Spekulatius

Advisor fees, if you pick their advisory services. It’s hard not to recommend Fidelity and if you don’t want to dive into foreign stock markets, I would argue it’s better than Interactive Brokers.

Same here. I also got another lot of CVTA.

Just break your order in small little limit orders at slightly price points. That’s what I am doing, especially now with zero commission trades. FWIW, I don’t think Fidelity gets paid for order flows and In did an analysis for myself that the commission savings far outweighs the rebates I am getting (price improvement). That’s for small order of maybe 50-300 shares or so, which I how I like to go about this now. if you do orders > 1000 shares, then the rebates become more noticeable.

Thanks for reminding me that TAST has year end tax loss selling dynamics. I agree that TAST looks tasty. I have put it on my watch list a few days ago, but haven’t dug into the stock yet. It looks like a perfect candidate though and the business should be resilient.

It’s probably good for a bounce. It looked at the Q3 earnings and what really surprised me is that they can sell thermal coal for $60/ ton. Isn’t that more than 6x what the operators in Powder River get? I think Met coal may go down to $100/Ton - a lot of operators have a cost of $90/ ton so further drops will lead to idling of capacity. I do like ARCH here (don’t own it, but out it on my watch list) as they seem to execute well and seem to have low production cost assets.

Also adding to CCU. Why CCU? or why add now? Because it’s down 3.5% and it’s cheap. Even protesters like beer and get thirsty.

Also adding to CCU.

Spek, can you talk about what’s the reasoning for buying DD? 3) reasons: 1) products with pricing power 2) cheaper than peers (MMM) 3) strong management (Breen with Tyco pedigree) willing to optimize shareholder value That said, it’s held back by weakish economy in the business it operates and tariff concerns.

Timely post: https://berkshirebuffettandbeyond.com/2019/12/03/has-buffett-lost-it/

Well, there is switching cost. The more folks work with the company and the more embedded it is in business processes, the higher the switching cost and risk. I do wonder though they with the virtually zero unit cost models, like SAAS, that when times get tougher, the price may become a tool to acquire or retain customers at some point, especially if there are equivalent competing products around. After all, why wouldn’t a SAAS company not use price as a tool if they have to, since the incremental unit cost is zero. So it’s just a question if the product has substitutes or not. The company I work for just introduced WDAY. I think it replaces an SAP module that was awful. I will see how this goes. So far it looks like the conversion has been botched, the go live is at least one month late and counting.

Added to DD and CTVA.

I think lousy POS IPO’s always existed, but they tended to be smaller issues they were placed by 2nd or 3 rate investment shops. What is new now is that some business with questionable models were growing in tens of billion $ valuation before the IPO. They were sponsored by deep pocketed investors like Softbanks, it also mutual fund investors like Fidelity or the first Tier investment banks (GS, Morgan Stanley). Softbank seems to believe they can create their own moat by outspending anybody else out there, which has some logical underpinning if you believe their investment can become dominant platform companies. While this might be true, it’s also a recipe to fund companies that blow through a lot of money and in some cases don’t even show great economies of scale.

It’s not just companies disappearing, it’s public companies slowly eating themselves via share buybacks. The latter is a larger factor than companies disappearing. Also accompany disappearing doesn’t mean that the capital has left the market, if it happens via a stock merger for example. As for the stock market, while it may not be a general bubble, the valuations overall is certainly stretched. There seems to be a particular with a narrow set of “quality” stock going on, while the tiers below in quality aren’t really that expensive. While the downturn in late 2018 was certainly considerable, it wasn’t really a severe bear market. It felt more like a correction, similar to 2011 ( European crisis), late 2015 (energy bear) or 1998 (Asian crisis) a short term correction of 29% or so that quickly reverses. Nothing like 1990/91 or 2001/2002 or even 2008/2009. The latter were certainly severe events, but there is certainly a garden variety of scenarios that can play out between the former and the latter event, especially one, where we take a decline and then an extended market where the market sort of just bounced around, instead of climbing right back up. As for what could cause this, I see multiple things they could cause a decline like, negative interest rates blowing up banks, political changes (election), recession, trade war and most likely a combination of these factors. Of course there are always reasons why the market may go down, or why the market may go up. Staying flexible and have a bit of cash in hand, should bargains represent themselves , is how I intend to play this.

