Spekulatius

I agree on declaring them a terrorist state. De facto they are already. Trying to hit civilian infrastructure has a poor record of changing war outcome as well. The Russians will most likely lose Kherson and a significant part of their army very soon. A countermeasure against the drone swarm will be found as well, possibly by jamming GPS signals or something like cannon based defense systems. The Iranians don’t do themselves any favors either. What little they gain by helping Russia will be absolutely overshadowed by increasing sanctions and getting deeper in the terrorist state stigma and international isolation. Really stupid from their perspective. The mobilization brings through war from something to watch on TV to something that starts to affect lots of families and I think quite soon , almost everyone will know someone who get killed or injured in the Ukraine. How much this changes Public opinion, we do not know, but I think it will change the perception for some people about their government.

@Dinar Sorry for leading the thread OT (college admission) it was just a point I was interested In personally. I think adding racial criteria rather than objective measures to school and college admission criteria leads to rabbit holes that should be avoided. I absolutely think that being a black or Hispanic gives you better chances than being white or even more Asian at the same level of qualification currently. My son is half white and half Asian technically and we for sure won’t identify him as Asian in his college application process. I wrote this just to debate your numbers for Harvard (22% black admissions when it‘s in reality 15.2%). I do agree that even these numbers could indicate racial preference to the admission process. On the other hand does anyone really think that Chinese Colleges are better than US ones ? Does anyone know of a Chinese American sending their kids back to a Chinese college?

The Harvard freshman‘s are 15.2% black, not 22%. So slightly over represented. I am sort of interested because my son will apply for next year. https://college.harvard.edu/admissions/admissions-statistics

Yes, indeed. I am happy to see this as well. People say I lot about the stupidity of the Europeans here, but the same negligence is going on here in NE with respect to obstructing NG pipeline builds. It is literally possible that NG need to be rationed here in a really cold winter and with a bit bad luck while having basically the Saudi Arabia of NG right around the corner just 200 miles from here (Marcellus field). I guess nobody believes it until it actually happens.

I think earnings could look better then people think, because the inflationary costs to input costs for a lot of companies have started to abate. Of course this differs from business to business and energy costs are still high and probably remain so, but for a lot of others things, input costs (which have been pressuring margins) have started to revert and some may end up recovering margins that has been lost during a cost surge. For tech companies, While I agree that growth may slow, there is a lot of fat in salaries. Both in terms of high salaries being paid as well as the numbers of positions and perks they may be able to cut, once competition for talent from upstarts and hot areas like crypto starts to abate.

This sounds good. If indeed LNG starts to flow from the floating terminals in a few weeks from now, then I think it will go a long way to alleviate issues in winter:

Yes, the vast majority technical people leave by choice, not because they have to. The, "let's fire the older guys and hire cheaper college grads" was happening in the 90's and maybe for a short time after the GFC (when college grads were scraping for jobs) but it hasn't been happening for quite some time. The reason are the high boomer retiring rates (which means persistent losses in tech experience) and the college grads are just not showing up. College grads are not cheap either...

Maybe $STIPS might work as well. it's a 0-5 years duration TIPS ETF.

I think the biggest risk is that you are forced to sell it because it is a state controlled entity like what happened to CHL and CNOOC. Similar idea is PBR-A. It has paid out more than 20% of my investment in just a couple of month. it's interesting to hold these dividend monsters in tax deferred accounts. You really want to get your investment back very quickly with these sort of iffy entities. 10% return is not enough, imo

The replacing depends on the job. In my area of expertise (loosely related optics) engineers are hard to get - to niche and those that are working tend to be specialized. I bet ASICS and Chip design is the same thing. So if you hire a different engineer, it takes years until they know their way around. In my area, the talent drag from older folks retiring is very real. Then the company hires new engineers from college and while some decide to hang around, I see more than half changing the job after 2 years and the whole training thing starts from scratch. There are many engineering disciples like this. Try material science, chemical engineering, automobile and many others areas that are not flashy but keep the world moving. These areas pay decently but not enough to really attract new young engineers or scientists who are more interest in "tech" or get rich doing something crypto or something along the lines. I can't blame them either.

@thepupil thx, i don't have a clue either. However the fact that "risk free" rates are blowing up means that perhaps they are not considered risk free any more. Perhaps the Quantitative tightening is the reason as you stated. I would agree it is an indication that something somewhere is blowing up. Perhaps we are seeing a repeat of the pension fund disaster in the UK.

Anyone knows why the ^TYX (30 year treasury) is going parabolic? This is an insane movement since August.

Title says it all. i don't think it's in the cards, but apparently some people do: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2022/10/20/china-could-invade-taiwan-end-year-us-warns/

I mentioned before (in the China thread) the fact that autocracies tend to have lower stock market returns than democracies as I seeing a paper cited by @Packer16 on twitter. Anyways, here is the abstract with a link to download. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3198561 It's a pretty dry paper with a lot of statistical analysis, but the gist of it seems to be that if you invest in a stock market governed by an autocracy, you are taking a risk that you don't get paid for generally. That does not mean that you can't get good results in some cases. Might be worth discussing, but in any case, I felt it worth putting out here. I also think it's worthwhile following Keith / packer16 on twitter: https://twitter.com/Bonhoeffer_KDS Democracy and stock market returns.pdf

This behind the curtain thing is just disgusting. I think they need to call an election. I do not know the UK constitution that well, but it seems from a democratic POV, anything else is just unacceptable.

