positive test result to stay home. You can call us wussies, but when since the positivity numbers have been creeping up in Mid December, we have curtailed social activities. My son still does his stuff (swimming, school etc) but there have been cancellations due to infection clusters (several people with positive test results). No dining in restaurants or anything with several people in a room etc for us. My wife works at local hospitals here and they definitely have seen surge in COVID-19 related admissions. It’s mostly unvaccinated that are having a hard time as well as some with the JNJ vaccine (without boosters ). She had a potential exposure early this week so I went to our guest bedroom until she gets a negative test result from a swab at least 3 days after her exposure (a Colleague of her working in the same room tested already already positive). I have seen cases at work (we get notifications) but I am pretty much alone in my room and we have mandatory mask anyways, so risk of exposure there quite small, if you avoid break rooms (I get only coffee there and then bail) and do hand washing. I do expect this to get back to normal in a few weeks. I personally only watch the positivity number in our state as the main KPI. If it’s below 3-4% again, we go back to normal. Right now we are at 22% , which is almost a record. This means you are most assured to get exposure if you are in room with a dozen people a couple of times. Not worth it for me. So far, none in our family have gotten COVID-19, despite more exposure than many others (teenager going to school, wife working with COVID-19 in hospital, me going to office).