Spekulatius

What if workers start calling out sick at slaughter houses, processing plants, distributors, trucking companies, and most important of all perhaps, FOOD RETAILERS. There is no way I would be working at a grocery store stocking shelves, unloading trucks, working cash registers for $10, $12, $14 an hour. To an extent, that happened in the Detroit Post Office. We are not getting daily mail delivery in my city. The Post Office tries to do it, but some delivery routes can't be made every day. The distribution/sorting hubs sometimes had 90% worker outages. For a while, all outbound packages were being routed to Indianapolis for sorting/shipment. Many of my packages took 2-3 weeks to be delivered. 1st class letters were taking 1+ week to go across the city. There were simply not enough workers coming in. The Post Office was very close to collapse. In the past few days, things seem to have gotten better with the mail. I've also heard that more workers are coming back. Things are still difficult, but not like what they were. A lot of businesses won't function if workers don't show up. If there is a 2nd wave, that could be a real problem. They need to pay more and/or get rid of the $1200 UI weekly subsidy quickly. Worst implementation of good idea ever. They should have just bumped the UI benefit to a higher percentage of salary. With the current incentive structure , a large part of the American population won’t get back to work - a middle school student can do the math on that one.

Externally managed REITs are almost as bad as SPACS especially when the external managers are AAMC crooks.

Let’s hope they fly ;D

Risk know them - avoid them seems like a good https://www.erinbromage.com/post/the-risks-know-them-avoid-them It’s quite shocking to read the case studies about how one person in a choir could infect many people in the church after a couple hours of exposure for example. On the other hand the risk to contract COVID outdoors seems to be vastly overrated, so politicians really should open parks and beaches.

This weekend, I trimmed my wife’s hair around her neck and now I am grounded for the week.

Seems like we need to close down the White House, quarantine the inhabitants and deep clean it.

^ Good comments from Broeb22 above. My company started to use Workday and it is for better then the system we had before (Kronos and some SAP integration) just from a user experience perspective. Another thought - most of the benefits of new technologies over time should accrue to the users over time. Maybe that’s already happening, but it doesn’t quite feel that way.

Kind of investment related and pretty good. https://twitter.com/justbrosef/status/1259266070759845890?s=21

Ye, and increasing infection rate is expected when you open the economy back up. Germany has opened up some schools, more stores are open and some factories (automobile) have started back up again. It is interesting to note that there was also an outbreak cluster in meat processing plant as well ( Coesfeld). That triggered a setback for this county in terms of opening the economy further son e a threshold of 50 new cases/100k population was exceeded. Almost logical. :o https://www.dw.com/en/coronavirus-outbreak-closes-german-meat-packing-plant/a-53374478 As in the US the meatpacking plant outbreak occurred with guest workers (from Bulgaria) with not that great working and living conditions. The virus is very good at finding weak spots apparently.

Hmm, who could have known: https://www.channel3000.com/72-got-covid-19-after-being-at-large-event/

I also think mortality rate will come down because we will learn how to treat patients better over time. That’s why I personally think it is better to get infected late rather than early personally. I also know for sure they Germany and many other European states try to avoid the herd immunity route. Germany and opened schools again and some business and does test and trace to contain new outbreaks. Same with other Scandinavian states. Perhaps Italy is too far in and Spain in some areas at least to try this, I don’t really know. I do think that the US has lost the optionality to avoid the herd immunity route, because the shelter in place were were lifted early, so the case load is probably too high for test and trace to work. We will see how it works out, I don’t really know what the best route is. I hope the best for Sweden, Germany, the US and all other nations to obtain a workable solution with a manageable human cost, but some area quite clearly doing much better than others for a variety of reasons.

https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/health-environment/article/3083627/coronavirus-hong-kong-records-no-new-cases-covid While these are success stories now, I'm afraid once they open up the borders/businesses again... Boom. Boom? They'll keep screening people at the border and international travel will be pretty low until there's a vaccine or at least better therapies. Any time they gain now by crushing the curve and containing it is fewer deaths before a vaccine. Well, let's see what happens. I'm just very curious to see how these countries start to easy the lockdown measures, and how they will handle potential 2nd or 3rd waves... Just look at Singapore, and now S. Korea where a single club goer has caused another possible outbreak... which led the government to shut down bars/clubs again. Seems like they will have to go back and forth with measures, for the next 12+ months... At some point, I'm afraid that the whole society will lose its patience/integrity. The whole society will lose their integrity because they can’t go to bars? C’mon. Also, we keep talking about lockdowns, but the US and Europe never had any “lockdowns”. We had “shelters in place” that are quite leaky, in some countries/ states more so than others. In my state, many stores were open (hardware, groceries, liquor and of course drugstores), parks open, takeout food available and many business declared essential etc so people still went to work as usual. That’s not what I call a “lockdowns. lockdown is what the Chinese did when they prevented people from leaving their apartment for any reason. We never had a lockdown in the US or Europe.

