Spekulatius

It all depends on the gold price and the discipline of the operators. It is similar to oils and gas except prices for their product are better. Personally, I would rather own a little gold etf and not worry about thee things. FWIW, I own a little IAU.

Interesting. Hospitals in ND full, asymptotic nurses can continue to work. https://www.grandforksherald.com/newsmd/coronavirus/6753876-With-North-Dakota-hospitals-at-100-capacity-Burgum-announces-COVID-positive-nurses-can-stay-at-work SD looks similar.

No, but I liked the price I got. Pure play Defense Play NOC and LMT have barely moved. The way I see it RTX is half defense and half commercial aerospace, so If I consider defense didn’t move (much) then commercial aerospace is worth 25% more than yesterday? I don’t think so.

Sold my RTX, PCYO and GRA.

Jokes aside, I added back $FAF today. There is always something in the doghouse.

Highly recommended. I bought one in October of 2019. It has been a godsend. My wife and I spent just about all our free time out on Lake Winnipesaukee this spring, summer, and fall. A boat is great for social distancing. Also in case Biden gets any crazy gun control passed I lost all of my guns in a tragic boating incident this past summer. CorpRaider and rkbabang, could you suggest a specific ticker . . . er, I mean model? $MCFT sunk today -6.8%. Obviously a WFH stock.

Which one ?

the real news is not that we have a vaccine, it is the high efficacy (90% indicated). A vaccine that with only 50% efficacy is not a game changer, one with 90% is. I do agree it doesn't really change anything for the next few month, but it does indicate the light at the end of the tunnel. Now I would like to hear how the vaccine rollout is going to be handled, because handling the logistics well is crucial. An now it's even more important to contain the spread as well as possible so we don't have another 200k dead before this vaccine is available.

I looked at ELBIT Systems (ESLT) as it trades near its low ($113 vs $110 - 52 week low). I will don’t see it trading at a discount to US defense plays that I think are lower risk. It is a nice outfit they I owned before - I bought it around $30 in 2012 and sold it for more than a double in 2013 (looking back at my records) but it was very cheap back then and trading lower than US defense plays. Maybe people are worried about fallout from ELBIT selling 'suicide drones' to Azerbaijan given the conflict w/ Armenia? https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/israels-elbit-systems-sells-azerbaijan-skystriker-suicide-drone-577053 Just a guess off the top of my head. Oh boy, these things are for pretending, not for actual use. The part with the live demonstration on an adversary driving a Jeep sounded bad too. These things are basically a mini version of the V1 invented in WW2 by the Nazi’s - carbon neutral due to their electrical engines. Unrelated to this, my holding Rheinmetall (RHM.DE) had pretty strong results in their defense sector. it’s an industrial conglomerate that used to be 1/2 defense and the rest automobile supplier, but not the mix is netter than 60/40 due to defense growing and the automobile part shrinking. With European defense spending surging, RHM has one of the best growth profiles in the defense sector, imo. I recently rebought some shares around 63€which I had sold around 80€- paying attention to the sometimes widely fluctuating shares can pay off. https://www.rheinmetall.com/en/rheinmetall_ag/press/news/latest_news/index_21696.php

I am not sure if Europe has peaked. France had 85k yesterday (per worldodometer) and that number has been rising. The Czech Republik, Belgium and France has reached their hospital capacity for ICU, so there is severe stress on the health care system a d other countries aren’t far behind (Netherlands , Switzerland etc). I watch hospital utilization and admissions more than anything and three US has seen a remarkable increase in admissions from below 40k to more than 55k and it is going steadily upwards. We have seen already the hospital system in Midwestern states starting to get into capacity issues (the the posts about South Dakota) but this will get much more severe once we cross 60k admission, which were the former peaks from Covid wave #1 in March and #2 in July. This time, wave number 3 is broad based and cases are rising everywhere, not just the epicenter in the Midwest. So, I think it is likely that we will exceed former perks in hospital utilization forcing local shutdowns if the health care system which is going to create widespread knock on effects to everything else. While it is true that tolerance is higher this time due to knowing much more about the disease and better clinical outcome it is also true that the increased complacency makes it harder to reverse trends in rising infection rates. Also, while we have invested a lot in equipment, we still have the same restraints in personal that we had in March, since it really isn’t possible to get more doctors and nurses in hospitals quickly. because of all the safety precautions (gowning up, segregating COVID-19 patients in COVID-19 floors) treating COVID-19 patients require more manpower than regular patients which is the reason why hospitals will be shutting down with an influx of COVID-19 patients before capacity is reached. All those quickly erected field hospitals are more or less useless, because there aren’t enough people around to operate them. Quite frankly, I think the administration should be activating army medical resources again, as they may be needed in due time, but it’s hard to predict where. In any case I watch hospital admission more than anything else, as I think this is the key indicator driving the decisions. MA (where I live) is on the cusp of its second wave and we have already a soft curfew from 10pm to 5AM and it is likely that those measures may be ratchet up more.

