Spekulatius

The article is more about the wonders of compounding than anything.

Currently watching: “The Expanse”, Season 3 “Perfume” Germain Film noire series (loved the book from Süsskind too) “Russian Doll” - I agree it’s a great script “ Babylon Berlin” - very athmosperical Film Noir/ crime (of course I am biased towards German TV series)

So what’s the safest long here - UNIT common?

I didn’t feel that INDUS situation is dire, it‘s just that the stock was too expensive at 20x earnings and now is around fair value, but still not cheap. A shallow revision in Germany is possible. It might bring better buy opportunities. A lot of stocks in Germany were quite overvalued and have now come down to fair value and might become good values going forward. There are a lot mid cap companies in Germany that are world leaders in their niches and could be great investments in a recovery.

In my opinion, Windows 7 is vastly preferable and more reliable than Windows 10.I dont care for the new Post Windows 8 GUI either.

Oh, that is such a brilliant comment, and hits at the crux of the problem in America. So many people, (gov workers, etc) - want something for NOTHING. Where did the idea of sacrifice and work ethic go? With government - cutting spending has to happen - I live in Illinois - and there is going to be a tax revolt here one of this days. Real estate taxes are out of control, Chicago city taxes are out of control and city workers don't actually work. Pensions, etc - they all want to retire at 50 with full pension/benefits and get a second job. It's a ticking time bomb - raising taxes will be the route they take, until the public revolts and forces spending down. I hope I am out of here by then...Florida, here I come! You can buy a really nice waterfront home in NWFL for around $500K - 700K. The higher end gets you a property with more elevation & lower flood premiums. Cost of living is low. No state income tax. Beautiful beaches. Tolerable winters. Summers are less tolerable. There are also no well paid jobs in North West Florida, which is the issue with most nice low tax states. Of course for retirement , it doesn’t matter and that why the folks from the NE like to move there. Schools are also rumoured to be terrible. I have lived in 3 states so far and at least in NY and MA, the high taxes paid for a relatively safe environment and good schools. Illinois and particular Chicago seems to be basket case to me, because it appears to have neither of the above and high taxes.

My own opinion is that they did very little regarding buybacks, as they were napping the entire time. We will find out soon enough.

FWIW, I agree on Indus AG, it’s nothing special. They do add a layer of holding company debt on top of the operating company debt, so they seem to be more leveraged than I’d like. I have owned some in the 90’s last time. At times, the stock is cheap, but it’s not particularly well managed. I do like the concept of rolling up Mittelstand companies, but haven’t seen a vehicle that does this consistently well. There are some that do seem to do it Ok with a concept of owning several independently operated companies in the same industrial sector. Dürr AG and ISRA AG come to my mind. I particularly like Dürr, but I don‘t think we are at the right time of the cycle to buy this yet. France and Scandinavia the richest hunting ground for holding companies.

Excel is my daily bread and butter. I can’t do without it.

I like it. A basic EPS of ~$23/sh under the assumption of zero realized gains, zero increase in net earned, and zero increase in interest rates. It's certainly not hard to imagine an actual figure of double that amount.... No it’s not hard to imagine, but even if this comes to pass, FFH just looks like an OK value.

The insurance business has done quite well with a combined ratio of 98.3%. The investment side continues to suck wind. I have reduced my exposure to FFH after some considerations. I would be quite happy to hold FFH, if they would just stick with bond investments like other plain vanilla insurance corporations. I am sure the book value has recovered some since 12/31 due to equities bouncing back, but so has the PPS. I don’t feel like their equity investment are set to perform well going forward though.

I haven’t seen this stock being mentioned for a long time. They go whacked very badly during the financial crisis (down more than 80% if I remember correctly) being in cyclical names back then and due to holding company leverage , but seem to have made it back. Discount to NAV north of 20%. I will take a further look, but I think I like EXor and some others better.

Interesting, they he now owns almost exactly 8.75% of both WFC and BAC. He is not really limited with WFC any more - has sold quite a few shares and is quite far below the 10% limit.

I believe that LT home values will move with income/salaries in the given area, not so much inflation. People tend to spent as much on housing than they can afford.

You know the photo is staged when she wears high heels on the factory floor.

It's beer ;D Essentially branded consumer discretionary purchases. They have decent brands (Molson, Coors) and an established distribution network. It's pretty cheap and was 10% off today. While the business may go thru ups-and-downs, especially in terms of management's execution (as we are seeing with other CPG's like Kraft-Heinz), I think product demand will remain relatively more steady (compared to say, Tide detergent). So it's basically, multiple is low, they have scale, brands should have staying power. Was just curious if there was more than met the eye to the thesis. In the alcoholic beverage segment, beer is losing market share to spirits and wine. Within the beer segment, TAP’s mass market brands are losing share share to craft beers. I think TAP represents a slow bleeding consumer franchise, somewhere in between a consumer staple and cigarettes, imo. The bleed is probably slow enough that an investment in equity makes sense at this point, especially since pricing holds up.

