Spekulatius

I believe it’s a worthwhile discussion. Many value investors do use a mix of technical analysis with a value approach. Mike Burry was an example. Mike sold a stock when it made new lows - his rationale was that new lows are often followed by lower stock prices from experience and he could always get back in cheaper, if he wanted to. Nothing is perfect for example, but it seems to me that these rules may work.

My son is currently learning “Child’s Anthem“ from Toto. Great song to play on a piano:

I consider FDX a mistake. I did not really react to the indications (reorg, noise about trade etc) that there might be an earnings revision. So my cost based ended up too high, since I also ran out of funds when it got really cheap. I bought more, it not enough, my cost based is still a bit underwater. I agree some downgrades were downward silly, I saw one report where the analyst reduced the target price from $240 to $160 or so, with the rational that he now slapped an 11x multiple rather than a 14x multiple, due to a “murky near term outlook” or something like this, I like it at current prices and most likely will add in a correction. GS went better and I sold my shares recently. I don’t really like the business all that much, but below tangible book value, it was just too cheap.

I felt like most people here kept a cool head. There were certainly great opportunities to make money. I unfortunately ran out of cash too early. I sort of expect the volatility to stay so I am cashing in most of the stocks that bounced hard and hope for a repeat of some sorts. Most of the issues that caused the crash are still there.

Does a valuation of ~$30B for Airbnb make sense? Are there any revenue and profit numbers out there for this company? The combined market cap of HLT and MAR is less than $60B and those two are doing pretty well at the moment and control a significant part of the hotel space.

Is that so? I know a town next to where I live who bought back their grid from National Grid years ago and they enjoy much lower electricity rates than I do. Their grid also seems to be more reliable, as they had little outages during the snowmaggedon in March 2018 and what went out was quickly repaired. I rented at this time in NG Territory and my Appartement was without power for a week. Maybe just the exception from the rule, but there does seem to be easy to make it a truly local utility work. The town in question is a rural community of roughly 10,000 people.

It dawned on me that Muscleman never stated that he would seitchnto indexing. As stated already before, indexing really doesn’t solve above problems. MM also outperformed in 2018 (+10% ) so it’s doesn’t seem to be a matter of underperforming recently either. He had some multibaggers in 2018 (SLMR) that don‘t look like traditional value stocks. I would be curious to know what he is going to be up to.

These have been especially difficult years for value investors given QE. I'd be very leery of shifting to a Boglehead buy-and-hold index strategy at a time of QT. Index funds started to be available to me in 1998 when I started my 401k.if I had bought in back then, I would have just been flat in 2010 or so. Some foreign indices have even longer periods of underperformance. The enlightment of indexers comes after 10 years of pretty much straight bull markets if you take out Q4 2018 and some dips along the way. I fully expect to see another 50% down market in the next 10 years again.

The best option for the state is to have PCG going through bankruptcy, lay out the victims from the liquidation proceeds and then change the law. If they change the law now, the state or PCG‘s customers have to pay the damages, which I think makes no sense from the states POV. If the current possibility for litigation stays, the PCG newco will have an issue and will be worth far less, which means far less liquidation proceeds for the victims and difficulty to invest in infrastructure going forward.

May I ask why? Valuation is looking less attractive. Pipeline stocks had several failed attempts to move higher in the past. I still own a good bunch but I am reducing positions as they get more overweighted. I would scale back on when they fall again. FWIW, ENB is an ~10% position currently. That‘s pretty high for me.

Bought a starter in FRA.DE Fraport is the owner of Frankfurt Airport. Trading at around 9x EV/EBITDA which is cheaper than for most of its history. I am not sure but a strike of the security personell and the trouble with Brexit (which will affect air traffic from Britain) seem to put pressure on this stock. Recent operational performance had been decent. FWIW, I have started to reduce my overweight position in pipeline stocks (WMB and ENB) . I am still holding good chunks and ENB is still my largest position (or close to it). I guess I just have a weakness for infrastructure stocks.

Forget about California bailing them out. People have died and politicians needs heads on sticks and it’s better not be their own. PG&E‘s Equipment provided the spark that started these fires, so I think it’s easy to put the blame on them. If the $30B in claims go through, the equity and possibly the preferred are a zero, but the debt may still be good. Debt still trades at 80c on the $ and preferreds at 50%, which doesn’t look like a great risk reward to me. I believe CA legislators would need to indemnify their utilities better against similar claims in the future to ensure investibility, but that wouldn‘t help current investors.

I see a great market for luxury goods, pollution control, infrastructure, public transportation equipment, housing, airplanes , travel/ hotels, cars, social media/ advertising. It will be interesting how this country managed the growth? Did you notice any security or terrorism issues? Those things can really mess with growth and stall a country.