I think there is a difference between collectibles and assets or business that generate cash flow. I don’t think accumulating collectibles is really investing. For other things that generate cash flow, it is more about semantics. A business is harder to value than a real estate asset that is rented out and where you have a pretty good idea about future cash flow and comps. The problem with investing in hard assets like real estate assets is that we don’t have direct control of the asset (the cash flow and when it can be liquidated) and there is an layer of G&A expense that is never going away unless an entity is liquidated, which rarely happens. So those Reits etc. in my opinion should trade at a discount to NAV, the question is how much.

This is interesting too, but based on my observations true. https://www.nbcboston.com/news/local/gov-baker-top-education-officials-to-provide-coronavirus-update/2225052/ This is especially true for smaller kids. Also , some parents are forced to mix kids with other households because there were no childcare options. That leads to higher transmission rates than if kids go to school in controlled conditions.

I looked at ELBIT Systems (ESLT) as it trades near its low ($113 vs $110 - 52 week low). I still don’t see it trading at a discount to US defense plays that I think are lower risk. It is a nice outfit that I owned before - I bought it around $30 in 2012 and sold it for more than a double in 2013 (looking back at my records) but it was very cheap back then and trading lower than US defense plays.

There was also questionable nutritional advice about fried sweet potatoes being a healthy. Reading this newspaper feels a bit like reading East German newspapers in 80’s before the wall came down. There was a spurious habit of putting totally meaningless news on front pages and the real interesting stuff was hidden in small articles in the other pages often in between other meaningless articles. I know that the interested people there were pretty good at reading this code and I do wonder what people in SD have similar filters.

Yes, the risk of a large animal reservoir is that the virus can remain there, has time to mutate enough to make current treatment ineffective and then eventually jump back to humans and start the whole “game” all over again. I agree with Doc that it’s important to find out (and push China) to do forensics on the origin and try to eliminate the thread that we get a repeat of this in the future.

It is also interesting to note that the VIX is way down from ~40 to 27 now. There were probably a lot of hedges in place for the election that are now worthless or being liquidated and add to the buying pressure. Personally, if the VIX goes below 20 again and I see some decent opportunities to hedge for a reasonable cost I would be interested to do so, but not at current levels. This is all pretty worthless after the fact rambling, but still fun to do so.

The election is close, which means nothing untoward is going to happen to tech. This is not that great for cyclicals which don’t care about the color of the party either, but need stimulus to get moving and that is less likely with gridlock. I could well be wrong - this could also be just momentum that somehow got randomly started and then everything jumps on the train because think Mr Market knows something that they don’t.

Whatever the final result, I find the whole process quite amusing and the stock market reaction interesting: FOX down 4%, coal stocks down 7% Gold down too, Loot stocks line RGR down 8% etc.

LMAO - oil and pipeline stocks are down as I write this. My ANTM is up ~9% If you trade the election outcome with a simplistic view, you can very well end up being right and losing money.

Looking at premarket, bank stocks are down, because treasuries are down and pot. no stimulus, I suspect. Luckily I don’t own any. I will get really if my defense stocks are down today

Contrarian view - Trump victory is great for tech, bad for cyclicals, at least some of them. Energy is an example of this - drill drill drill got the industry in a hole, if there were more regulation, prices especially for natural gas would go up and Energy stocks would do better. Energy stocks may go up tomorrow but I don’t think it will last. The other problem for cyclicals is a stronger USD with Trump than with Biden. I looked at the exchange rates last night and at some point USD.MXN was up more than 3% and its now back into the red. A lot of the election impacts are really counterintuitive somewhat.

Return over 10 years 1)BAM 2) BRK 3) FFH I think BAM has the highest risk of blowing up in the face of these three , but it is lower than I thought initially. BAM benefits from lower interest rates and FFH gets hurt the most amongst those three, do in a way the decision is also a macro call. I do think that FFH has the best snap back potential short term.

Thanks. I'm guessing the last number is the estimate for your IFR? It's not clear what the percentages indicate (and it's not clear how they come up with such precise numbers). The simple way to build a model here is to use CFRs, adjusted for region and adjusted for risk factors defined per CFR from different sources: CDC etc. i assume the percentages apply if and once you're Covid+. (?) It may be more conceptually sound to go through a simple exercise (which will correlate with common sense) and use a risk stratification. Alberta has put up a 3-level risk (low-intermediate-high) system: https://www.alberta.ca/lookup/COVID-19-personal-risk-severity-assessment.aspx An interesting aspect is that the Alberta site does not require a US zip code and, at least for me, adding dementia to the risk factors does not significantly change the risk level. The Sanford Health group also has a nutrition coach subsidiary. https://www.profileplan.com/ Yes, the percentages apply once you have COVID-19, so the last number is the CFR rate (I think). I don’t know how the calculator works, but it is normalized to 0.25% and I suspect it has multipliers based on your inputs that either increase or decrease the three risk metrics it calculated. I played with my numbers and increasing the blood pressure seems to have the largest impact. In my case, I lost a few years of my COVID-19 age due to having pretty good blood pressure values generally.

PDLI Shares trade suspiciously weak.

LVY bounced already a lot from the lows and they lost $600M last quarter. I haven’t dissected their financial statement but a lot of their cash are actually customer advances for concerts in the future. So far customer er have rolled those over, but what if they get the idea that this is going to take a little longer and want their money back? I would bet against large scale concerts in Spring. I think summer 2021 is the earliest I can see a slow return.