Spekulatius

It's Fannie Mae / Freddie Mae. Uncle Sam basically underwrites the risk of interest moves for a 30 year mortgage. No private lender would do that for the small amount one is paying especially considering that there is no prepayment penalty. The US is the only country where the 30 year fixed mortgage exists as far as I know, due to the unique structure of the US mortgage market.

Don't forget that housing in some areas went to zero. Detroit and other cities in the midwest are an example. You find abandoned houses throughout in the US. So there is some survivership bias in averaged data as well. Housing in the 70's was a way to protect from inflation, as there were few other things were average Joe could protect assets from inflation. That may be one reason why housing did reasonably well in the 70's until Volker put a squeeze on interest rates in 1980 and killed the housing market with it.

I think the relentless downtrend in interest rates from 1980 until know has a lot of do with higher housing prices. If this reverses, I think prices will have to come down. The second factor is land use / building permit restrictions. In many US cities, the population density is quite low compared to Asian or European cities, partly due to zoning laws. If these cities grow in population, they need to spread out rather than grow in density.

Remember the fallen….FinTwit favorites.

Starters: TPB, INTC Adds: LMT, NTDOY

To me, Game of Thrones and specifically Lord of the Rings is just better source material than Herbert‘s Dune world and I think they are better on the screen too. I have read Tolkien, and felt that Jackson‘s adaptation is true to style and for me still the all time greatest fantasy movies series of all times. I think Villeneuve‘s Dune Adaptation was good, but to me it’s a notch below GOT and LOT mainly because the source material isn’t as good. That’s just my opinion. I enjoyed Dune and the Visual are good, but the storyline just missed these moments that one tends to remember. Both GOT and LOTR have those in spades, but Dunes does not. That said, I enjoyed the movie and look forward to the second part. I think the whole will be larger than it‘s part just like the Jackson‘s LOT trilogy.

I agree with this take. I was a huge SciFi fan as a teenager and devoured pretty much anything I could get my hands on, but Dune never hit the spot for me. Too much is just about the athmosphere while the action and the characters seem unrelatable. I tortured myself through the book and never touched anything else from Herbert again. There is a lot of good Sci Fi material out there. Classics from the 40‘s and 50‘s, sometimes even just short stories with interesting characters and story lines. Stuff like Larry Niven’s Ringworld universe is much better screen material than Dune for example. The tech and CGI is now good enough to bring it on screen in a credible manner. I am looking forward to much to come. Or just imagine what you could do with the Tolkien Universe using the Silmarillion as a foundation.

LOL, Woot Woot for nepotism. I sort of wonder how Howard and Susan keep the Berkshire culture intact if they have no idea what is going on at Berkshire.

I really liked the first episode of the Foundation and the second is somewhat, but it seems to go downhill from there. I agree on this.

I know it’s late, but I highly recommend this show on HBO. “Every lie we make is a debt to the truth and sooner or later it must be repaid.”

MARA does look extremely scummy. Headquarter in Las Vegas already says something as there are a lot of fraudulent companies located in NV. The Chairman Okamoto also feels very promotional and has an unimpressive track record. $40 January puts are north if $4 with the stock at $54 so fairly expensive.

Sold half my FAF. I am getting a bit concerned about higher interest rates. Edit - sold my 9988.HK (Alibaba) tonight ~17% loss.

Uhgg. This is very applicable to investing, message boards and use of social media. Kahneman also talks bout this in his book, that's why I am posting this here: https://www.pnas.org/content/108/22/9020 Social groups can be remarkably smart and knowledgeable when their averaged judgements are compared with the judgements of individuals. Already Galton [Galton F (1907) Nature 75:7] found evidence that the median estimate of a group can be more accurate than estimates of experts. This wisdom of crowd effect was recently supported by examples from stock markets, political elections, and quiz shows [Surowiecki J (2004) The Wisdom of Crowds]. In contrast, we demonstrate by experimental evidence (N = 144) that even mild social influence can undermine the wisdom of crowd effect in simple estimation tasks. In the experiment, subjects could reconsider their response to factual questions after having received average or full information of the responses of other subjects.

