Spekulatius

It's a very respectable attitude from your side. Agreed. I hope sampr01 will get a fair outcome and kudos for posting here about his situation. There is a tendency to only see people swimming victory laps so to speak (especially this year) but the reality is often different.

I agree that Picasso was an extremely well regarded poster and appears to be great stock picker. However, when you are responsible to invest other people’s money, risk management is even more important than being a good stock picker. The complaints are dating back to 2014 based on the Finra site. The following excerpt (from a lawfirm representing claimants ) is quite interesting: If true, this is more than just a trade going bad, it would be unresponsible gambling with other people’s money. https://frankowskifirm.com/stockbroker-dennis-phillip-ayre-named-as-respondent-in-1-4-million-arbitration-claim/ https://frankowskifirm.com/dennis-ayre-continues-to-rack-up-customer-complaints/

Sold HDG.AS and ATTO in my tax deferred accounts. I kept the positions in my taxable accounts.

NIC service business was similar to $LDOS. It can be regarded as an outfit to rent out bodies (or perhaps workers with security clearance). The tech (if there is any) isn’t owned but the company itself, but by the agencies. This is different than Palantir. They run a much higher gross margin business where Palantir owns the tech.

I guess the fix for NYC is lower prices and lower rents. Families will move out and younger folks will backfill. Of course the solution with lower rents isn’t really great for landlords, but it could end up making NYC a more interesting and vibrant place. There is always opportunity after some wreckage.

I can see the case of an utility coming in and offering broadband when there isn’t really any competitive offering, like is the case in many rural areas. In those cases there are even subsidies to offering broadband. Some of the smaller telecoms like NUVR do a pretty nice living getting their Capex subsidized via A- CAM funding and I can’t see why they wouldn’t allow the electric utility to do something along the same lines to provide broadband to customers as well. I guess some rules would need to be established to prevent double dipping of the utility but I can’t see why there couldn’t be a workable solution, After all every household pretty much gets electricity unless it is totally of the grid. So why not offering broadband to underserved communities as well through the utility?

NOC sells their service business for $3.4B: https://investor.northropgrumman.com/news-releases/news-release-details/northrop-grumman-sell-federal-it-and-mission-support-business This continues the portfolio restructuring that has been ongoing with NOC. They spent $7.8B for Orbital Science in 2018 and this worked out very well. I think it makes sense for NOC to sell the weaker IT service business. They can do this non dilutive for earnings buy using the proceeds to buy back shares and reducing debt (which increased with the Orbital Science acquisition).

Plastic surgery?

PDLI

I guess no one here remembers the late 60‘s Hippie generation. The Hippies were far more radical and socialist than the Millenials are now and look at where we are.

AZO

Going after FCC subs for rural broadband - ~$900M: https://www.cnbc.com/2020/12/07/spacex-starlink-wins-nearly-900-million-in-fcc-subsidies-auction.html

ABNB should be an interesting one. Pricing between $$44-$50 actually seems to be reasonable. I try Fidelity for an allocation but I don’t think I will get any. I am not interested in Doordash, but those guys truly timed their IPO well.

The VW ID.3 seems to be outselling the Tesla 3 in Europe. It will be interesting how the ID.4 (a bigger crossover type vehicle) will do - the base version is supposed to come out in March 2021 in the US. I think we will see quicker adoption than some people think as it looks to me like the tipping point finally has been reached in EV availability and adoption. Ten years from now, I wouldn’t be too surprised, if the vast majority of new cars sold are EV’s. The UK is already considering a ban for ICE cars starting 2030. If you own a gas station or refinery assets, you are setting on a rapidly melting iceberg, imo. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-11-26/vw-s-id-3-quickly-climbs-to-top-of-europe-s-electric-car-market

Putting this here for a lack of a better location. Interesting Sunday read on the Canadian Avro fighter project which got canceled in 1959: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200615-the-record-breaking-jet-which-still-haunts-a-country For those interested, the BBC has great long form articles about aviation history right now and the above is one of them.

Most traded stocks in Europe - Nov 2020 from Degiro: https://www.degiro.ie/knowledge/blog/most-traded-stocks-november-2020 Tesla has been tops for a while in many countries. Derigo publishes this monthly.

The bull case is that it’s just a Ponzi scheme getting started , I guess. It is a bit concerning to the bull case that they’re are so few bears out there, since almost anyone seems to thinks BTC is going up.

^ big surprise if you live in crowded quarters m use the same bathrooms (that was one way infections were found in the study) and have roommates bunking together (I bet they do t wear mask when they sleep, how could they). My only conclusion for a civilian setting is that I wouldn’t rely on mask preventing infections in a setting like a cruise ship (the closest equivalent). As for the general conclusion of the reference (not the study ) that mask don’t work, I wouldn't agree. If you refer to the often cited danish mask study, check out Taleb’s posts on Twitter. He concluded that the design and even the math of the study is incorrect and that the results actually infer that the mask cohort did show lower infection rates. Edit: corrected for typos.

Added a bit of NOC on recent weakness.

Thats all one needs to look at imo and it can’t be ignored. My wife is working overtime as I type this in various hospitals, as COVID-19 patients are back in our area. The problem with seniors getting isolated is a real problem, but it’s not lockdowns that are causing this, but the virus running rampant. Lockdowns don’t prevent visits to seniors unless in special circumstances.

Significant update - Koyfin now covers foreign stocks. This looks very good after a quickly look: https://www.koyfin.com/help/release-notes/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=release-promo-11-20-global&utm_content=notes-b1

Gold is highly useful for jewelry (malable), has a nice color, does not corrode and can be used to build excellent infrared mirrors (I use it just for that a bit in thin film form at work). The supply of gold will increase less than the supply of fiat money, they why I would bet that over long periods of time, it will keep it’s value better than cash. Diamond is a crappy investment because it needs an expensive and subjective classification system (not a fungible good) and the demand is procyclical and at least used to be controlled by the De Beers cartel. In addition, it is not possible to create artificial diamond that exceed objectively the quality of natural formed diamond.

Es, that’s exactly how I see it. 1980 was a bad starting point since it was quite a bubble in Gold with the price more than doubling within a year and a year later, it halved. Part of what caused this crash were the Volker policies curbing inflation.

Make sense though. Large city with many renters, large population of young and single people and high cost. But I bet Seattle suburbs are white hot. I'm throwing 700k cash offers at 3bed/1bath 1,000 sq ft houses in the east bay of San Francisco. I'm not even competitive apparently... Suburbs have largely lacked the price appreciating that Appartement or houses in the city areas had. I lived in Long Island and now in Boston area and in both cases, houses were still below ~2005 prices. I think RE in thr city core might have doubled with8b the same time frame. If this trend reverses, it could have a long way to go, but I somehow doubt that it will.

China isn‘t really communist any more, it is just run by a party that used to be communist decades ago. The state owned companies are kind of hybrid between both worlds and a left over from communism. It’s not where the puck is going. In some ways China has a brutal Manchester capitalism.