Spekulatius

How do you know the Chinese were the aggressors? It always takes two parties to get a bar fight and finding out who started it is usually an exercise in futility.

We also had low interest from 2010-2016 and lower valuation multiples than we have now. The important question for stock valuation is not where interest rates are 2 years from now, it is where interest rates will be 10 or 20 years from now. Stocks are like bonds with infinite duration that way and most of the value is decades out.

Regarding confederate flags and shades of grey, this classic comes to my mind: God is not on our side, because he hates idiots !

So a couple of overeager soldiers had a really bad bar prowl about a worthless piece of land and this results in a large scale conflict and nuclear war. I guess that could happen too on 2020. I don’t think it’s very likely though.

Very interesting analysis. Thanks for sharing. I had two thoughts when I saw the graph of deaths vs mobility. 1. A common sense explanation which makes me think there is causation here: you can tell people all you want that they should stay home and apart, but they only listen when the bodies pile up. 2. The r-square is ~50%. This is wonderful billionaire territory for financial market predictions and rubbish noise in laws of physics. Not sure where in the spectrum between rubbish and wonderful such an r-square is in “epidiomology”. R^2 =0.483 is pretty much rubbish in any field. Anyways, this is a multivariate problem. No single factor can explain everything.

I am not sure what you are trying to prove. The deaths are going down much more sharper than new cases. That shows CFR is going down. And Arizona deaths/million is 180. NY is 1598. I believe you are correct that CFR rate is going down. The reason are two fold in my opinion: 1) in NYC, the health care capacity was exceeded which meant that only the most serious cases got admission. Since disease progression is hard to predict with COVID some patients got admitted to the hospital too late. 2) Treatment has vastly improved since March, Doctored understand much better how to prevent severe diseases progression and how to deal with clotting, inflammation etc. This all helps bringing down CFR rate and progress is ongoing.

I kind of like Portney. He is just like James Cramer, but far more entertaining. There I said it.

The COVI-19 infection numbers are pretty bad today with 3k+ infections in CA, TC, FL and 2.5k in AZ. AZ is about the same size than MA and we hit a limit with 3k hospitalizations. I think AZ is at 1.7k now, but rapidly rising. If this keeps up they will reach 3k in a week and then they do need to shut down, or risk of running out of hospital capacity. Or perhaps they take it more serious now and avoid all that trouble.

I think the study presents current standard of care already. Administering steroids has been done for quite some time already (based on what I am hearing from my wife) as well as administering blood thinners (Heparin) and drugs to break up blood clots as well as some other things. This likely has reduced the IFR rate already compared to March. We likely will see more progress as our understanding of the disease improves.

I think the burn rate on stimulus is currently $1T every 5 weeks or so. A $1T infrastructure bill that takes years to work off is in monthly terms so much less that it hardly makes up for CARES. It’s still a good idea, but it will hardly make a dent except in certain industries.

OT? I am afraid that our expectations in both of these cases are too high. In fact, I am afraid that our expectations of human behavior in general are too high. Whether applied to young people in their 20s, or people in general, or "highly rational" investment professionals frequenting certain investment forums, or even people at the highest levels of business or politics. Yeah, that makes me a misanthrope. :-\ Also see my signature. This is nonsense....I’ve seen children (first hand) in third world countries have more responsibility and act more “adult like” than your average millennial. Notice the more laws we create to coddle individuals, the softer society becomes and the more coddling it needs. If you have low expectations of society and individuals (and let them know it), you’re pretty much guaranteed to get poor results. I’m a firm believer in the saying “Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And, weak men create hard times.” If I had to pick a point as to where modern society is, I would say somewhere in the bottom of the “good” inning. And when this doesn’t work, something evolution does the work. I a, not quite sure what to think of this. Is it Robinhood’s fault, or the parents or the individual himself. Is there anything that could not have happened if he had opened the account with Schwab or Fidelity or Interactive brokers? Anecdotally, my 14 year old son has friend from high school and one of them is in the “silver trade”. I am not sure what this teenagager is trading and perhaps it is harmless, but it seems to me that the parents should probably look at this closely. My son got interested too, so I let him open a virtual trading account at Investopedia. So far, his trades have been losses as far as I can tell. FWIW, I bought my first stock when I was 16.

Bill is a friend of mine. But thanks for making it clear who's the real one here. Bill Brewster is not a friend of mine, but I follow him on Twitter and also follow Tobias Carlisle podcast. He wanted to bring the whole tragedy out in the open to shine a light on what’s happening here. Others stated that it will end in tears, but this is worse than tears. Bill B seems. genuine too me and I am baffled why anyone thinks he is deuche.

