Spekulatius

Oh vey, this thread went off rails and it's partly my fault.

Once you eliminated the bad apples, the biggest risk is that you invest in a stock that becomes dead money. I have plenty of those in microcaps. This happens because the management is secretive - most likely because they want to run the business like a private enterprise and don't care about the share price. For them, it's a nuisance to be public and their disclosure and lack of PR reflects it. They typically won't distribute much cash either and just do the bare minimum and are happy to exist in obscurity and do run this business as they please and likely to their benefit (cushy jobs with a high salary, and undisclosed other benefits).

Added a bit to my $NNI and $APA starters. Both very small still.

Thank you for your perspective. You obviously know more about this topic than I do and are certainly correct. Short of the city states like Singapore and Hongkong, I can't come up with any country that seem to have benefited from colonization. Hongkong thrived because it was used as a base for the British to exploit China to a large extent.

I am shocked when I look up the capitalization range of what is called small cap, micro cap or nano cap etc. . I don't think the "nano cap" classification even existed 20 years ago. A stock with $2B in market cap is now a "small cap" and $2B used to be huge, a business that employed 10 thousands of people... I guess that's what inflation and a decades long bull market do to my perception.

@Parsad Do you think the Parsads would be better off, if the Brit’s never had set foot on the Indian continent? Impossible to know, but I would put the chance no better than 50/50. The Brits for all their faults put some rules and systems into place and overall their colonies were better run than the French, Spanish or Portuguese ones. The only country that was never colonized in that Area is Thailand and they are somewhat better off than their immediate neighbors. Then there is Japan, but it’s an entirely different situation and geography. Apaolgies for getting truly off the rails here. I am still interested to see if Nery keeps here PhD or not. Seems like copy and pasting several pages is more than an oversight issue. Or perhaps she just had a lazy ghost writer which is quite commoner amongst the entitled.

I actually would like to see some of those adventures in US flyover country. There are interesting things to eat, drink or look at everywhere. Even if I drive in the hinterland here in MA, it is almost impossible to find a town without a microbrewery for example. We traveled once south to North Carolina and the selection roadside BBQ places seemed compelling. I also fondly remember the gas station in Virginia we stopped at with a confederate flag. Got some gas there and I asked for the bathroom. Turned out this place still had a real outhouse. I decided to hold it a bit longer…. There are roadside adventures everywhere.

With nanocaps the hard part is people factor - if management is capable and on your side. I feel like foreign exchanges are a better hunting ground than the US market, as the US market is quite plucked over and the quality of what remains is quite low. In foreign markets, it is quite possible to IPO a business at an $100M (equivalent) or even less EV and those are really business with profits not startup projects or shell companies.

I am a Doctor but not of the kind that you want to have your Appendix removed from. My wife does not even trust me with a kitchen knife.

Finding cheap small stocks is the easy part. Doing the research and finding out who owns them, if they can be trusted and how good of an operator they are and how good the business is the hard part. You will have to sift through a lot of stocks to find a few good ones. There are some microcap conferences (some online ) that can be helpful to get a feel for management. this can quickly feel like a full time job. A good network of similar minded investors to collaborate with is probably a must.

My pick is $ELV I think it’s reasonably priced and will likely grow earnings in the low teens for the next few years. It’s one of my larger positions. Others I have considered are $NNI and $BTI I think $BTI dividend alone may be enough to beat the market even with the share price flat for the next few years. $NNI is also a low teens compounder trading for book value.

So are they going to take away her title? Because that’s what happened to other people.

Interesting, the first 5 trading days performance is correlated with the full year performance 69% of the time, 83% on election years. Doesn’t bode that well for this year.

Well, the Mag 7 are winners too. When you get rid of those, you also get rid of the largest winners. If cutting the winners is your concern, then you should not cut the Mag 7 either.

S3 of Slow Horses is indeed great. This show gets better and better. I also like “Monarch” and “For all Mankind” on Apple TV. Apple TV is often dissed but they make awesome shows. They really are about to become the new HBO.

I would agree with @Spooky here that the SP600 is a better bet than the SP500 now. I do have a related question - what is the baseline probability that a stock from the SP500 beats the SP500 index within the latest (or better even former). 5 year timeframe. It’s got to be less than 50% because the distribution of returns is quite skewed.

Yes, it was the GFC that messed things up. The FTSE has a lot of financial exposure and literally all large financials were significantly impaired from dilution. There is also very little tech exposure, which has been driving the returns in US indices.

Besides, all UK stocks suck, doesn't matter what business they are in (tongue in cheek comment)

Sold my starter in $CI in tax deferred accounts and added to my $HUM starter from the sales proceeds.

DOCS.L Dr. Marten (starter) and an add to RI.PA (Cognac trade war)

Trade war getting serious - Cognac. They cleverly target French goods since French politicians were behind the EU antitrust/ dumping claim for Chinese EV sales in Europe. https://www.reuters.com/world/china/china-launches-anti-dumping-investigation-brandy-imported-european-union-2024-01-05/ Porsche/ LVMH etc also have a lot to lose here.

Yes, ADI has done a good job, as did peers like MCHP or NXPI or STM. those all have very diversified customer base, so it's harder to track real consumption versus inventory hording. MLBY just supplies car makers, so they have relatively few customers and I think they deliver a kit basically. They should know exactly how much goes in one car (one kit or set/ car) and it should not be too hard to find official numbers how many cars have been sold. It should be obvious that you can't take customers by your word in this business as they always give projections that are WAG and supply chain managers are incentivized to order too much because too little means production stops. So they tend to overorder and then adjust down. If they see inventory piling up internally , l they often cancel all PO's all of a sudden and may not order more for month.

you are correct on the "Stan" etymology - it's not Russian. the Russian tourists (and mafia from what I heard) is concentrated in Phuket and Pattaya. I guess the Russians go elsewhere too, but they are probably too dispersed in a big city like Bangkok. On the tourisms side, there are much less Chinese tourists (they avoid Bangkok after that Mall shooting in October, I have heard) than I expected and Indian tourists now seem to replace them. Biggest issue I have with Bangkok is the heat and the pollution as you say. Temps were from 30-34Deg C and that is about the coolest month. Summer you have the monsoon wet season and April/May are the hottest month. I just can't take the heat as well as I used to when younger. Chiang Mai is a lot cooler, but that's a trip for another time.

MBLY - another belated Semiconductor supply chain victim: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/mobileye-releases-preliminary-fy2023-financial-115000786.html I think this revenue guidance is ~25% below consensus (which is about $2.5B in revenue for 2024). Boggles my mind how this supply glut has escaped management so far. they can see how much their customers have bought and how much cars they are selling with those Mobileye kits.

Phuket is now Pukhetistan - the vast majority of tourists ( and quite a few LT residents on LT Visa) are Russians. Bangkok was very nice. It has probably the best food in the world. For westerners, I recommend the food courts in Siam paragon, Terminal 21 and Emquartier and a few others. We also did the local outdoor markets (they all have food) and it was mostly awesome. I also recommend getting a thai massage, but many of the places on tourist or shopping streets don't do it right - we went with this (Healthland Spa) , which is a franchise. 2h for 650 Baht (<$20) https://reservation.healthlandspa.com/ If adventurous check out to the Soi Cowboy alley next to terminal 21.