Spekulatius

Many countries have flare ups in Europe. France, Spain, Germany and the UK have all flare ups, as has Israel. Israel got problems once they opened schools I think.

https://www.zawya.com/mena/en/economy/story/Hurricane_Isaias_may_claim_at_least_one_CEO_scalp-TR20200810nL1N2FC0HXX1/ “Hurricane Isaias may claim at least one chief executive’s scalp. Connecticut legislators want the head of James Judge, the CEO of $30 billion New England utility Eversource Energy, on a pike as blackouts linger in the Nutmeg State. “ Stock is down 2% today. I am not emotional about this stock. I just think investors are not realizing how bad the situation is for this company. ED, PEG and NGG (all of them are East coast utes) are all down today in the same 2% ballpark. Likely cause is rising treasury yields, imo. May the power be with you soon.

Sold my BRKB shares. My most Index like position and close enough to fair value to me.

Cutting corners on the science is dangerous both because it can lead to people getting exposed and dying when they think they're protected and aren't, and because if there are safety or efficacy issues, it can cause long-lasting backlash against vaccines in general, leading to more deaths and suffering over decades. You already have crackpots making stuff up about vaccines, if you give them something real because you don't do things right, it'll be bad. From what I've seen, Russia is talking about a phase 1 vaccine that has been tested on hundreds of people... That's pretty bad science. Is the concern with the Russian vaccine: 1. Safety? 2. effectiveness? Safety: If the virus kills 0.6% people and the vaccine has dangerous side effects 0.6% of the time, you haven't really gained much at the population level. Effectiveness: OTOH, if its not truly effective, you will start being spikes in cases as people get infected. Its a loss of resources and credibility, but for a poor country it might be worth the shot that it does actually work well. Agreed it's not unto the usual standards, but in the current scenario everything is now a risk-reward decision in real time with limited information. Safety would probably worry me the most here. So Putin's injected his daughter to allay those fears. Not the right way to look at it. You don't gamble with whole populations by injecting them with unproven medicines. This kind of callous thinking is what got the US and Russia in their messes in the first place. Not supporting Putin's decision here, which s probably more driven by the propaganda value and his domestic political needs. I do hope the planning for the next pandemic considers questions like the following. I certainly haven't seen them discussed anywhere. If this virus had an IFR of 50% (Ebola like) with huge infectiousness, and you offered me a vaccine which had a 1% side-effect of death. I would be sorely tempted to take that "side-effect" risk as the lesser of two evils. The current IFR is much lower, making that vaccine much less tempting. I would want way more safety and effectiveness, but not sure how much more. Surely not at the usual standards where things take 10 years. So how much less can one settle for as an individual or as a country? Looking at risk vs benefit is fair. It does matter if the IFR rate is 50% vs 0.6%. My concern with having politics messing with the process is the risk and benefits arnt’t really known of the numbers presented are fudged. Then people might make wrong decisions based on faulty/compromised data.

It’s pretty sure that in terms of fatalities per 1M , the US ( currently at 502/ 1M) will exceed Italy (currently at 582/1M) in a about month. Who would have thought this in March? Also, while we are at it, Italy’s population density is 532 people/ mi^2.

You can read the prior posts about T cell immunity that already exist in 40-60% of population, so 20% infection of COVID should get us to herd immunity. But let's just say this: If GA reopens schools and no one seems to be wearing masks in the schools, and if the new daily cases continues to drop into the end of August, is that proof that daily cases of 4-5k per 10M population for a month is sufficient to get us to herd immunity? NY, NJ, FL, TX, GA all have reached this ratio. CA and WA are still way off. Another data point supporting this view is that Iran recently said they probably have 24M people infected. They have 100M people in total. If 24M people are infected, it only takes 1-2 weeks before reaching all 100M people, but it seems to have stopped there. How do you conclude that it takes only 1-2 weeks to get from 24m to 100M people without knowing the Ro? Also, how does Iran come up with the 24M number for the total cumulative infected? I guess I am skeptical of anything from Iran.

They may ust get it to themselves first, like Herman Cain did for the cause. These golf club members skew older, unlike the protesters.

It seems to me that Berkshire just recycled capital in low risk bets. They sold airlines and WFC and bought higher quality BAC and their own shares.

The PCP purchase was a dud before COVID-19 so I am not surprised by the write down. I would like to see a post mortem from Warren or Munger would be interesting.

I recall when I moved to the US in 1997, I made photos (and wasted film) of sagging power poles and haphazard strung electricity wires especially in San Francsico because I honestly have never seen such a mess, except on a trip to Cuba. I still should have pics somewhere. My current nervy company is National Grid and when I moved to MA and rented an apparent back then, the power went out in March 2018 twice due to snow storms, the second time for almost a week. In March 2018 it was pretty cold and having no power and heat isn’t fun at all. When I bought my house here in The same area, a selling point for me is that the power connection is with an underground power wire coming from a main line. Also and interesting fact is that a town next to me (Groton, MA) bought back their distribution network from national Grid a while ago and currently, their electricity rates are some of the lowest in MA. Also, the grid seems we’ll make tainted and never experienced the outages that Nation Grid experienced during the same 2018 Episode. in fact, realtors use this as a selling point for houses there. In a world of low interest rates and apparent failure of good stewardship, I think it is an option for local communities to apply pressure to regulated utilities and buy back networks where intakes sense, imo. One can call this socialism, but in my opinion, with “great power comes great responsibility” and when a monopoly doesn’t meet the needs of the communities it serves , than I think it should be fair to take it back for a reasonable compensation of course. Now the Groton model may not work everywhere and there isn’t risk theta town mired in “power” politics will do even worse than a privately owned regulated utility. FWIW, I have no opinion on Eversource or NGG as an investment and don’t recommend shorting something for emotional reasons as well.

