Spekulatius

I decided to sell most of my position. I still have Fairfax India and willing to give that more time. Seems like they have a little more preference for quality assets in that portfolio, and I like India's 5-15 year growth potential. The irony is that Fairfax owns a good chunk of Fairfax India, and more importantly, generates really nice management fees and performance bonuses from Fairfax India. If Fairfax India does exceedingly well, Fairfax will benefit handsomely. If Fairfax India does average, Fairfax will still benefit from the fees. I would rather own the asset manager! Cheers! https://tv.getyarn.io/yarn-clip/71cf3f54-184e-4143-b723-0bdce2921b4c/gif#LfJMAgFkOU.copy

Small add to CVS and a starter in ANTM.

I read his letter and think it’s odd that he doesn’t think banks have been impaired. That doesn’t make any sense to me. Sure, we can debate If bank stocks have been overly punished, but there is little debate that they have been seriously impaired by higher loan losses and lower interest rates. This alone would question me a money manager’s judgment.

Yeah, some people are focussed on politics. Strangely, nobody on this forum is talking about France. Yesterday, France had 6,500 new cases for a country of ~65 million people. Yesterday the United States had 29k new cases for a population of ~325m people. Over the past week, looks like France took over the lead for the most significant covid outbreak amongst developed countries, relative to its population? Things seem pretty manageable in Sweden these days... So, shall we engage in a series of venomous statements about President Macron, now that France is "winning?" Is this MFGA? SJ Oh man. Prepare to be viciously attacked like the dozens of others who came before you; that dared present anything contrary to the narrative of the guy who got snubbed for debate team captain in high skool. Now back to crying about Trump. I heard yet another person who dislikes him is writing a book or prepared to make a statement about how much he sucks! Libtards....go crazy! What is happening in Europe is interesting. Again multiple factors involved but yes politics plays a role. There is significant resurgence in the aggregate in the European Union but the average hides wide disparities. There appears to be some inverse correlation between the extent of the initial wave (eg Sweden and some others) and what is happening now but 'performance' with the first wave is also correlated. There is more testing now but the positivity rate is also going up. An argument could be made that it's better to spread the spread over time but there may be a fatigue component. Time will also reveal more about the seasonal impact. Based on what I am hearing from Europe, fatigue definitely plays a role, same as it does here. The second wave in Europe has been caused to a significant part by summer travel (Spain and other countries depending on tourism opened up) and it has not gone that well.

As predicted, we have finally caught up on Italy in terms of COVID-19 death normalized over population. I am comparing country to country here: I guess Italy’s government isn’t quite as incompetent as thought. They got hit very hard early on, but then managed to contain it. We didn’t.

CVS getting some love here. I also added a tiny bit.

Interesting clinical candidate with an unmet need. It looks to me like they will need to raise cash with a secondary very soon though. Word of advice...this is a highly promoted stock at tier 4 brokerage houses and to date, the company has been very eager to use any sort of share price bump to raise capital. Note, that's what they all do, some just more regularly than others. Thanks for the color. I have no idea what a Tier 4 brokerage is, but I suspect that these are the dinky outfits that recommend and pump microcaps? Anyways, the way I see it CR P has maybe 2-3 quarter of cash left, which means that they probably raise in the next 3 month or 6 month at the very latest. Typically buying ahead of a secondary is not a winning proposition. Tier 4 example http://www.teribuhl.com/2019/03/19/honigs-broker-dealer-laidlaw-target-of-fbi-investigation/ Good warning on CRBP https://seekingalpha.com/article/4245168-corbus-ties-suspect-investors-history-failed-clinical-trials-lenabasum I have a bunch of accounts at a lot of different places either personally or for those I oversee. So occasionally the dirty wringer produces "sales leads" which I end up on. No joke I had a fellow maybe 4 years ago call me unsolicitedly and hard selling me some options strategy on....Corbus. At like $8. A few days later in went down like 50%. I have nothing to add as to whether what the actual company is doing will bear fruit. But having been almost exclusively involved in seeking out and doing deep dives and short only candidates earlier in my career, I can tell you that many times, just using guilty by association with some of these names, is all you need to do(outside of securing a borrow and timing the short entry :P) CRBP down to $2.1 ( down 76%) premarket on apparent clinical trial failure. Wheeee!

I think that’s one of the core things nowadays more so than before. Most of the money is made being correct about duration of the business, not the multiple now. You have to look further out. Being right about tanker spot rates in 3-6 month doesn’t provide much of an edge, but being right about a tech moat ten years out does.

Recently re-watched “Casino Royale” , Daniel Craig’s first Bond movie and it has aged very well. It might be the best Bond from the whole series. Now, I am watching “Chef’s Table - BBQ” in Netflix. That’s a pretty well made series for those of us who like BBQ.

There was a large push a few years ago from PPO and PBM (hard to tell who really is in charge here) to push online. most of the “savings” came from going from 30 to 90 day refills. I think this came to a halt somehow. Maybe the saving weren’t really there due to waste? It’s really hard to tell.

