Spekulatius

That about sums it up: https://www.cnbc.com/2020/10/23/fauci-says-trump-hasnt-attended-white-house-coronavirus-task-force-meeting-in-several-months.html

Europe got complacent. Cases here are rising too - in all regions. I think we will crack 100k cases/ day very quickly. Hospitalization is the one metric to look at. The last waves topped out at 60k COVID-19 hospitalization. Once we get to this number, the hospitals system becomes strained, we are going to have local restrictions again. Edit: another indicator - my wife went to Costco today and noticed that several items like paper, wipes were sold out, just like during the first wave. Apparently people are getting ready for things to come.

TRV as it reached my price target.

The Swiss Kanton “Schwyz” went from “doing great” to “ Oh crap!” Within 2 weeks. Cause is apparently a super spreader Jodler event (Swiss folks singing) with 600 attendants. Rapidly rising and constraint hospital capacity are the result. Schwyz is a relatively sparsely populated Kanton in central Switzerland.

^ Interesting papers. The paper below seems to indicate that excess death were somewhat undercounted. Granted Alzheimer victims don’t have a great prognosis anyways, but still:

No. I did not. I am a cheese lover, so I suspect I missed something.

Yes, this is very true unfortunately as whatever is posted in the politics section inevitably spills over. I have seen at least one investment board ( investorvillage.com ) getting totally destroyed by political posts. That said, the separate section for politics contains the damage somewhat.

Van Trapp from VT if you can get it. Sierra Nevada also has an Octoberfest that’s pretty good. I do drink the Sam Adams Octoberfest which is easy to get where I live. From the German Oktoberfest beers, I prefer the Hacker-Pschorr and the Löwenbräu, but they are much harder to get.

I looked. And there is almost no criticism of Trump in Feb/March. He is the President of the United States. He's going to get criticism (even if he did everything right). But blatant Trump-bashing was exceptionally rare on this thread. My guess is that you are recalling conversations from other threads. I'd say that you are correct about Feb/March. The discussions in Feb/March had already frequently become contentious, with a few posters directing personal attacks and insults at others who held different points of view. At that stage, the personal attacks were usually of the nature of questioning the other person's intelligence or numeracy (ex, person X is too stupid to understand exponential growth). The reality was that there were intelligent and numerate posters on both sides of most issues, but their views were driven by differing assumptions about a wide variety of known-unknowns. My memory was that the political rancour was a little later in June or July, when most of Europe and Canada had their situation well in hand after a lengthy lock-down, but Sweden and the US had a growing mess on their hands. At that stage there were frequent posts lamenting the situation in the US and frequent questions about whether America was great yet and #winning was occasionally used. It was a bizarrely political discourse where every bad outcome was attributed to particular politicians. The venomous political statements related to the covid situation in the US seem to have abated somewhat as numerous countries in Europe have lost control of their situation. SJ The trends in Europe show how quickly this can run out of control. 40k cases today in France is pretty bad. They have started curfews , but this time, they are more targeted towards hoy spots. I think a total lockdown of the economy is unlikely in Europe as it is in the US. US trends are pretty lousy too - rising cases almost everywhere, but that’s not driving the response - hospitalization is and it’s rising too. These COVID-19 trends have persistence, once they start rising, they keep rising for a while: https://covidtracking.com/data/charts/us-currently-hospitalized These hospitalization rates at a local level will drive a response at a local level. We will find out if muscleman herd immunity theory is correct, but I think not. Too many population groups haven’t seen the virus yet. I live in MA ~35 miles out of Boston and no way there is any herd immunity here. Just 10 positive cases in a town of 3300 with no case since May (we have town stats here and testing a availability is pretty good). Other towns around me are similar , but there are also hot spots in between (mostly blue collar communities) with way higher rates too. I expect rising rates and hospitalizations, but hope for the best. Thanksgiving and inevitable travel and family gathering could well ignite another surge. We know from Europe that family events and private meetings/house parties are a major cause of spread and those are hard to control.

You say you understand but the poster above didn't really explain it. Inventory went down, meaning it was sold and hence generated cash. The carrying value of the inventory would be expensed through COGS. The *total* cash flow generated from the sale is really the gross margin (from your income statement) plus the carrying value decrease (change in inventories). I thought the explanation was fine. Now do inventory write downs. An inventory write down is a non event for the cash flow statement.

They have a nice asset in Wyoming, which is cost-advantaged relative to synthetic production, and cost-advantaged relative to other trona miners. However, I don't trust management. Didn't take a rocket scientist to figure out they inflating annual production through deca rehydration, and eventually production would drop off significantly. The manner in which they disclosed this made them appear either dishonest or incompetent. Happy to chat more about this one on a dedicated thread for CINR. Read the same VIC pitch and I'm in too. Lets start one :) This entity still has 50% IDR’s. Automatic pass for me.