The reinsurer AXS and RE don’t look that great, they took quite a hit last quarter. I had positions in both of them and sold out a couple of days ago. I do agree that Münchener Rück‘s result look pretty good. We will see how BRK and FFH are doing. FWIW, I have reduced my FFH Position, but not because of their catastrophe risk, but because of concerns about their investment side.

WFC is cheap, probably caused by negative press coverage about the outage. I added some on Friday. FWIW, I could still access my accounts, but it was slow.

Another issue with Interactive Brokers. I bid on an stock (which I purchased before on IB) and the order remains in “blue” status, meaning that the exchange doesn’t accept the order. This has never before happened to me and seems to be only with one stock. I put in a ticket with and they first told me that there is no bid ask. However, I lok at the same stock with E*TRADE and Fidelity and there is an bid ask. After I put in a second ticket the answer was as follows: This does not make sense, because I know that the stock has traded since I made a bid ask. It almost seems like IB is trading in a different exchange than these other bid ask or trades go though. Anyone understands what’s going on? Again, I have traded the same stock before using IB.

Shhughes1116 - thanks for the color on MAC’s managment changes. I agree it makes a change of control more likely for MAC vs family controlled TCO. There is an interesting article from Brad Thomas (prolific writer about Reits on SA) about TCO, which also mentions MAC as a comp. The point he is making is that TCO has way less (7 stores) exposure to ailing department store retailers (Sears, JCPenney) compared to MAC (49 stores). While I think MAC can fill these cavancies when the time comes (some of it is in JV and would be a shared expense), it still means that they have a lot of work to do and capital to spent until the properties are fully productive again. It’s an opportunity, but also a risk, imo. https://seekingalpha.com/article/4236590-taubman-centers-get-rolex-price-timex

Besides the bravado around macro, Druckenmiller basically pitched cloud plays and specifically mentioned NOW. I put it on my watch list around. $165 and it now trades at ~$220. Not bad at all. It would have been better if I had bought it myself. ::)

I guess they don’t like the fact that as long as the preferred (or debt) is publicity trading, they need to file the financials for their now “private” firm. The simple solution would be to tender the preferred? I wonder why this want the plan to begin with? Stinginess or lack of cash?

Any comment why you choose MAC vs TCO? Both seem to trade at similar valuations (7-7.5% cap rate) and TCO has even higher quality malls and a better balance sheet and way better long term track record. I think they are equally likely to be acquired. What I noticed with Nc (and TCO) that both have shown shrinking FFO/share due to dispositions from property where the proceeds were invested in their higher quality properties. This is dilutive, because apparently these investment have only initial returns of about 7%, while the deposed properties have cap rates that are higher than that. Then adding the lag when the rents are kicking in from the projects and it’s clear they are dilutive to FFO , albeit hopefully accretive to NAV. The low initial returns on investment bug me a bit on project that are upgrades (low ROI’s for green fields would be understandable, but most of these projects are just updating existing properties) and make me think they these operators have no choice but to keep their properties updates, or they quickly may become dreaded B-malls, trading for 8.5-10% cap rate and quickly losing value. So a lot of the Capex may just be maintenance Capex in the end, even if it’s capitalized. Anyways, I am basically questioning if recycling the capital in higher quality properties created value.

Is this is a major source of revenues for Wells and other banks? I was under the impression that most migrants used something like Western Union or Moneygram. I will note, due to weird circumstances, I've been having to send myself money - I'm currently in South America and can't mail myself a new debit card yet - and I can send myself cash through a service like Worldremit for ~1% of my remittance (including both fee and FX charge) and pick up directly at a local bank five minutes later. That is going to put a lot of people out of business over time. Remittance is most likely a very small part of larger banks revenues. The larger banks now promote Zelle, which I think is a bank sponsored payment system and is free or very cheap (I haven’t tried it yet).

Weather apparently doesn’t count. Now, I'm in a weak position for my argument that it's nice living here (Calgary) because I had to get my furnace serviced today to keep up with the -30 C weather. But, the weather here isn't as bad as people think. We have a significant portion of relatively warm days in the winter because of a weather pattern known as chinooks. Plus, it is one of the sunniest major cities, which I think is relatively more important to people's well-being (and livability) than temperature. But on the other hand its pretty freakin' cold right now. I will still never move. Yep, that's what everyone in Alberta says... Well we have sunny days... or .... But it's a dry cold (yea, right). All you need to know is -30 C. That's COLD! I got a buddy in Edmonton who always fantasizes about moving to Toronto where it's warm lol. He'd do that in a second too if over here we didn't loose our minds with the houses. Those of us in Calgary can always cling to the fact that at least we don't live in Edmonton... There are probably not many jobs there, but we once were travelling through the Lake Okanagan and Kootenay area, which is absolutely beautiful and appears to Canada’s banana belt. It’s probably costly though.