Spekulatius

The banks are taking a bath here with lower interest income, possibly followed by cuts in principal later. I think China going to japanize their financial system.

I don’t think it’s going to winner take all either. GOOG has a $2T market cap and if Waymo gets commercialized, they are going to offer either the driving as a service or a suite of hardware and software as a kit for OEM to build and design into cars. I think GOIG will struggle with this because they are not customer focused and hard to work with. MBLY has a $11B market cap and $10B EV. They work with most OEM anlread and their safety systems are already on dozens of models at high volume. Their approach is to make incremental improvement that step up from Level 2 to Level 3 driving. Each step up will require much more complex systems and they state that ASP goes up ~4x from to L3. If they also gain volume there could be huge growth eventually. You get much more bang for the buck. I also think that if INTC sells their controlling stake, MBLY will get acquired. I have no position yet, but the recent decline makes this now a reasonable bet, albeit risky.

I think it’s wrong question to ask, because Mobileye product is only part of the solution and most systems currently are still just safety systems. But they have plenty of crowdsourced mapping data. In a way they want to make the shovels for the self driving gold rush. https://www.sec.gov/ix?doc=/Archives/edgar/data/0001910139/000110465924026792/mbly-20231230x10k.htm

If you want to make a bet on self driving, MBLY is probably the best one and can be owned for $11B in market cap. It’s still majority owned by Intel. They probably have the OEM solution with the highest market share by far.

I see no way that self driving will not be a monopoly for many reasons. If communication with other car is the issue, industry standard will do that. I don’t think it’s going to drive viability because most of the cars are not self driving and will not talk to anyone for at least a decade to come.

Some insiders are great indicators but then there is Dustin ($ASAN)

You can justify anything with history especially if you go back for enough.

From that bunch, I keep my eye on Netdragon 777. HK. It’s a gaming company. Seems or have plenty of cash on the balance sheet and they pay a bi- annual dividend (almost 8% yield on those) plus a special dividend which pushes the yield above 10% but that is probably variable. I love companies that pay special dividends as it shows they pay attention to capital allocation and rewarding shareholders. 777.HK reports entering later this week, so I will take a look at those and might buy sone shares. It’s really quite cheap, has been growing and pays out very well. It’s my kind of stock.

Since we are discussion LIDL in another thread, I guess most people don’t know that LIDL owns also a cloud business that they started from scratch. https://www.irishtimes.com/business/2024/08/23/how-lidl-accidentally-took-on-the-big-guns-of-cloud-computing/ Almost $2b in revenue according to this article. Would be funny if LIDL comes at Amazon AWS with “Your margin is our opportunity” .

Local TAM is too small. I like the LIDL stores but they seem more geared towards urban or suburban shoppers that like bargains. If you see one buy the German Weißwurst and some Pretzel from the Bakery - they are pretty good and both are some vintage Germany meal right there. There are some other awesome deals to be found there like a good Sopressata for dirt cheap.

I am with @Dinar in this case. Hamas will be reborn. War on terror does not really work unless root causes are eliminated and in this case they are not. The USA was in Afghanistan for 20 years and never got fully in control. Fought the Taliban, then Al Quaeda , then ISIS etc then the Taliban again. As long as the general populace supports a terrorist organization nothing short of destroying the entire population will destroy the terror organization either. If the general population stops supporting the terror organization then the terror organization will wither and dies out, but that’s not happening here.

Yes, Ripley is an excellent miniseries in vintage film noir style. Very much recommended. I watched Predestination yesterday on Amazon Prime. An excellent SciFi movie that I have not heard about before. I recommend it too if you like the time traveling genre. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2397535/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1

Quite a bit of R&D spent is already capitalized. https://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~adamodar/New_Home_Page/datafile/R&D.html

LOL:

The cliffsnote link above has some very concise writing, although I don’t see a connection to modern day asset management. Too bad he stopped posting in his blog it seems.

@John Hjorth my guess is that those Russian that do care and have some eduction will leave the country. People are a countries biggest resource by far, so the brain drain will just slowly bleed out Russia in the long run. Putin sees himself as a modern day Czar playing a 19 century rules in the 21 Century. He truly is an anachronism, palace and all. And Navalny is dead.