Note that PG&E at a sub level ( not the holding) went bankrupt before in 2001 due to poorly designed deregulation ( leading to Enron price gauging utilities). Back then the preferred were trading at much lower prices than they are trading now. Equity ended up being unimpaired after the release from bankruptcy a few years later. I think the current situation is different though. I just mention thi for historical perspective.

Exposure to above multinational doesn’t give you much leverage to growth in Indian, as it is only a small part of the operations. Many of the above actually have their subs trading in China (Unilever) albeit at nose bleeding valuation and for us retail investors, there isn’t a good way to buy Indian stocks on their native exchange directly. It’s an interesting market, just like Korea, but unfortunately not accessible to retail investors.

I think what you’re describing is called the recency effect. Any asset that has been down and out for years can be affected by it. It’s almost always better to prospect for investments in the bombed out areas. So I think you are on the right track. I’ve also found that when nobody likes your idea and thinks “You’d have to be crazy to buy ____” you should get excited. But you still have to do the work. You need to be different and right, not just different. Bombed out is not enough to warrant an investment. I would always assume that anything that is down and out for a long time, is down for very good reasons. If you invest in these assets you need to see something the crowd doesn’t see and you need to be right within a given time period. Also, one should distinguish between a mental block and a heuristic. A heuristic is based on experience and is different than a mental block. The human brain is lazy and probably doesn’t want to look into areas that have proven to be minefields before when there seem to be simpler ways to accomplish the same thing. I admit of having a bias towards tanker stocks, E&P, mining stocks etc. I don’t think it’s a mental block, I just don’t feel it’s worth spending time on to turn stones around in areas where you need to be right or get wiped out or vastly underperform. It’s a heuristic and to some extend a circle of competence thing.

The investible pool in Vienna is quite small. in the past, I invested in Vienna Airport (FLU.VI) with decent success, when it was fairly cheap. The best blog I am aware of (for Mostly European stocks ) is Vallueandopportunity. I don’t think he owns Austrian stocks right now. I think NXPI is a higher quality alternative to Infineon at a similar valuation. Andritz is a good company, it does not look very cheap. I think Rosenbauers performance got worse, because of a cartel lawsuits where the suppliers of fire tracks determined quotes for market shares to keep prices high. With “fair” competition, margins may be lower forever in their business.

I would wish them to buy some companies in the aerospace industry in addition to PCP. It’s a great secular growth market where patience will be rewarded. The second one is infrastructure. Pipelines (KMI ?), AirPorts, Harbors etc.

For those who care, Eric disclosed his legal issues and the situation he is in prior to the meetup. I wasn’t aware of it, since don’t follow local news all that much. The story is what it is and I am not inclined to judge. What I do know is that the three of us had a great time talking investing, politics (a bit), stocks , doing a podcast (my first one) and play a board game. I wouldn’t hesitate to do another meetup again.

What’s wrong about listening to my incoherent ramblings about a stock that one is better of not knowing about?

I agree with Viking that the risk is WEB age. I think the company will be differently run after he is gone. Headquarters will become bigger, because nobody can fill WEb role as a CEO if the holding with such minimal staff and ensure compliance. There is a risk that the culture will change for the worse. I could see BRK getting broken into three pieces (Insurance, Utilities, Industry), but that may not be easy, because the Insurance subs own shares in the other parts as well as the holding company and it may not be able to get the stakes consolidated. BRK is huge and May becoming too large to control for a new CEO. I am in the 5-10% bucket and wouldn’t go higher than 25%. There is always systemic risk that someone, somewhere does something and affects the whole company.

You haven’t seen their stores, that’s why....It feels like it’s dying and Toys r Us 10 years ago. I haven’t been to their stores in years, it’s totally redundant with Target and AMZN if you have prime. They were very popular in the 90’s and early 2000’s, but then slowly lost their touch.

In my experience with lightly traded stocks, a limit order at the ask will only fill 100 shares and then the bid will move to one penny over your limit order which is of course why market orders are good to use when filling the order is more important than scalping a couple pennies. Buth then, a market order can really stick you with some bad fills, hence the allure of the adaptive algo, but alas it has its problems too. Ain't no such thing as a free lunch... Free trades at Merrill Edge are nice because you can split your order into multiple orders for free (assuming you are within your monthly allotment of free trades). But then Merrill won't trade many low price/volume stocks anymore. Years ago, I absolutely never used market orders, but over the past 10 years, I find sometimes they are just the only way to get a fill. Yep, but the most annoying trades are those where your bid never gets a fill, but then you see a trade for 0.01 penny higher a microsecond later. While you can only trade in 1 penny increments some HF trade can do smaller increments and suck up all the liquidity. At least that’s my take of it.

You can buy MS for book value today :-)

Mine looks like this: Business evaluation 1) Is this a good business? 2) Is the stock cheap? 3) Is management capable and honest? 4) Is the stock safe (balance sheet, business resilience) 5) Are there more head winds or tail winds going forward?