We will know by August. The Spek family spends less too, mainly because there isn’t much to spent on for us and Mrs. Spek can’t get vacation currently and is working more than we’d like.

How did the main topic of this thread become the confederate flag and how did a Jewish person (Gregmal) accused of anti semitism? I know that sometimes creep sets in, but one also need to look at the current situation and decide if this makes any sense. As far as I know, the virus does not afflict the brain. I am guilty of causing topic creep as well but that’s just too much. There is quite a bit of useful info here, but it’s gets drowned out by more and more garbage posts. Those should go into the politics boards.

For those interested, here is a distilled list of best-evidence that has built up over the last few weeks versus prevention of transmission. https://academic.oup.com/jid/advance-article/doi/10.1093/infdis/jiaa189/5820886 https://www.ecdc.europa.eu/en/publications-data/using-face-masks-community-reducing-covid-19-transmission https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)31142-9/fulltext From a humble perspective, a detached and rational approach tends to avoid running into sterile debates and tribal drift but i often feel like an idiot. It's fascinating that this virus, which is somewhat benign from an evolutionary standpoint, stirs so much reptilian instincts and one has to wonder about the host (and its institutions). Maybe i focus too much on governance issues. Here is another one : https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/26/9/20-2272_article Runs a bit against my hypothesis that truly asymptomatic (And those that never show symptoms) younger people aren’t likely superspreaders. Well, it seem they can be. Whether one is truly asymptomatic or get some mild symptoms later is not that important. Its been clear for a while that there is asymptomatic transmission, which happens while talking. To some extent masks help but not eliminate small tiny droplets floating in air and its difficult to wear masks continuously. That is why Japanese say "ventilation is key". That makes everyone life easier. And now we know it works. I think we should copy what works. That is not to say not to use masks or stop washing hands or stop safe distance. But no need for enforced lockdowns. I agree on ventilation. in retrospect, closing down parks and beaches was probably a mistake, since with a bit of precaution, outdoors activities are pretty low risk. Also anecdotal, a significant outbreak In a nursing home in Montreal was at least partly linked to bad ventilation: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/vigi-long-term-care-home-all-residents-infected-1.5569178 As far as asymptomatic vs presymptomatic, I would think that the latter probably has a much higher viral load and becomes more likely a superspreader than the former. The problem for an individual of course is that one has no way of knowing in which group you are going to go beforehand. However, it might be of value when you look at populations. I guess more evidence is needed. It’s seems at least that kids don’t spread as much as thought, but there are probably socioeconomic and behavioral aspect as well that I am not sure about.

For those interested, here is a distilled list of best-evidence that has built up over the last few weeks versus prevention of transmission. https://academic.oup.com/jid/advance-article/doi/10.1093/infdis/jiaa189/5820886 https://www.ecdc.europa.eu/en/publications-data/using-face-masks-community-reducing-covid-19-transmission https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)31142-9/fulltext From a humble perspective, a detached and rational approach tends to avoid running into sterile debates and tribal drift but i often feel like an idiot. It's fascinating that this virus, which is somewhat benign from an evolutionary standpoint, stirs so much reptilian instincts and one has to wonder about the host (and its institutions). Maybe i focus too much on governance issues. Here is another one : https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/26/9/20-2272_article Runs a bit against my hypothesis that truly asymptomatic (And those that never show symptoms) younger people aren’t likely superspreaders. Well, it seem they can be.

Motley Fool tries to do that , but they have a bunch of momentum in their picks to, be it by choice or as a byproduct of their method. You can sort of get their thinking without paying when you listen to the MF industry focus podcasts, which are pretty good. I personally subscribed to their Stockadvisor service. Best of breed is a crowded bet and you pay dearly because everyone seems to do this nowadays or tries to, valuation be damned.

The economy is sort of open already here in MA and in Southern NH. Our son meets with friends outside every once in a while. I think we are going to do some local trips here in summer. , perhaps to the Berkshire’s or to Vermont (assuming they will have us). My wife currently can’t get vacation, but I think she ought to be able to get some this summer before the second wave comes in. Lots of restaurants here have converted to outdoor seating, which I actually think it is a great idea and I hope it stays even when this thing is over, of course this is weather permitting. Somehow we should try to make lemonade out of lemons.

At least some of thee recent surge might have been caused by Memorial Day activities . Timing would be about right - you get an infection and it multiplies though a family and you get a surge. If that’s the root cause I should mot likely ebb pretty soon. No surge in states that had high numbers before perhaps because people were more careful there? Hard to tell. Anecdotally, I have seen no evidence of Memorial Day parties with several families in my neighborhood.