It is worthwhile to watch this and Masa is unlikely the only one gunning big tech stocks with options. The Sherwood Forest crowd was supposedly a factor too, but probably too small to matter. This is likely a Momo trade with several large players involved. Until Mr Market removes the plug from the bathtub and some players get into trouble we will never know.

Looks like another community outbreak in Chelsea, MA during the last few weeks. Almost 6% positivity rate - 180 cases. So much for the herd immunity crowd @15% - Chelsea had a mid thirties antibody positivity rate in a late April study (not the best study, but numbers should be correct ballpark) and Antibody positivity should be higher now. My own small town had zero cases since June - 10 cases total since outbreak with 600 tests. Population roughly 3400 people. Similar with surrounding towns. I don’t think there is any chance of Heard- immunity there. Antibody positivity rate here would be below 5% for sure, most likely much lower. https://www.boston.com/news/coronavirus/2020/09/02/latest-massachusetts-city-town-coronavirus-data

I would likely to get vaccinated once a Vaccine becomes available. If the news suggest that a conventional vaccine becomes available shortly after the Moderna vaccine, I may decide to wait a month or two, but I wouldn’t wait for half a year or longer. I have been keeping up with my vaccination and get a flu shot every year. So far so good and I haven’t had the flu since the late 90‘s. I had flu several times before and it wasn’t a pleasant experience. FWIW, I assume COVID-19 vaccination will become mandatory for school children and students and probably colleges or one has to go for the online option. I also assume that vaccinations will first become available for first responders and health care workers, and higher risk cases. One thing to keep in mind is that there is an individual benefit to vaccinations and a community benefit and both are equally important. For example with flu and other vaccinations , the vaccine doesn’t work as well with older people because their immune system doesn’t respond as well to vaccination . So those people benefit when other people get vaccinated the most , as it helps choke the community transmission reaching them. Another interesting case is kids and school. Kids themselves are not vulnerable, but teachers and school personal and parents may be and this May drive a vaccination requirement for kids (which I would support).

So I decided to open another COVID-19 related topic about vaccine with a poll. I hope this is not becoming a political discussion. My goal is to find out how people think about this from a risk/reward perspective, especially those with a medical background. My underlying thinking is that we will get a vaccine most likely from Moderna in November that uses a somewhat novel (and unproven) RNA Messenger approach and mot likely a second option of a traditional vaccine a few month later. I hope it adds value for readers and posters.

CVS - free one day or two day delivery in my area: https://www.cvs.com/content/delivery?eval=40A50HhmBxkBF+ajmu95bWe3dRQ6vEzpfwxceAlMKO8=&WT.mc_id=EM_RX_200905_All_the_Ways_to_Shop I do think that same day delivery is just a matter of time.

The answer is simple. (Almost ) Nobody does this (Tracking filings off 100 companies).

The US isn’t like Canada.

I took a look. It has a lot of data and it looks pretty good. Still, I won't pay for TIKR since M* for free is good enough for me. ::) Just MO though. I can also get M* for free through a library, but it’s a pain going through the library website and quite frankly, the M* user interface sucks. I would pay a little for convenience. Edit - I just realized that the Boston public library gives access to CapIQ. Cool!

Seems like a tough area to enter,I agree with Jurgis here. I know that CVS/ Walgreen/Amazon/ United Health all are looking at this problem from different angles. One thing I noticed that they claim to be tech driven with software, automation, robotics as the secret sauce, but none of the founders seams to have any expertise in these areas. Perhaps you politely ask them who is doing this work? Yours sincerely, The always skeptical Spekulatius.

I know this is totally irrelevant, but Rheinmetall has some pretty cool YouTube Videos demonstrating the Oerlikon 35mm cannon air defense system and other stuff. Here are two for nerds. I can’t wait for the consumer version to come out ;D FWIW, Rheinmetall has put up some impressive numbers with their defense business recently. I own a few shares.

Added to CVS and a tiny starter in HII.

For the commercial products, I just hope that a Tier including international stocks is available that is affordable for individual investors. I don’t need an API Or any fancy power tools. I honestly just look at a better version of yahoo finance.

I know you brought up SAP.TO (Saputo) and it looks interesting, as it is currently valued at a discount to its longer term metrics (EV/EBITDA, EV/ SALES). Looks like a GAARP stock which are hard to find nowadays. Is there any catalyst you can see near term? Looks like the shares have been hit hard by COVID-19 although the business seems to chug along quite well.

Shameless plug: This is my favorite website for fundamental research. The main thing has going for it is that all the information is in one place (valuation metrics, fundamental, balance sheet, income statement, CC transcripts) and most importantly, it works for most foreign stocks as well. While other websites like Koyfin have nicer charts, none of them offers information on foreign stocks, at least not in their Beta implementation.

Adding a bit of $CVS