Spekulatius

Interesting experiment. There is a lot of skepticism about Astra Zeneca's vaccine in Europe and back and forth on approvals, but when Wismar did an open "walk in" vaccination using the AZN vaccine for everyone above 60 year old, there was huge demand: https://www.ndr.de/nachrichten/mecklenburg-vorpommern/AstraZeneca-Andrang-beim-Impfen-ohne-Termin-in-Wismar,coronavirus4838.html I guess people are voting with their feet.

The vaccine will stop the pandemic, but COVID will become endemic and will be around forever, I think. The protection against severe disease is much better than the protection a flu vaccine provides against flu and probably exceeds even the optimistic guesses early on what we could achieve, both in terms of efficacy and speed to market. With such good individual protection provided by the vaccine, I care much less if other people take it or not - if something happens due to getting COVID-19 to them it will be on them. It is undesirable to have the virus floating around in huge numbers because that also means that variants will pop up (evolution is a number game after all) but I think those can be solved with yearly vaccine updates/booster shots. We just need to provide everyone on earth access to the vaccine. The US will probably be fine within two month, but the rest of the world will take much longer.

The mRNA vaccines have proven themselves against the variants. Overall, they seem to work better than the traditional vaccines in terms of efficacy, at least compared to those on the market. I would like to see more data on the Novavax and the Sputnik V vaccine. Novavax showed some very good data. Sputnik V is a bit more of a question mark (who trust the russians?) but there have been some peer reviewed papers published that seem to indicate strong efficacy. they sell a lot of South America so soon we will get epidemiological data on how well it works. I think AstraZeneca < JnJ< Novavax in terms of the ranking with Sputnik having the potential to be equivalent to Novavax. I am recalling this from memory and several twitter threads post4ed by biotech cracks that seem to know what to look for. I think it bodes well to mRNA tech in general. There have been some articles posted that a malaria vaccination based on mRNA is in the works and seems possible. Malaria vaccination has been an elusive goal and what is out there doesn't seem to work all that well. Perhaps with mRNA vaccines, we can get the job done which would be huge for mankind.

Thanks for writing down your rationale. I have looked at EW only casually after you mentioned it. It seems too expensive to buy but I think you are correct in holding it. Along the same line, I bought a bit of GMED last year. It is not cheap either , but I qualitatively liked it after the MF’s recommended it, and the valuation seemed reasonable.

I do not know anyone who has gotten the JnJ shot yet, as this vaccine has been hard to get and until very recently only small amounts trickled to vaccine centers. Let us know how it goes. I know a few folks who would prefer to get the JnJ vaccine over the mRNA flavors.

Interesting crowd behavior. I don't think Munger would have anything to add that hasn't been discussed before as far as pro's and con's of BABA are concerned. Li Liu's opinion I think count's more.

You mentioned EW before - a stellar Long term performer, but how do you square the valuation? A 12x P/S is hard to swallow for a med tech. Even over a 15 year holding period, the starting valuation matters quite a bit, imo.

Yes, it seems the mRNA vaccines are pretty robust against all the variants so far. This makes them likely the weapon of choice against the epidemic. I think we will probably see a “booster” that enhances the profile against variants for those that have been vaccinated already by next year. The P1 strain is still a huge concern for countries that used mostly conventional vaccine or countries that are relying on natural herd immunity, which may not be achieved with the ongoing variants the virus is able to produce to overcome natural resistance.

MRK looks pretty solid to me. Low valuation and basically a Greenblatt stock. Organon spin-off could unlock some value. There are some warts in terms of Keytruda going off patent late this decade and the constant amortization expenses resulting from taken out smaller biotech to refresh their pipeline , but even considering all this, the stock sees like a good bet from current levels. LMT is another one that I think will do OK over the long run. AMZN is a growth stock that isn’t really overvalued and I think an expansion into health care which is slowly happening could create a lot of value.

I like some features of the new site like site stats and also the search appears to be better. I don’t like the site design as it wastes so much screen real estate compared to the old one.

Isn't that basically Reuters or AP news? From the big networks ABCNews is probably the most unbiased. For foreign news, I have plugged Aljazeera.com before - their curation is surprisingly good and they are fairly unbiased except issues pertaining Israel.

Just reminder that Virgin Galactic's "Spaceship" has not reached Space yet. Their revenue last year was $238k and their losses $273M. It remains to be seen, whether SPCE is a commercial success. The stock has done well, but then again GME trades at ~$190/share too as I type this.

What flavor are they getting?

The European/japanese investment banks can’t seem to catch a break. $1 billion here, $1 billion there and pretty soon you are talking real money... ————————————- “ CFDs aren’t legal in the U.S. but their usage in other regions, particularly Europe, may be something that regulators weigh as they monitor this margin-call situation, Amy Lynch, a former SEC regulator and president of FrontLine Compliance, told MarketWatch in a Monday-afternoon interview. “Extremely risky,” is how she characterized CFDs. “[u]It’s kind of like being able to go into a naked position[/u],” she said, referring to naked bets where investors use derivatives to gain exposure to an investment without owning the underlying asset. to gain exposure to an investment without owning the underlying asset. It is really like buckets shops are legal again, just at a grander scale.

What does this have to do with taking the vaccine or not?

If the Domino’s are falling, they are not falling where I am not looking. In have extensive watchlist and other than VIAC and DISCK I don’t see much that is falling out of the now normal Momo tech rut. Even VIAC and DISCK are just going back where they were a couple of weeks ago. I guess that trade is close to unwound but I don’t see the great bargains here. I am not sure what I am missing.