The Swedish models isn’t different than the US model effectively except the Swedes do with intend what the US does wby accident and of course the Swedes have a much better outcome (no collapse of their health care system in Stockholm vs NYC). What I do not get is - even if Stockholm reaches heard immunity until fall, that’s only 10% of their population (Stockholm has ~1M people vs 10.3M Swedes), so they still will have 10x more cases overall when Stockholm is done. NYC probably reaches some level of heard immunity too, and possibly some hard hit areas in the NE (Boston, Connecticut), but again that’s only a small part of the US population. There is still a lot of uninfected humans in both countries to work through. If that’s our strategy anyhow, how about estimating some numbers. US 340M people, let say we infect 60% with a 0.75% mortality rate and get there without crashing the health care system somehow. That’s 1.53M dead by my math which needs to be seen relative to the ~2.8M natural death rate in the US. Maybe that’s what it is, but I have not seen this spelled out in a WH meeting - this is our strategy and that how much it’s going to cost us and that is how we minimize the damage and the risk of the health care system crashing etc. Instead, the WH says, we are going to have 100k dead and we are winging it and see what happens.

I don’t think it’s a mutation of the virus causing this. It’s more likely that with so many cases and 100 thousands and of infections, some people or kids in this case have a different and adverse reaction to this virus, one of them with similar symptoms than Kawasaki’s disease.

This doesn’t sound that great: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-05-07/china-study-finds-5-to-15-of-covid-19-cases-are-reactivated

Biden and Trump both get infected before the election and don’t make it.

I know Dalal.Holdings mentioned this before, but there is more and more evidence that Vitamin D is protecting against COVID-19 or at least the severe progression: https://www.marketwatch.com/story/new-study-claims-vitamin-d-deficiency-may-impact-coronavirus-mortality-rates-2020-05-08 Anyways, cheap insurance with very little downside if it doesn’t work. So take in some sun when you can or some Vitamin D gel tablets.

We have crappy diets, resulting in first world problems like high blood pressure, diabetes etc. In rural China and rural Africa, people have 110/70 blood pressure well into their old age. In the western world, with processed foods and high salt and high sugar, we have extremely high blood pressure and diabetes rates very early in life. Our bodies don't fight off viruses as well as healthy people. My view is it's largely diet based. All, the above and second and third world countries also have reporting issues, plus the epidemic has not run its. course yet. There are reports of bad situations in Ecuador (Quito) and Brazil but numbers are hard to come by.

Yes, I think they the gist of it. BRK is valued like a conglomerate at a discount to the sum of parts. Can’t be taken out or broken up either. Buffet definitely spooked some investors at the somewhat ghastly annual meeting.

What kind of company is this? NVE is a leader in the practical commercialization of spintronics, a nanotechnology that relies on electron spin rather than electron charge to acquire, store and transmit information. The company manufactures high-performance spintronic products including sensors and couplers. What, what? You should read the fun facts: https://www.nve.com/funFacts.php These make everything clear, no? I think we'll have to ask Spekulatius to explain this stuff to us. Quantum electronics. This Spintronics was supposed to be a great technology 30 years ago, but ended up being used only in niches.

Shouldn’t be an issue any more. For regular surgeries etc, hospitals are open for business. I think some truly elective stuff (mild hernia etc.) may still be pushed out depending on the area. The bigger issue is that some patient fear going to hospitals or doctors now out of concern contracting COVID-19.

Thank God the leader of the free world is an intellectual colossus, eh? Hardly so. However, the US can take a few punches while Brazil cannot. It’s mostly because theYS can print $ and borrow trillions for almost nothing. Brazil cannot do that, their currency tanked already and they have issues with inflation as is..

Some on this board hate FRFHF/FFH, but what are your thoughts on MKL relative to FFH? Do you just like the S&P500 plus portfolio returns Markel delivers better than the deep value dumpster-diving Prem prefers? FFH seems pretty cheap right now too, and I've considered adding to my baby position. There is a whole lot more pessimism built into FFH right now because people don't believe the investment results will be good going forward. From 60% of book, they don't have to be great to get a decent return in the equity. But I think investing is hard, and Prem is fundamentally a good investor who made a couple large bad bets (particularly deflation hedge which might have become pretty valuable around now) which really dented performance. If you back out the losses from that large bet, results are only mediocre since 2010. BRKB> MKL>> FFH, imo. Based on current prices, risk adjusted.. Also worth a look: TRV , CB (own a bit TRV). Today, I added some BRKB

I also added GD and TRV and restarted CMCSA and ORI. Strange disconnect in the Market, some stocks go to the moon, others into the doghouse.

Re India - GDP growth isn’t everything. India has substantial problems. For example inflation picked up from ~5% in 2019 to 7.35% lately. That’s a huge headwind as it causes a weakness in exchange rates relative to the dollar if purchase parity is kept. The valuations on India that I am seeing are just no attractive considering this backdrop. You can buy bald for book value and with 20% ROE in Brazil right now if you care, but the country is run by a moron and the economy is probably going totally into the toilet as they can’t borrow for nothing like the US can. You can make a lot of money when the situation improves and they rerate, but they also can do an Argentina and you are out of luck. For the time being, I‘d rather be in anything dollar or Euro denominated.