You are correct regarding RFP but I would add that it went to $2 (and below) because of perceived bankruptcy risk, not just because of low lumber prices. That’s a whole new dimension of risk you are taking beyond commodity prices. Regarding SLB - if you want to cry in your sheets regarding missed opportunities look at old annual reports from Schlumberger, which you can still find on SLB IR site: Here is an old one from 1981: They actually had ~$1.7B in cash in 1981 and only 440M in debt (bank loans). 280M shares outstanding worth about $55 each (stock had fallen from $80 in 1980) for about $15.5B market cap. Market cap 40 years later……drumroll….$47B.

I agree on this. If you like lumber near term, buy lumber futures not some riff RFP stock like Greenfirst (FinTwit favorite) Lumber futures bottomed at $450 and recently hit $750 while Greenfirst is up like 10% in the same timeframe? But there are worse cases like this: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/ceo-natural-gas-producer-eqt-162117083.html Looks like the chumps at EQT may lose $5B on their hedges with a ~$7.5B market cap. it seems to me that when you went long EQT a while ago, you weren’t really going long NG, you were long an idiot management team that was hedging the hell out of their business. Seems to me that if you like a commodity, you should just buy the commodity.

The office I work in never closed down. Not a single day. (Amongst other things, I support manufacturing operations).

I am listening to it as an Audiobook. Chapter 2 had an interesting experiment where 42 experienced investors were asked to value a business based on 3 years of balance sheet and income & cash flow statement summaries. The variance of the result was more than 40%. That's an interesting baseline data to keep in mind. it means that if you think something is 20% overvalued (or undervalued), there is a good chance you could be wrong (assuming you are an average experienced investor). At the very least, this means once should be a bit careful when selling something, because it reaches fair value. If you think the above is bad, you will be shocked when the listen (or read) about the findings when data and experiments were analyzed regarding the criminal justice system.

Well, I won't do this either, seems to complicated to me. I would just go with either doubling down for a month or a replacement stock/ETF (dirty hedge) for a month , if I feel uncomfortable with the risk of doubling down. Besides that, I don't have too many losses this year anyways and most are in IRA's.

I don't understand the animosity towards @lnofeisone . This may or may not work. It was meant as loophole and that's possibly what it is, so why the hostility. No one is forced to use this trick. Has anyone run a Turbotax test? That's the ultimate tax authority for me since I am just a peon and do my taxes in TT. If TT says yes, I would be good to go.

Do you think there is a chance that lawmakers understand mathematical algorithms well enough to regulate them?

I learned something today. St Pierre and Miquuelon is still a French Island! That's why smuggling liquor makes sense. I guess it's mostly VAT arbitrage or do they have special liquor taxes there? Liquor isn't really outrageously expensive in mainland France. Sorry for the OT post.

I think most of the gains in Oil and Gas have already occured. I also think that most inflation has already occurred and I would not be too surprised that if we are going to see a slight recession in late 2022 due to the whiplash from COVID-19 reverses. These are all baseless hunches of mine of course. I think it is not easy to predict energy prices. I tended to be overexposed to this sector, but gave up on it in 2014, luckily before the oil price and energy crash. I basically gave up on this space and let others venture into this snake pit. Money can be made trading this, but my guess is that the ratio of money to be made to brain damage incurred is way better elsewhere. FWIW, my first stock I bought in the US was Conoco, when it spun off from DuPont in 1998. I did quite well, especially since the timing was pretty good with a barrel of crude hitting below $10/brl as a result of the Asian debt crisis back then. Stuff like this will happen again. I have seen oil crashes in 1983, 1989, 1998, 2002, 2008, 2014 and 2020. I may have missed a few smaller ones. It is really hard to run a business when the main factor - the price you get for your product is beyond of your control.

Keep adding little lots of FISV. FWIW, some of the Fintech are selling off quite a bit recently (FIS, PYPL and the Brazilian samba stocks PAGS and STNE)

I have no idea. I have enough to worry about getting my US taxes right. Obviously, tax laws differ from country to country.

US Rig count is going up. We are still down from 2020, but increasing nevertheless: Crude is driven more by what happens in Libya, Iran, Irak and Suadi Arabia. ESG has very little impact there. The drop in oil production occurred early in 2020 and has nothing to do with the administration. I would bet that oil production is in fact up since Biden got elected ( not that it has anything to do with it). Then again the US is only a small piece of the puzzle anyways.