Anyone planning on taking advantage of forced selling in the names? Do we know what Archegos owns? I think Tencent Music was mentioned. WhaleWisdom.com comes up empty handed. Maybe the bigger issue is that many other funds run similar L/S strategies with a high gross exposure?

This variant is of a concern because it can reinfect those that previously had COVID-19 apparently.The evidence from Manaus, which was supposed to have reached heard immunity but now sees another wave suggests so. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/01/health/covid-19-coronavirus-brazil-variant.html Evidence suggests that vaccines still protect against this variant too, but data is scarce.

This variant is of a concern because it can reinfect those that previously had COVID-19 apparently.The evidence from Manaus, which was supposed to have reached heard immunity but now sees another wave suggests so. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/01/health/covid-19-coronavirus-brazil-variant.html Evidence suggests that vaccines still protect against this variant too, but data is scarce.

Chances of death are very low but you can still get very sick and incur permanent damage to your lungs or organs. Even if you are healthy. Not just theoretical, I know someone 40ish and healthy and fit that had this happen. They have lung damage, it's permanent. They also went through complete hell for 2 weeks. Israel has vaccinated over half their population and haven't reported any issues. The pharma companies aren't based there so they have no reason to lie about the effectiveness. I feel at this point it's quite a remote chance the vaccine is more dangerous than covid. The exact same thing is true for the flu. Do you think everyone should get innocolated (yearly flu shot)? I can write a list of bacteria and viruses that can (emphasis can) have terrible terrible repercussions (much worse than a Corona virus). Why are you behaving so differently towards this one? Could it be the global fear mongering? And you are going to use the shit hole called Israel as a good example? What's next, North Korea? Eritrea? I actually think everyone should get vaccinated for flu as well. I do it, I had a flu a couple of times before that and while I apparently survived it, wasn’t much fur for ~7-10 days each time . A flu shot is much easier on me and since I got them, I never had the flu again. For COVID-19, the risk reward ratio for vaccination is much better because COVID is much more in inconvenient , if you get symptomatic and much more dangerous. Also, why is Israel a shithole country? I can think of a lot of other states that deserve this classification much more so.

Ma held 76% of Ant Financial until recently, and with the recent IPO - is now a multi-billionaire in China. Just exactly HOW does one pull off this trick in a communist country? SD The answer is simple - China is not a communist country. The communist party is just communist by name, for historical/legacy reasons. China’s current economic system is crony capitalism.

Actually Jack Ma is an interesting case where a founder created a cooperative culture from the get go. Alibaba created several billionaires while AMZN only created one (Jeff Bezos). There are some interesting articles pertaining to how Jack Ma ran Alibaba early on. He never was the all controlling operator , he was more like a leader why deputized most of the operations to a core group (who all become very rich) with him being the face until 2 years ago, https://hbr.org/2014/06/the-secret-to-alibabas-culture-is-jack-mas-apartment

I don’t really know the rent vs buy math in those specific areas but one thing I do know is that trying to buy a house when buyers are out there in force and panic buying basically everything is not a good proposition. This is not only because of the high price one needs to pay, but also because it is I likely to get the house you like as well. My experience is that those panic buying periods don’t last and eventually things are calming down, when though prices as indicated may not. In an more evenly balanced market, even if prices remain high, it is much easier to pick the house you like, negotiate contingencies with sellers etc and make home buying a much better experience. So my inclination would be rent first and wait it out little. That also has the advantage that you get to know the area you live in much better and sometimes, there are relative deals to be had just watching closely and you will find that certain pockets can be desirable for you because of traffic patterns for your commute etc.

It is clear that the vaccination has a dramatic impact on every metric - transmission, severe cases requiring ventilation, death. We can see this most clearly in Israel, because they are the furthest ahead. https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/945680#vp_2 It is true that the LT impact of the vaccines is unknown. It is however also true that the LT impact of having COVID-19 is unknown too. With vaccines we talking about a controlled immune system reaction, with COVID-19 we Talking about a Virus in the wild. We know for that for some people, the impact of having a COVID-19 infection is Long lasting (glass lungs, shot kidneys requiring life long dialysis etc). Each choice has some risk, but I think the of controlled immune system reaction is way lower than an acute infection a virus from a wild. I also think that over the Long run, the risk of getting infected by COVID-19 will be almost approaching one for most of us as this disease becomes endemic. People can make their own choice but I think for me, it is pretty clear what I am going to pick - well, I have already picked.

I looked at both S-1 and I can come to terms with CPNG but what is really OSCR bus8 es model, is it like LMND for health insurance. Their numbers look atrocious. Both GOOG health care IPO‘s AMWL and OSCR look underwhelming to me. I havent even come close to a deep dive, and yea, the approach is at best scattershot, but the impression I have gotten is that somewhat like LMND, theyre focusing on developing the brand. Its not very efficiently rolled out, but they have a little bit of everything...their own clinics, the tele health offering, pricing models that "appear' transparent and are generally received well by their customers. My guess is that they would be burning many times more money if they put all of this into motion in all their markets, all at once. All in all I think its probably burned through a good bit of money experimenting and will continue to do so. At the same time trying a lot of things in a scattershot way sort of lets you feel out the sensitivities of what works and what doesnt. Its in the right place at perhaps the right time....there does seem to be bipartisan support for fixing a lot of the issues in healthcare....so you'll need to cross a few bridges to get there, but there are bridges which lead this to being a bit of a disruptor. At the least its a small starter that will compel me to do a bit more work on it while the market is beating the shit out of companies like this...and if nothing else I'll probably be able to unload it later once things settle down. $32 was the original low point of the IPO range that ended up being revised upwards twice to $39. So I'll take my chances there. $OSCR down to ~$24; $AMWL down to below $17 <insert toilet flush gif here>