Spekulatius

Ignore Powell. Just watch what the ^TNX and the ^TYX is doing. I am not claiming that they can't give wrong signals, but at least there is money and a market behind both of them. Powell's talks come with an agenda.

Worth watching: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/u-energy-secretary-urges-refiners-180205766.html

I think housing has seen a pull forward or demand during COVID-19 that is now waning. The fundamental LT issue is that we don’t build enough single family homes and likely won’t in the future, due to land use constraints. I think in the future we need to go vertical and that means multi family homes. The Southwest has issues with water scarcity and the Southeast with climate issues (rising sea levels, increasing temperatures and increased storm frequency and severity). Those are multi decade trends, but in my opinion, they are quite real.

Went on a 4 country trip to Germany (family), Paris, Belgium and Netherlands, Belgium cities like Brussel and Ghent in particular have been awesome and better than I expected.

Watching the latest season of Unforgotten, which dropped in Amazon Prime a few weeks ago, It’s Brit crime TV at its finest. I also like Slow Horses on Apple TV in the same mold. Started to watch Indian Match Making, the reality TV series on Netflix. I don’t really watch reality TV if this kind, but the cultural aspects of this show kept me interest in Season 1 and Season 2 seems just as good.

My brother lives in Germany, but his house can be heated with oil, so not that big of an issue. He also has a solar roof, which helps with the electricity bill. I have heard that heat pump systems sell like hotcakes. That’s another way to reduce energy costs, but only for single family homes.

My framework for foreign currency devaluation relative to the USD is to look at the inflation differential over time which means country X (in this case India inflation rate) - US inflation rate over longer timeframes (couple of years). Generally, Countries with high inflation rates have more currency depreciation. The underlying thinking is that buying power relative to each other remains the same. Right now, inflation seems to be lower India than the US (~7% in India vs 8.5% in the US) which suggest a short term dis location based on Fed tightening and flight to safety perhaps. the USD has been extremely strong recently despite high inflation causing buying power erosion. So from that perspective, it might be a good contrarian bet to invest in in Rupee based assets right now.

Do people really believe that something like a zestimate has less than a +/- 5% error? It’s probably less when you live in large community where houses constantly turn over and they are all more or less the same, but generaly, I think a 5% error margin is a good guess.

I highly recommend a days trip to Vancouver Island / Victoria. I have rented a car in Seattle and went over to Canada and back to Seattle without issues. I don’t think doing this the other way round would be a problem.

Early happy hours drinks or are you talking about stonks?

I agree with @gfp here. Removing 10k of longer term debt wont have the same effect than giving 10k of cash to the same amount of consumers. There won't be much of an impact on spending.

Blockchain tech is inherently slower than a centralized database which is essentially what an exchange is. I don’t see blockchain disrupting exchanges. The Twitter user HideNotSlide has good info on exchanges. I recommend following him:

Probably. You should take what every source states with a huge grain of salt. Xi has a tough decision to make - on the one hand, they want to make owning a home cheaper to help out young families and perhaps the demographics in the long run, on the other hand lower home prices may de-stabilize the financial system and cause unrest with existing home owners. We know there is financial stress in the system, because China lowers its interest rates and seems to do some sort of quantitative easing while the US is tightening. This is interesting because China has their currency pegged to the USD so it generally means that monetary policy in China has to track the US. That means that we will likely see a devaluation of the Yuan relative to the USD.

It has to do with the field, but more so about the specific job. I work in engineering and had a job where I was both individual contributor and had to lead a group of engineers as well. Than add a bunch of travel to the mix as well. The money was good, but it wasn’t worth it for me.

That’s essentially the broken window fallacy implemented as a public policy, on a large scale: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window

The tax credits for kids don’t amount to much when you are ~$250k in combined income or more. I think we got $1200 or so combined and I had to pay this back even after filing my tax return. On the retirement issue, my son is starting college next year and after that we can consider. I am in my mid fifties right now, my wife a bit younger. I highly recommend having a nurse as your partner. In addition, the key is to have a job that’s not stressful. I don’t mind working, but I do mind jobs that are incredible taxing. Those jobs can eat you up.

The deal works for me. I bought when it dropped to a bit above $40 and then more when it went to $37 recently. I learned about this business from the focusedcompounding podcast. I think they had a position in it years ago and sold. The stock got very expensive in 2019 but with the crash in Fintechs, the price got down to a pretty reasonable valuation again. This is just one of those boring business that keeps plugging along.

CVX is very stingy.They won’t buy OXY. Warren knows better than to mettle and sitting in both sides of the table in a self dealing manner could reflect very badly, if he were directly involved.

Sold CSVI in my tax deferred accounts after they received a buyout offer. Another one of my buggers gone.

Well, Gazprom reduced the flow to 20% anyways a few weeks ago, so I don’t think that reducing it to zero matters all that much. I mentioned already that Germany’s storage is 75% full ahead of time and Poland for example is almost filled up. There is a lot of doom porn going on about next winter in Europe, but the data suggests that Europe should be OK. Be t year, the jig is up on Russian NG and the gas will be stranded , so no more Euros in Putins Pocket for that until 2027 at earliest, if he is able to build new pipes for new to China etc.

@joka I think one issue why cloning doesn’t work is the information lag. It’s up to 3 month on entry and exit, if you are talking about using 13F. When a manager is actively promoting a position ( basically pumping a stock where he has a position in) it’s even worse because you might be buying what he is selling. This is what happened with many FinTwit small cap and mid cap stocks that were and still are handed around. If you are using the 13F’s as an source for ideas, that in my opinion is not cloning. I do this as well and get ideas from it every once in a while. I do think that in this case you need to understand what you are buying, there is really no shortcut around this. if you want to shortcut due diligence, you need to invest in their vehicles or just do index investing.

This is not a consumer play, this is a Momo play.

Think about this - somebody is on the other side of the table and has lost $110M. It’s most likely lots of small retail investors. BBBY isn’t really worth more than a few month ago. It’s likely a ball bouncing down stairs.

Shameless cloning = brainless cloning. I think the likes of Guy Spier, Seth Klarman and Prem Watsa have underperformed index investing for a long time, why would you want to clone them? I think looking at what other investors are buying and why has value but you need to put your own thinking behind these ideas and then It’s not cloning (cloning means carbon copying) any more. I think cloning in a strict sense does not work in most cases.

I think a quick look at the index charts tells you more about Mr Market than any of the indicators (fear and greed). Looking at the VIX charts tells you a lot about the fear part. The headlines from CNBC are often mean less chatter, imo. How often are they obsolete when they show in the website just 2h later? I have seen it endless times that the CNBC headline shows “ Market is down because of XXX” and 2 h later the market turns green and yet the headline is still there. These explanations of short term movements are superfluous and worthless but apparently create enough interest and that’s what CNBC and other care about. i think charts are actually better market indicators than any of the headlines as they represent what all the market participants are doing in aggregate.