Spekulatius

There was also questionable nutritional advice about fried sweet potatoes being a healthy. Reading this newspaper feels a bit like reading East German newspapers in 80’s before the wall came down. There was a spurious habit of putting totally meaningless news on front pages and the real interesting stuff was hidden in small articles in the other pages often in between other meaningless articles. I know that the interested people there were pretty good at reading this code and I do wonder what people in SD have similar filters.

Yes, the risk of a large animal reservoir is that the virus can remain there, has time to mutate enough to make current treatment ineffective and then eventually jump back to humans and start the whole “game” all over again. I agree with Doc that it’s important to find out (and push China) to do forensics on the origin and try to eliminate the thread that we get a repeat of this in the future.

It is also interesting to note that the VIX is way down from ~40 to 27 now. There were probably a lot of hedges in place for the election that are now worthless or being liquidated and add to the buying pressure. Personally, if the VIX goes below 20 again and I see some decent opportunities to hedge for a reasonable cost I would be interested to do so, but not at current levels. This is all pretty worthless after the fact rambling, but still fun to do so.

The election is close, which means nothing untoward is going to happen to tech. This is not that great for cyclicals which don’t care about the color of the party either, but need stimulus to get moving and that is less likely with gridlock. I could well be wrong - this could also be just momentum that somehow got randomly started and then everything jumps on the train because think Mr Market knows something that they don’t.

Whatever the final result, I find the whole process quite amusing and the stock market reaction interesting: FOX down 4%, coal stocks down 7% Gold down too, Loot stocks line RGR down 8% etc.

LMAO - oil and pipeline stocks are down as I write this. My ANTM is up ~9% If you trade the election outcome with a simplistic view, you can very well end up being right and losing money.

Looking at premarket, bank stocks are down, because treasuries are down and pot. no stimulus, I suspect. Luckily I don’t own any. I will get really if my defense stocks are down today

Contrarian view - Trump victory is great for tech, bad for cyclicals, at least some of them. Energy is an example of this - drill drill drill got the industry in a hole, if there were more regulation, prices especially for natural gas would go up and Energy stocks would do better. Energy stocks may go up tomorrow but I don’t think it will last. The other problem for cyclicals is a stronger USD with Trump than with Biden. I looked at the exchange rates last night and at some point USD.MXN was up more than 3% and its now back into the red. A lot of the election impacts are really counterintuitive somewhat.

Return over 10 years 1)BAM 2) BRK 3) FFH I think BAM has the highest risk of blowing up in the face of these three , but it is lower than I thought initially. BAM benefits from lower interest rates and FFH gets hurt the most amongst those three, do in a way the decision is also a macro call. I do think that FFH has the best snap back potential short term.

Thanks. I'm guessing the last number is the estimate for your IFR? It's not clear what the percentages indicate (and it's not clear how they come up with such precise numbers). The simple way to build a model here is to use CFRs, adjusted for region and adjusted for risk factors defined per CFR from different sources: CDC etc. i assume the percentages apply if and once you're Covid+. (?) It may be more conceptually sound to go through a simple exercise (which will correlate with common sense) and use a risk stratification. Alberta has put up a 3-level risk (low-intermediate-high) system: https://www.alberta.ca/lookup/COVID-19-personal-risk-severity-assessment.aspx An interesting aspect is that the Alberta site does not require a US zip code and, at least for me, adding dementia to the risk factors does not significantly change the risk level. The Sanford Health group also has a nutrition coach subsidiary. https://www.profileplan.com/ Yes, the percentages apply once you have COVID-19, so the last number is the CFR rate (I think). I don’t know how the calculator works, but it is normalized to 0.25% and I suspect it has multipliers based on your inputs that either increase or decrease the three risk metrics it calculated. I played with my numbers and increasing the blood pressure seems to have the largest impact. In my case, I lost a few years of my COVID-19 age due to having pretty good blood pressure values generally.

PDLI Shares trade suspiciously weak.

LVY bounced already a lot from the lows and they lost $600M last quarter. I haven’t dissected their financial statement but a lot of their cash are actually customer advances for concerts in the future. So far customer er have rolled those over, but what if they get the idea that this is going to take a little longer and want their money back? I would bet against large scale concerts in Spring. I think summer 2021 is the earliest I can see a slow return.

I read this during my lunch break and now I want my lunch break back. It’s a large wall of beautiful crafted sentences but with little substance, imo.