The Covid-19 turbocharged WFH trend provides an option for people, who want well paying jobs who formerly were only available in a city, to move elsewhere and do the same job. Some pole will like this and take this option and some don’t because they prefer to live in a City anyways. How these net movements work out is any wine guess, but it seem certain that there is a net migration out of large expensive cities. The places these people move to (suburbs) will see stronger home appreciation and large apartment buildings in large cities will probably be less desirable.

CBOE (add ) for me.

Agreed. Continuing the old thread rather than starting a new one is interesting for perspective.

Excellent article in the Atlantic about COVID-19 R0 dispersion, superspreaders and infection clusters. For one thing, it looks like Sweden actually had a strategy to target clusters much more effectively than others. Same with Japan: https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/09/k-overlooked-variable-driving-pandemic/616548/

If you look countries who have had best in class responses to handling the virus (with the best health outcomes and least economic damage) testing was the backbone of their effort. And mask wearing and social distancing. Strong communication with consistent, unified message (lead by science / health professionals). Not rocket science. But still very difficult to execute. Gee, remember when the Surgeon General said masks weren't effective, and that Dr. Fauci guy said the same thing? This is correct and the same mistake was made elsewhere (in Germany for example). If you realize you made a mistake, you should correct it, not double down on false beliefs. It’s no different than investing. I think I posted this in this thread, but the Moment Fauci started to talk about the benefits of mask in those Coronavirus meetings, I saw people at work wearing masks the next day. Nobody ask them to do so, it just happened because at least some people were listening. Then my company started to distribute surgical masks to everyone (they were hard to get initially) and then wearing them became mandatory. No community spread at work so far , unlike what we have seen in the White House. It‘s not bulletproof protection, but together with social distancing rules, this works and stops the spread.

I expect a third wave. Current trends in hospitalization are already trending up and we know that in an epidemic, trends have momentum. Even the Northeast is seeing already and increase in hospitalization. https://covidtracking.com/data/charts/us-currently-hospitalized These cyclicality / waves we are seeing are not really separate waves, more or less the same wave hitting different states at different times. We are seeing a second wave in Europa however, in particular Spain and Britain are noteworthy, because they were hit hard by the first wave. So second waves are definitely in the cards in the US. I think thanksgiving will be a major driver from increased travel and family gatherings and together with a seasonal trend will cause another spike. How pronounced it’s going to be will be mainly be driven by people behavior.

Perhaps, the Tencent equivalent today is still Tencent. They have their Fingers in many trends highlighted above. The other prediction is that we should expect to see a few megacaps from Africa. Right now, it seems like it is a wasteland for investing But there an evolving Startup and I would expect a few companies to crack the code within thr next 10 years there. Africa Is pretty diverse, so it hard to expand from one country another even. Perhaps, the Chinese manage to colonize , womit could be chinese companies dominating this market 10 years out possibly.

Quick take on the situation in Spain, one of the worst Wortformen in this pandemic: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-10-04/spain-s-toxic-politics-and-health-crisis-have-got-merkel-worried

UK stocks are tax friendly for US investors - there is no withholding of dividends except for UK Reits where 20% is withheld. The Netherlands are also tax friendly in Europe and that is one reason why many Holding companies domicile there.

It's great move, Speculatius, Because HII is not a business, it's a scheme [with a ticker, though] to suck up funds from the US military budget to keep people meaningless employed. Well, I am not sure I fully agree. Should the US just outsource building these ships to Korean shipbuilders for example? it sure would be cheaper, but I don’t think it would ever happen. There is some issue with IP too, but I don’t think there is much IP in the hulls and that is actually my concern with HII in the long run. Longer term, military power is going to be driven by technology much more so than by the number of boots on the ground. that’s why I believe the likes of LMT, NOC and LHX are better bets than HII.

^ It is also puzzling that there is a group of people even here that believe that herd immunity is inevitable, yet would not take the vaccine. It seems to me they it should be clear, that catching the live virus in the wild in a totally uncontrolled setting as far as dose and delivery is concerned is the worst option of all. Getting a vaccine that is not a live virus (so it can’t replicate) in a controlled setting and with hopefully known safety data should be much better in almost any scenario, even if the vaccine isn’t perfect in terms of efficacy (catching the virus naturally sure isn’t perfect either). Getting a vaccine is surely more cost effective than an ICU stay and getting infusions of MAB and Remdesivir.

LEVI (AH) and HII. HII was a starter position and the defense play I had the least confidence in.

The stock was flat, the business wasn’t. MSFT’s revenue grew from $25.3B in 2001 to $77.8B in 2013; roughly 10% annually.

^ I have Seen a lot of questionable analysis in their thread, but this is beating almost all of it. Adding up all the percent positives to get the total cumulative positives would only work if everyone in NY would be tested every week and everyone tested positive once eliminated from the pool of subsequent testing. Of course that’s not the case, the number tested each week is only a tiny part of the total population.