New trailer is out: Looks very promising: On my visit to Germany, i learned that my Great grandfather served on the western front in the German army. When hew was conscripted, he signed up on a hunch as cook (he could not cook at all) and got accepted. He never really had to fight much and barely fired a shot. Not something were you can earn a lot of medals with, but he got home whole. That's one of the "Artillery" pieces he probably worked with (Gulasch kanone). No army can operate with this sort of machinery.

I think the Fed decided that the risk to overshoot on the rates and impact the economy in a real negative way (meaning significant increase in unemployment) is worth taking, compared to the risk not doing enough and then playing inflation ping pong for a decade. I would tend to agree with them. The one caveat is that the financial system blows a gasket somewhere. It won't happen in the US, but it could happen elsewhere - the weak currencies (yen, Euro, GBP, virtually any EM currencies) are an indication of strain. My guess is that we could see defaults with EM's or maybe even within China, because they ride with the Fed due to their currency PEG.

I think this North Ireland issue was a leftover from BJ. I guess they changed the talking heads but not really the agenda. Since you like they grey Tori suits, you have to ask yourself who put Truss in charge just 6 weeks ago/ The same grey suits of course.

That’s a question I try to answer myself. If I had to guess, about 2% less in EBIT than currently (10% EBIT to 8% EBIT). The 2 % EBIT reduction resulting from a 1% reduction in gross margin and 1% increase in SG&A basically going back to pre COVID-19 numbers.

I can speak to Harvard directly as my son is trying to get in (long shot). According to our college advisor (yes these exist) our son needs a mid 1500 AP score and write a couple of essays. They also have an extensive background questionnaire for parents (have yet to see that one). I guess a kind way to describe it is to say that they are looking at intangibles but it’s probably also to balance their admission goals to whatever target they have based on made up fu-fu criteria. I have to say that I like the German system- once you get your Abitur, you can study almost everything and everywhere. Study Physics in Heidelberg - admitted. Free too. But then comes the brutal part - sink or swim. Test are designed to weed out the weak- after 2 Semesters 50% are gone, after 4 (mid term tests) more than 60%. Somewhat wasteful in terms of time lost, but fair, imo.

The schools in the US ( I have lived in 3 states and my son went to school in all of them) are not necessarily bad, but the dispersion is huge. You can find crappy schools and quite good schools in the same town, sometimes even just a few miles from each other. It’s not the funding either. In the town in CA where I lived , i looked at the funding of schools and it often turned out that the schools with lousy stats had more funding than the schools with good stats. Most of the differences is just due to demographics of the students that go there. In California at least, the schools with a high percentage of Hispanic students have low overall grades. It‘s not due to funding either since schools in the same town with less funding often get better overall scores. Besides CA, I have lived in Long Island, where schools have excellent funding and well paid teachers and it shows. There were issues with drugs and bullying however. We are currently living in suburban MA and the schools are funded well, but not as well as LI, However, I prefer the demographics here and the drugs and bullying are much less an issue. Anyways my son has to work quite hard. Plenty of homework too. He is doing some college grade studies in math for example in his honor class in math. It also was mentioned here, that you don’t need to take AP and other tests to get into college. While that is technically true, you can’t really get into a good college that way. Maybe if you excel in some sport that the college is looking for. Otherwise it means probably community college.

FERG (a UK company but virtually all their business is in the US) is another one I am following. It's a distributor, somewhat similar to WSO. Recent podcast discusses it: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/value-hive-podcast/id1492171651 I think it's overearning right now, but it's an interesting stock to look at.

Regardless what you believe to be correct, i think it is not a good idea to invest across political fault lines i the future. I think it did not matter as much in the past, but it sure looks like it's going to matter now. If you are located in China, it is probably better to invest in China, or get your money out in safe place. If you are located in a western country, it is not a good idea to invest in China. Besides that, I think Keith Smith aka @Packer16 has shown some evidence (white paper?), that investing in countries with autocracy's delivers subpar returns on average. I mean even the return in Chinese stocks are nothing to write home about, the rapid increase in GDP notwithstanding. That's true even before the Chinese stocks crashed in late 2021. Even if you do a gross sanity check on the situation, why do you believe that investing alongside this neo Maoist is a good idea? Makes no sense to me. There is not way to get rid of him either. https://www.scmp.com/news/china/politics/article/3196532/congress-delegates-embrace-communist-party-slogan-pledging-support-xi-jinping?module=lead_hero_story&pgtype=homepage

Lousy demographics Lousy geostrategic location Lack of resources and no way to protect their trade routes Lousy leadership. I think Zeihan is broadly correct, although he is oversimplifying and he is sensantionalistic.

I am in my mid fifties and doing similar works to yours, but in a different area. I think I easily can do this into the mid sixties, if I have to or feel like it. I agree with @boilermaker75 suggestion to keep fit. When you get into the fifties, health issue usually start to occur in many ways and it is important to keep your body healthy. As for investing, I don't really think anything changes, but you just need to be more aware of risk. You can't really afford wipeouts at this point any more.