A COVID-19 vaccine is not a binary event. First of all, I expect traditional vaccines to win out eventually rather than RNA vaccines (Moderna etc) because they don’t need to be stored and transported at low temperatures (-4F) and possibly work more reliably. one of my holdings - MRK works on a vaccine that gets orally administered and should work well on older people too. The first vaccine may work, but are likely not perfect in terms or efficacy, cost and ease of application etc. I think this COVID-19 epidemic is a huge boost for any company in the vaccine business as even flu vaccinations and possibly others will get a large boost.

Covid risk calculator from Everest health. It calculates the risk to get admitted to the hospital, get upgraded to an ICU room and come out with the feet first. Enjoy: https://calculator.covid-age.com/ Mine are roughly 5% / 1.5% /0.22%

Covid tracker seems to be correct (they add up data from individual states). https://covidtracking.com/data/charts/us-currently-hospitalized It clearly does show rising hospitalization rates. The CDC website is hard to navigate and really doesn’t have well made trend charts. My state MA also has good granular data (down to a town level - the town I life in had 4 new cases last week after being without cases since about late March) but again trendlines are missing. The best tracker I have found for Germany is from the Tagesspiegel newspaper: https://interaktiv.tagesspiegel.de/lab/karte-sars-cov-2-in-deutschland-landkreise/ As we all know from investing, momentum is real and it is even more real when looking at epidemic KPI’s and we need to look where the puck is going not where it is right now. Or at least we need to see if the elevator is going up or down, as Munger would say.

It seems like they get income from other tokens (both 5% yearly “maintenance”) and 0.5% withdrawal fees. This sounds like a frocking expensive checking account for users to me. Thank you for the explanation. So it seems more like participating in arbitrage than In a crypto checking account via this token. Then the question really is why do those opportunities exist and how likely they exist in the future, because if you put a PE ratio as a valuation mark, you do assume that there will be cash flows in the future.

It seems like they get income from other tokens (both 5% yearly “maintenance”) and 0.5% withdrawal fees. This sounds like a frocking expensive checking account for users to me.

Ok, October is German month in Netflix - Barbaren and Oktoberfest: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt9184986/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt10244612/

Again, the fallacy of CASES! OMG! What a disaster...these people are total idiots. As I posted earlier...UF GAME CANCELLED BECAUSE OF COVID OUTBREAK......(tiny print) All 21 players are either asymptotic or show minor symptoms... Can we please create some place where a certain percentage of the population lives where there are high taxes, shutdowns every time one catches the flu. and absurd rules around things like soda, plastic bags and police officers doing their jobs...and another where there are no taxes, and people just live their lives?? If you read the article - one of the main reason for the shutdown is that the coaches fail to cooperate with the contact tracers and even went to so far to told the team to ignore calls from contact tracers. So it is likely that more clusters were created by these activities that we don’t know about. Our governor Charlie Baker is Republican.

Earnings have been pretty good for defense contractors. LMT, NOC and LHX all best their earning targets. I was just looking at LHX’s numbers which reported earnings gs today. Looking back, Harris was a ~$6B company with close to 20% operating margins. L3 was a bit more than $10B revenue company, but their operating margins were much lower - 11%. Now, if we revenue weigh this we expect to see ($6*0.2+$10.2*0.11)/($6+$10.2)=14.3% margin. LHX in the last quarter achieved a 17.9% operating margin already. The quarter before were 18.2%, 17.5% and 17.3% respectively. Seems like things are generally moving in the right direction. Defense is an area where economies of scale are very real. As a small contractor , working in defense can be a fairly trough business, because awards can be lumpy and the bigger guys can be squeezing you on margins.But once you are a prime contractor and have your lobbyist working for you Etc. so you understand which way the wind is blowing in thr Pentagon and economies of scale, then things get much much better.

Pretty typical microcosm of what is happening: https://www.boston.com/news/coronavirus/2020/10/28/why-did-massachusetts-shut-down-ice-rinks-charlie-baker-says-blame-the-adults

Nice start. QQQ's down about 1% a/h. As described, the MSFT experience indeed with FB, AMZN and AAPL. Google was super impressive but not really one of the stocks I view as having been put on steroids by the covid situation, so a bit different than some of the others. Well, it depends on when you bought them. The puts that I am looking at are still down significantly for the day, but bounced back a little after hours. If you bought them at the peak of today, then you are in the money.

^ The problem with puts is if they are adequately priced? To me the prices paid right now seem very high, as you would expect with a VIX of ~36. As mentioned before, the VIX never really got below 25 even in a steadily rising market. VIX 25 is a fairly high number, historically speaking.

In Europe at least and I suspect in the US many new cases are do ing from family and friends get-togethers. Also note that in Europe restaurants and bars (the differences tend to be more marginal in Europe) have been open. In neither occasions, people wear masks. We have Thanksgiving coming up, which likely will cause another spike in cases.