Spekulatius

Another prediction - one of the two Prigozhin Wagner) or Putin will not be alive any more a year from now. My guess is that Prighozhin will have an accident, but it could go the other way around.

He got just about everything right 7 years before it happened.

Looks like there was a special military operation near Belgorod, this time in Russia itself. I think it was basically a Psy-op, somewhat deflecting from the Bakhmut loss. The fact that people were hauling ass from Belgorod with their cars 65km away after news about the incursion tells you all, you need to know about how the Russian living there think. It seems to take just a couple of armored vehicles and one or two tanks to get 20km deep into Russia. It also looks like most of them made it back into Ukraine. From a military POV, this is a nothingburger, the action is going to be somewhere else.

We are in a cold war with China - see my post in the Taiwan thread - most people just have not realized it yet. It plays out mostly economically, now more politically and probably at some point militarily. Regardless of what you think is right or wrong, you need to invest in the world like it is, not the world you want it to be and place your chips accordingly. In my opinion, it's a bad idea to put your money on the other side of the fence that is being build here between the two blocks.

totally OT, but love it. I am not into cream fillings and such - I like dark chocolate. I am trying @rkbabang recommendations of the TJ 85% Uganda chocolate, since it's value priced as well.

My goto chocolate is the Ghiradelli with 85% Cocoa. I would give the Sea's chocolate a try, but they are basically unobtainable on the East coast. When I lived in CA, I was not exactly thrilled with the Sea's pralines but that was a while ago and I have not tried them since. Costco has pretty good stuff on sale from time to time. It's very hard to go wrong with Belgian chocolate or pralines. This is a chocolate stock I have been checking out a couple of times, but never bough (Barry Callebaut). There is of course Lindt and Sprungli, but it is very very richly valued and the common shares cost a Be5rtkshire like 100K CHF.

Coming from Europe, I would strongly disagree. Ghiradelli chocolate is much better, if you want to stick with made in the USA.

I bet you can use them to catch mice (they love the peanuts taste ) and maybe kill them at the same time.

Some interesting discussion about China, Taiwan and how it relates to Ukraine: Neill’s thesis is that we are in a Cold War with China but haven’t acknowledged it yet. This is similar to what happened after WW2 before China invaded Korea in 1950.

@TwoCitiesCapital yeah, if you ever expect the economy to perk up, big tech /QQQ would not be what I expect to do well. I would think that small caps, retail stocks, commodity or value stocks would be the trade. I think the QQQ is a flow story which probably was ignited by the AI mania.

My position wasn’t really large enough to cause me headaches, but then again, why run a risk at all, when you get a relatively satisfactory result in a short time. If shares come back to where ai night them (high. 60’s) I would not have a problem to buy back into TSMC again everything else being equal. For Berkshire, one thing to consider is that they have plenty of China exposure already via AAPL and I am fairly sure that this went into consideration for Buffett.

Prince was a great dancer though. Well, it was the other Prince.

Let's also not forget the Chinese posture and maneuver after Pelosi's island visit. Those ocurred after Buffett sold, I think.

TYX (30 year treasury bond index) crept up from 3.5% to almost 4% in the last few weeks. Its quite interesting and unusual that growth/tech stocks have been so strong while LT treasury yields have been going up at the same time.

2 reasons: 1) the shares have were close to the near term price target I set when I bought it late last year More importantly: 2) Buffett explanation why he sold (geopolitical). I thought a lot about this and especially why he changed his mind quickly after the purchase. Buffett is extraordinary good at risk management due to his background in insurance. He clearly thought this through and felt that the risk is increasing. He also might have non-public sources (again Berkshire is at heart a company build around managing risk) that influenced his decision. I don't always follow Buffett, but in this case, I felt it's prudent.

I think what you quoted may be the original one. But then again, you can apply the gist of what Ben Gurion said to similarl situations than Israel found itself in, including investing. What I like about this particular quote is that it seems a contradictory on first glance, but there more you think about it, it captures a lot of about how humans (or at least some of them) can deal with adversity.

Sold my TSM reluctantly (geopolitical concerns) and reduced GOOGL a bit (valuation, concerns about AI hype).

@longterminvestor thx for the color on the insurance market. You are probably correct that BRO has outsized exposure to FLA because that's where they got started. The current consensus estimate for BRO's 2024 topline growth is 6.4% according to tikr, so I think the market expects a significant slowdown in growth I don't think the current hard insurance market can't really continue - I think it's a belated COVID-19 effect and we know how this played out in a lot of other sectors.

I have no idea who they blame but the problem is that those technical people (think EE's, software engineers) can't find decent jobs in China. There is a lot of underemployment and it seems that the 20% unemployed/underemployed number for young graduates starting out is about correct. No common prosperity for these folks, I guess. My friends assumption is that there is a lot of unrest in the younger generation, but he does not know how it will manifest itself.

@John Hjorth The line from Ben Gurion was “ To be an realist, you have to believe in miracles.” This was related to the founding is Israel that succeeded against all odds. My interpretation of the meaning is that “miracles” are possible and perhaps only possible, if someone believes in them. Or perhaps it means that if you try something hard and long enough, you may succeed in what seems like a miracle to anyone else. Either interpretation sounds good to me. Now we can go back to our regular scheduled programming.

I had a conversation with a fellow who manages people for an US company in the semi space. They have dramatically reduced their business there and let people go and moved operations to the Philippines. He said one thing - there are a lot of underemployed people in tech in China, especially younger ones and in tech/engineering. When you read some articles, the unemployment rate is almost 20% there. He think there is a lot discontent with the CCP party and Xi Jinping there amongst the younger generation that might at some point bubble up and cause unrest. He thinks it’s just a matter of time.

Bakmuth has little strategic value, so the fact that is has fallen doesn’t really mean much. Wagner wanted this as a trophy to show that are capable to do something, the terrible cost in term of losses notwithstanding, while the rest of the Russia army hasn’t been able to do any offensive whatsoever. The war will be decided elsewhere.

I like to watch these trailers for upcoming movies. Oppenheimer and Dune looks interesting and The Hunger games beginning at least visual striking. Lot‘s crap as well (pretty much any movie with Sharks or Jason Stratham, the worst ones have both) Edit - the new Antman - Quantummania on Disney+ is garbage.

It harder to make large leaps with real hardware and systems. Also, the buyer of these are utilities which move very very slowly. Energy parity just means that this reactor puts out more power than you put in. From there , it’s a long way until it becomes commercially viable.

The Chinese as debtors seem to be very hard to deal with. In cases where both the IMF and the Chinese are debtors the Chinese don’t pool and try to cut favorable side deals for themselves on the back of IMF easing debt terms. It’s clear that the belt and road initiate is another one of Xi Jinpings failures and seem to amount to little more than neo colonism.