Interesting - I ran a screen for high dividend stocks in HK (>10% dividend yield as well as some quality and debt metrics and got a decent list). However ,I have not heard about any of these stocks. - does any of those look familiar? I am sure there are some gems there but it’s very hard to do research from scratch in China. 1171 Yankuang Energy Group Company Limited HKG 1.18 12.62% 17.63% 1.30 1378 China Hongqiao Group Limited HKG 0.93 11.43% 6.25% 1.33 9979 Greentown Management Holdings Company Limited HKG (1.77) 10.44% 18.92% 0.57 777 NetDragon Websoft Holdings Limited HKG (0.70) 14.08% 7.93% 1.40 1126 Dream International Limited HKG (1.09) 11.58% 20.60% 0.56 1830 Perfect Medical Health Management Limited HKG (0.52) 12.30% 9.31% 0.30 1571 Xin Point Holdings Limited HKG (0.57) 11.51% 9.64% 0.36 6896 Golden Throat Holdings Group Company Limited HKG (1.76) 15.42% 15.96% 0.39 9616 Neusoft Education Technology Co. Limited HKG 1.13 12.12% 26.63% 0.33 398 Oriental Watch Holdings Limited HKG (1.23) 15.47% 26.62% 0.42 9908 JiaXing Gas Group Co., Ltd. HKG 0.03 11.37% 7.26% 0.97 1692 Town Ray Holdings Limited HKG (0.94) 10.75% 28.37% 0.32 926 Besunyen Holdings Company Limited HKG 2.09 50.14% 6.12% 0.46

It is not a geographical risk, it is a political risk. People remember when PBR was almost bankrupted by Dilma’s way of running it, which is why it is discounted that much. By the way, I think Canada also has some political risk the way they treat their energy companies.

Yes, a bit of a head scratcher. I think falling interest rates are another headwind since they get paid interest on their float. However it is a beautiful business model generating float when it growth, but with very little regulatory capital requirements unlike insurers or banks. I could see double digit topline growth while also generating FCF which can be used for dividend or preferably buybacks. Perhaps regulatory issues will indeed hamper the business, but I see little evidence to far and in any case, they operate in many different countries which limits this risk.

Russias industrial base is pitiful and yes they can export energy to China, but the cost to build the infrastructure is huge and it will be paid by Russia, either via loans or discounted prices. In any case, they will get much less for their energy exports then they would from Europe. Over the long term, they will become China’s gas station which won’t be a great economic outcome.

The idea is to make this a war that Russia can’t win either. Smaller countries have defeated larger aggressor all the time because modern more have made asymmetrical easier. Sure Ukraine would falter without western aid, which is why it must continue to flow and even gets increased. With somebody else doing the fighting it’s chance to put the Russian bear back decades auch that they be dangerous for a lot long time. This is not a new situation either. All these things including nuclear threats are nothing new. Russia tried similar in the 70’s and 80’s with the SS20 nuclear ballistic rockets to put a wedge between Western Europe and the USA. Same BS suggestions to cave to Russians and appease them - is it worth dying in a nuclear war etc. History quite rhymes itself. ass far as @Luke Russian friends are concerned, I recommend they pack up their stuff and move elsewhere to Europe or the USA. Much more freedom and economic opportunities there. I know quite a few Russian emigrants from work and not all of them are engineers or PhD’s either, but they all have done well. All of them came with basically nothing.

PLX and EDEN. I regard both at one position. It’s one of the best business models I have seen and it’s cheap if they do what I think they can do. They both have not worked out yet.

Berkshire provides you with all the information you need to value the business in their disclosures. What else do you need?

Nuclear Weapons are useless in this war scenario. Material numbers nothing until we discuss the quality of the material. it is not hard to find pre WW2 weapons like Moshin nagant rifles and 1938 horwitzers and Ws1 era Maxim guns. I am not sure how long you have been around but Sowjet Russia has a history of making threats - the most famous one was Khrushevs shoes scene at the United nations. You sort to know even they are losing when they do this stuff. This all bully playbook. If you know what happens when Russia were to use nuclear weapons read up on NATO flexible response doctrine. On Russian occupation, i have grandparents with first hand experience and let’s just say it’s worth a great deal of fighting not to get there.

Everyone in the oil sector looks very expensive when compared to PBR/ PBR-A. I think I am just about to get another 38c in dividends.