Spekulatius

Thanks for the color. SPLK for me is particularly egregious because they have high dilution (5-6% annually) while not growing all that much. Other serial diluters are PLTR, WDAY, ESTC and I am sure there are many more. At least those have been growing at a recent clip, while SPLK has not. NOW is actually reasonably attractive here and I think I might enter a smallish position on a correction. They are superbly managed should be able to keep growing for quite some time.

Yes, I am slowly raising cash when fair value is approached and I am not finding much to buy. I have been adding a tiny bit of VRTX and MRK. I see it more reflective of the jack if opportunities than a big macro call.

10% interest rates are not a problem for the vast majority of the company if the inflation rate is 10% too. 10% interest rates with 5% inflation, now that is a problem. You need to go no further than Mexico to see what this looks like (also Mexico is not quite there, but was close enough a short time ago).

LOL, he makes his comeback at exactly the right time. He should probably hail in with Andrew Fastow and bring the band together again.

Sold some more ABEV and the remainder of my GD. (I am keeping my defense exposure in LHX, NOC and LMT) Sold off my few shares in OGN (MRK spinoff)

I am tracking this one too, as they are getting some traction on the cloud conversion, but how can you justify the out of control SBC? They had about $180M in SBC on ~$500M in revenues so that's ~36%. Those are not old grants either - their quarterly dilution was only ~1.1M shares, so I am guessing they must be handing out new grants a lower strike prices like confetti. No position.

Here is mother recent talk. Druckenmiller here gives actually a bit of trading advice: 1) He exits when he figures his thesis is wrong 2) He Never uses stop loss. Is anyone using Toggle AI and if so, what is the experience? Today, IB has a Webinar today about Toggle AI around lunch time, so if it is quiet at work, I might give it a listen.

It is that simple.

There is probably some truth in this. Now that crypto has crashed (somewhat) all the WSB stocks are rocking. Coincidence? A year ago, I would say yes it is coincidence, but now I think there is a herd of sheep that likes to set money on fire moving from one popular trade to the next.

Sold my ABEV in my tax deferred accounts today.

I have some property stocks and a bit of gold. I am thinking of upping gold and probably invest in a gold miner or two as well. The best inflation hedge may still be owning good business with pricing power. Biden’s talk Cleveland from 5/27 ( linked above in this thread) really got me thinking that this time in fact could be different, so I will be watching for broad inflation based on wages rather than those commodity price spikes.

Cash was fine, because you could generate interest rates parking cash. Now, however, the real interest rates are negative ( after accounting for inflation) so it is not likely to do well. Inflation to some extend is good for stocks, but if it goes above a certain point (3-5%), it becomes very damaging to equity multiples. https://youtu.be/HLuiKOllVDY?t=2100 Another thing I would like to point out to those claiming that higher interest rates are not possible, because we can’t afford them. Well, what we can’t afford is real interest rates in excess of inflation, but a 5% interest rate and having 5% inflation is not a problem for the nation. In fact, since it would massively devalue the existing longer duration treasury bonds issues at lower interest rates, it would be a positive from the debt perspective.

And the rest goes broke doing the same thing.

I believe the commodity side of inflation is transitory, the labor side will not be. If you read the transcript of Biden‘s speech in the Twitter thread I linked in above, they are actually trying to create labor inflation. That would be the end of trickle down economics and probably not good for most equities. Thats a total regime change from the economical framework we have been seeing for 40 years, if it indeed occurs.

@CastanzaSome of the above is transitory. I have not noticed much inflation with groceries. Restaurants are getting more pensive for sure, but it seems to be more in the 5-10% range than 50% range. The long term driver for inflation will be wages, not lumber or other commodities. I think we are done with trickle down economics if this thinking goes into action:

ABNB certainly has the potential to be a great business, but it hasn’t proven itself yet to generate earnings. I am always amazed by the stuff these IPO‘s are spending on for what seems like pretty mature products/ platforms. I have never used ABNB. This is mostly because the cost is too high - we typically spent just a few days in each location and then when we add it up, the various fees makes using ABNB fairly uneconomic compared to Hotels. We have used VRBO several years ago to rent a skiing lodge NAND two years ago, we rented an apartment in downtown Montreal via Hotel.com that was hosted like ABNB. What I liked about Hotel.com is that the fees were included so you could directly compare it to Hotels vs ABNB tagging all sorts of fees on it after you made your choice ( I suspect they do This buy design and it is not customer friendly at all). ( ABNB rant over). Anyways, i keep my valuation discipline. I watch these new IPO and from time to time, I see some where subsequent drops bring the valuation into a range where it makes sense and then I buy a few shares. I haven’t really seen fat pitches from my perspective, but I have seen some where you don’t need 20 years of 20%+ growth and heroic margin assumption to see value.

It should absolutely get investigated what happens in this Wuhan lab at that one and the US should apply pressure tomorrow the Chinese to open the Sarong so to speak. If it want in the lab, we should be able to find the animal host and transfer chain. it should be evident for everyone that after hundred thousands of dead and trillion $ in economic damages throughout the world economy, we need to find out exactly what happened and to prevent this from occurring again. In the meantime, assume Occam’s razor is correct 80-90% of the time. I also think we should support Taiwan and give them the 23M/46Mdoses of a vaccine they need to get most of the population vaccinated. That would send a nice signal to allies and a big middle finger to the Chinese who want to sell their lousy vaccine to countries that don’t have any other options.

The bigger question is why would you want to deal with a stablecoin cryptocurrency at all? It seems like you take counterparts/ collateral risk and inflation risk at this same time. Why not stick with USD? Seems to work perfectly as a means to exchange goods and services.

I agree that ABNB ‘s valuation looks rich here north of 20x revenues. I can make the math work at the IPO price and maybe a bit more, but the math looks challenging around $120 or more.

And here comes the long weekend dump, LOL:

Seems like a game of musical chairs with not enough chairs. Fed buying treasuries (in exchange for reserves) then repo'ing reserves in exchange for treasuries. I guess it all makes sense, but does it accomplish anything? I doubt it. I guess someone somewhere grabs a few pennies in front of some sort of steamroller.

Why is that? We never tried UBI. We did sent out the first round of stimulus checks for everyone (similar to UBI) but most of the stimulus was sent explicitly to people not working ( enhanced unemployment benefits). This is not UBI. UBI would be sent to everyone, including those that are working, so it would not deter people from working than the current system.

The Chinese SinoPec vaccine doesn’t seem to work (efficacy is very low) so that partly explains why it was developed so quickly. The mRNA tech was there, but it was obscure and not a single vaccine was approved using this tech. A lot of people were sceptic, but it really proved that it was superior both in terms of development speed ,as well as efficacy. I am certain that this will be used for other use cases too, including very good initial results in Malaria (which has long been an elusive target for vaccines). Malaria is a curse for many countries in the tropics and having a vaccine available would be an absolute game changer.

Well, I used to like the podcast, until it became a de facto crypto podcast, then I stopped listening and following it. I think the split was a good idea as there are pretty different audiences. I will probably follow TIP again and see if it‘s back to it’s former self.

What long term principles exactly did you forget buying DISCK? I can easily see pot. value as many others here as well. I just think there is way more risks here than those that put money in it.