I agree on LAACZ. Owning nice productive assets with little leverage run by a good operator should beat non-productive assets like Gold or Bitcoin over the long run, or at least offers a better risk adjusted return. For a large cap investor PSA may offer a similar purpose (same asset class, low leverage and well managed) but it is not as cheap.

This is just anecdotal, but may add a little more color to anyone wanting to understand the industry. I've been to VicenzaOro many times & if you want quality, Italy is a great place to go (bring a very large wallet with you though). Hong Kong manufacturers (and Thai jewelers to a lesser extent) will copy just about anything & do a very good job of it, but will frequently use inferior quality gemstones (in particular, diamond melee). TBF they offer significantly lower prices, and something has to give, but even if you offer to pay a bit more for better melee, you'll be hard pressed to get the reliability of an Italian manufacturer. That plus the established haute couture names, make for an interesting segment of the market. Basically, there are 2 types of jewelers, those who sell branded (haute couture) merchandise with higher margins & slightly lower turns, and those who sell lesser brands & commoditized products at slightly lower margins & higher turns. Branded jewelers tend to have higher spend on required coop adds in order to promote brands. Commoditized jewelers will have more optionality with regards to participating in coop ads which become more requisite if they are members of buying groups and depending on the stroke of the brands they carry. --- Disclaimer: My hiatus from the offshore industry, into wholsale jewelery, was an abysmal failure. I'd have difficulty selling air conditioners on the equator. I think in this case, brand name, status attached to country of origin matter just as much a the quality of the merchandise. Northern Italy is well known for fine jewelers and Fope is a niche business with a global reach (85% of their revenues are foreign) that can exploit this, I think. Based on the price I paid 7 Euro and change), it trades at 7x EBIT. It’s too small for LVMH, but the new 59% owners have an investment banking background and saw value here. I hope they do t screw it up. I see a good chance they they follow up with a buyout when this COVID thing is over. I know this is a very different business than Fope & it's not intended as a comparison but Swatch bought Harry Winston around 2013. They don't break out the results in reports but they do say "Harry Winston will continue its dynamic growth trend in 2019". In recent reports they attribute slightly higher inventories to gold & gemstone purchases related to Harry Winston. They own the swinging luxury watch brands Breguet, Blancpain, Glashutte, Jaquet Droz & the more pedestrian Omega. Their lesser brands include Tissot, Longines, Hamilton, Rado & of course, Swatch. If you believe that the watch industry won't be decimated over time ;) (I've never been able to get comfortable with this possibility) these guys product the vast majority of the worlds mechanical movements & escarpments. If you claim to be a luxury timepiece manufacturer & you don't produce everything down to the tiniest little spring & screw, you're not as cherished by aficionados. Very clean balance sheet, possibly offset by high insider ownership which may or may not be aligned with the little people. The father built this company & the children could fritter it away. Annual reports are front loaded with society page fluff & the actual numbers are buried in the back. Some background on the FOPE deal: https://gioiellis.com/en/why-fope-was-sold-to-costamagna-and-morante/ I am familiar with Swatch. It a well run company, but I am a bit concerned that watches will have much less mindshare with future generations that grow up without using them or go straight to a smart watch (similar to what happened with stamps) I could imagine that there will be a market to build jewelers cases for smart watches, but Swatch wouldn’t have much of an edge here.

The Medallion fund doesn't do equities I believe and has been deliberately kept small to keep the high returns going. Their marketed funds have not been as successful due to size and different asset classes that they're involved in. Not true, Medallion does whatever Medallion wants to do. I'm sure most of it is equities. And "small" is $5b+ year in the fund returning 40-50% year after year, if not greater. Yes, they return all the excess capital annually, but that's still a lot of capital for those kind of returns. Amazing. I recall from reading the new book written on Jim Simon that Medallion's bread and butter was not equities; in fact, they had historically struggled to build profitable models on equities. A reason why Medallion pays out so much is that they've found it comparably difficult to reliably generate returns by trading new asset classes. According the book, they struggled in equities for a long time and then achieved a breakthrough, which allowed them to scale up to their current size of $10B. I m sure in the current mayhem in the stock markets, they make out like bandits this year.

I haven’t seen nothing yet either. They typically sent out the annual report either late June or even late July. Only last year they were early in late May.

I agree on HDS being a quality outfit. I have owned it recently for a very short time but regret selling it. They have handled COVID-19 well and the business is more resilient than I thought. They are really getting ahead of their competition too (mostly small outfits). Bought starters in NOC and GMED today. I also added to MRK bit. GMED skews toward the growth side (at least I hope so if their robotics tech works out) and NOC and MRK are quality outfits with a reasonable valuation and resilient business.

^ Moving at least part of the cash into a liquid gold ETF seems like a good idea, especially when interest rates truly go to zero or negative.