Also this: FWIW, the speed of testing seems to vary a lot from state to state. In MA, my wife went to a testing station and got the results back in less than 24h. There are also CVS rapid test stations around that are even quicker.

Imagine running a pension fund in this scenario. Liabilities increasing by 15% annually and bonds get zip interest. There is no alternative but to yolo.

As a Portuguese I can say there was a huge heat wave last month and even though I drank more water than ever I still was dehidrated. Old people tend to dye a lot in this circumpstances. Also the lockdown delayed other diseases management, so we will also have increased mortality for that reason. COVID is under Control except for some places in lisbon and even there it has been falling. We do have mandatory masks in indoor places...until recently there were no covid patients in our local ICU for over 2 months. Interesting, thank you for providing the context. I would imagine dehydration/weather-related items are (partially) controlled for when computing baseline weekly death rates - but as you mention if there are other medical emergencies which were delayed due to COVID, that would not be controlled for. Actually, I was going to ask, "If there is a boardmember in Portugal or Spain..." but I mistakenly assumed there was not. Thank you for correcting my misconception! ;D Heat waves tend to cause excess death for older people in Europe ( and other risk factors that tend to overlap with CoVID-19 risk factors too ) because man homes don’t have air conditioning causing heat stress for people. The rest of Europe has a heat wave too and it probably kills more people than CoVID-19 right now. Germany right now has an awful heat waves that has been going on for weeks.

4. Is a great one for investing. It minimizes the number of decisions that one needs to make.

PDLI ( thanks to wabuffo for the idea)

It should also be considered that the USD has devalued ~10% against most major currencies (EUR,GBP, JPY) and almost 20% against Gold since about May 2020 ( unfortunately I just have a small tracking position in IAU). Some of this is reversal of prior appreciation, but still.

[ ; - D ]

Most of the homes, especially in the Keys are built to avoid that. For instance where I'm at is roughly 8 ft above see level. And the units are an additional 10-12 ft elevated. Most of the complexes and homes look like the one in this link: https://blog.iese.edu/doing-business/2016/08/22/climate-change-and-the-florida-keys/ End of the day, if you are hugely concerned about global warming and not bullish on dredging/seawall type engineering solutions, its probably not the place to buy property. If you arent, there is hardly anywhere like it IMO, especially of you like fishing, scuba, island life, etc. So, Gregmal how much is the approx. property insurance ( including wind and flood) for your ~ 500k condo? Risk perception is subjective, but insurance rates aren’t, imo.

You seem to have limited knowledge of families... ::) Worst idea ever for non-trivial percentage of people. :-X +1, no +100000000000 That is just about the worst idea I've read here in a long time. +2. Never ever ( and I use this sparingly)

In my opinion, the one position BRK should Consider trimming is KHC. KHC seems like a secular loser that temporarily benefits from increased grocery demand. There wouldn’t be egregiously high taxes to pay either.

^ I my opinion, talking about the market impact of COVID-19 is fair game. After all, this is the reason this thread got traction initially. No need to excuse either if you are wrong, we can all learn from predictions and particularly the reasoning behind it.

More educated? I seriously doubt that. You have to be a baby boomer to have experienced inflation and we all know that baby boomers suck. Reading a textbook doesn’t really give you the same experience, that’s for sure. My grandparents were small kids during the Weimar inflation in 1922 and told me stories about people rushing to the stores to buy what they can immediately on payday because next morning, things were way more expensive. They were playing with small money notes that were several orders or magnitude devalued (a couple of weeks old at the peak) and people were moving money in wheelbarrows. I remember the 70’s and hard assets and gold later were all the rage. There was the 1979 Hunt brothers silver boom and bust. Easy money leads to a lot of misallocation of Capital but inflation does so as well. Hagstroms book “Warren Buffet way” discusses how WEB was investing in inflationary setting (buy business with pricing power and low reinvestment needs) and may be worth a re-read.

^ My simple thinking at this point (based on wabuffo’s point and Cullen Roche seem to think along the same lines ) regarding inflation is to forget about the Fed and just look at what the treasury does in terms of borrowing.on that end, it doesn’t look good right now. Business with power and or inflation protection bought at sensible prices should do at least OK going forward in any scenario.

I saw that at the recommendation of a friend. I thought it had some flashes of a really good movie, some really good scenes and characters, but that overall it didn't quite gel together and wasn't entirely satisfying. I just watched this today and love it. It gels really well for me, the acting, characters, storyline and the soundtrack. I think it’s one of the best movies I watched lately.

NOC’ earnings were Good (guidance raised) and LHX were solid (guidance confirmed ). It was good to see that LHX is basically going to generate the same margins that Harris had (~19% EBIT vs ~11.5% for L3) with the combined entity. I also went through RTX release and while commercial is suffering, they should be able power through and continue paying their dividend and invest until commercial rebounds. I agree that P&W and Collins are great business. I can’t help but bought a few starter shares.