I a guess it’s trapped because they can’t get out at unreasonable prices. I am certain they could get out at reasonable prices with the last rounds going into a loss.

Somewhere, between #5 and #8, the Millennials will be kicked out of the basement and off the of the old mans family cellphone plan. The struggle will be real.

Because the high market share Is the moat. I know it’s sort of a circular answer.

1) new fridge for wife at whirlpool inside $1100 2) Jeans at Levi’s.com for 50% off and free shipping $28 3)prepaid cellphone service for a year for all 3 member‘s of the Spek family (eBay/ redpocketmobile Store ): $600

It’s about 4% and 1/2 year with of profit. BRK is known of naming their price and sticking too it. No if and when or renegotiation. Keeping it simple may cost them some deals, but it will also make their offers a simple proposition and prevents them from becoming duped like OXY did. when they thwarted CVX.

It’s similar to BRK’s TTS in a sense. I strongly believe that Warren is advertising BRK when he talks about this failed deal with Becky Quick. “ Hey we are open for business and can close a deal quickly!”

Yes, home ownership is Italy is quite high and low in Germany (and even lower in Switzerland) and this is a huge impact on net worth. The balance sheet of Consumer households in Italy is actually in a good shape.

Greece is booming right now, FWIW. Italy has structural problems that existed before the Euro was implemented. Lousy demographics, inefficient institutions and low productivity are the main one that come to my mind. The grip of the Mafia on half the country didn’t help either, although they have improved in this regard. All these will, when they would exit the Euro zone. Italy is actually the main benefactor of the low interest rate policy. If they exit the Euro, the interest rates for new debt as well as for the business within would go way up.

For a low maintenance portfolio, I would probably put my money into index funds, some US, some world Index fund like VTWSX (or equivalent). If you want a value component, one could think about and equal weight cap fund for mid or small cap exposure and maybe some BRK. I also second GOOG if exposure to tech is considered, but I would keep it smaller than BRK, which is diversified by itself. Canada is a strange stock market since there is so much exposure to commodities and banks. If OP wants exposure to this, he could just buy a few individual Canadian banks stocks with an equal weight. if I wanted exposure to energy, I would just buy an oil major like RDS or CVX or a bit SU. Then rebalance this once a year.

A lot of multiple expansion has been with high quality stocks. MA, V, FISV, MSFT various SAAS/cloud plays like WDAY, NOW, rollups like SHW, ROP, POOL, CSU-TO etc. Oddly enough, some fangs like GOOG and FB aren’t all that expensive compared to above. They haven’t really seen multiple expansion lately either, as their share price has roughly followed their growth rate.

^ Thanks for above comments regarding EM banks. I guess I was just biased based on the performance since the GFC in 2008. I have owned EM banks before, made some dough in BAP ( Chile) and one a stub in AVAL (well run Bolivian bank) and I am tracking ITUB too, but not invested currently. I do agree, if they get the Brazilian economy going again, ITUB should be money good. It just seems to be that since 2008, they have used just about any opportunity to scoot themselves in the foot in addition to macro headwinds (waning commodity boom and meltdown of energy markets)

I wouldn’t call something where a significant part of the return comes from closing the gap to intrinsic value a compounder though. A compounder for me is a stock that grows intrinsic value at a high and fairly consistent rate. In order to do so, they will need to earn high returns on capital, Because over the long run, the returns from you stock investment should about equal the returns of invested capital of the business you are invested in. I doubt that a bank (ITAU) in a volatile economy like a Brazil can be a compounder in that sense. Actually most companies in EM won’t work either, because their ROIC isn’t high enough, despite being located in high growth countries.