Spekulatius

Added to RELY, AZE, BNTGY. New positions on EMN and FBIN.

Wise is more of a fully digital bank than Remitly which simply focuses on remittance payments. their target customers are different.

To be fair, AMZN then decided to move their 2nd headquarter to Washington DC but then fell far short of what they promised to build there.

I think we are close to peak private equity. Private equity used to be better operators than mismanaged public business they were taking out but I am not sure this is the case any more, now they became so large. I guess what is left is sticking the funds to retail and pension funds at very high valuations, as the bagholder of last resort . The reason for companies goin doing the IPO much later is that there is plenty of money available with private funding and many companies want avoid the scrutiny that comes with a public listing. The control issue can be dealt with different classes of stock.

$10k to kill an ICE director sounds cheap to me. You have trouble to even get a contractor for legit jobs around your house show up for that money.

I think it’s a little more complicated than that. The vision seems that they hand off tasks to different apps, then move them along workflows in ERP environments. Basically, what I think companies like UI Path tried to do, but easier to implement. Or maybe the vision is just to replace Google, but that would be more for consumers. Given how well Gemini/ search works, I think the latter is very very unlikely.

Bought starters in $RELY and $AZE (Azelis). RELY/ Remitly has been mentioned in several podcasts and is cheap but with potential macro headwinds. Azelis is a busted IPO from a few years ago and is a cheap chemical distributor. It definitely suffers from macro headwinds.

It seems to me that drilling costs go down over time in real money terms (adjusted for inflation). I expect the price of oil to follow a similar trajectory than drilling costs, so the price of oil will also rise less than inflation. Of course over shorter time frames, anything can happen, but over a few decades that’s how it is likely to play out.

Sounds a bit like OpenAI wants to be an operating system of sorts: https://openai.com/index/introducing-apps-in-chatgpt/

Perception is not everything. It may cause short term price spikes, but not much more. Supply and demand is everything. I don’t think demand is looking strong near term.

ChatGPT’s not so great:

Gemini’s answer:

Lots of tariffs too in this Guilded age. I think Trump / Bessent actually pointed to that time to justify the current tariffs. The guilded Agee of course led eventually to counter movement like antitrust as well as the rise of socialism in many countries (but not the US).

Yes, being “uninvestible” is as strong of a contrarian signal, as you can get.

I totally agree. The AI firestorm, seems to suck the oxygen out of the air for pretty much anything else. However like other firestorms, this one won’t last forever and leave behind a lot of scorched earth.

The cost of new homes can come down by changing zoning - allowing for condos and multi family homes where SFH only allowed before in desirable neighborhoods. Another thing that crossed my mind is if we go full populist is that tax code changes pertaining to real estate tax and deductions will encourage multi family and discourages second home and investment properties especially the like of Blackstone buying up hundred thousands of SFH. Even lassez fair counties like Singapore have a tax code that disincentivizes second homes for example with higher tax rate and transaction tax. .

Added a few ODET.PA shares.

The tikr.com has $21.3 cash earnings for AON this year, close to the Wells #. AON seems to have a larger gap between the adjusted EPS ($16.93) and cash earnings ($21.3) than other insurance brokers? anyone has any idea why this is? It could undervalue AON relative to other unless it’s an accounting quirk that won’t persist.

When felt the future ever certain? 1980’s? 1990? 2001/2002 (9/11 and recession), 2008? I think there are many periods where I felt much less certainty about the future than I have now. The folks who think housing prices are too high should just rent for the time being since it’s way cheaper in many locations. The time to buy a house will come.

Quite a story. How is this not a movie? https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/05/opinion/bitcoin-georgia-ivanishvili-bachiashvili.html

There are very violent Mexican and Vietnamese street gangs in areas where these minorities are strong. With the possible exception of Hispanics in some areas, they are not significant enough to make these ministries stand out relative to others. Sadly this is not true for blacks where crime rate teens to be ~4x higher across the board. I agree it’s a cultural factor from within that is the likely cause. I have listened to a lot of music of all sorts but Rap is the one of the few styles that I never felt the slightest connection with and I don’t feel like I am missing anything at all.

Sorry the old times weren’t better, they were worse in terms of violence and crime. Crime has been long secular downward slide, probably since birth control and abortion became more accessible certain population groups.

The only thing that has worked is birth controllable abortions so that kids nobody want don’t grow up, sadly. Strict gun laws in a city won’t do much since yo can drive in the city with a trunk of guns to do whatever and have less than 1/ million chance of getting caught. Background checks for gun purchases may help in some cases where clear nutcases or criminals want to buy guns . However, with millions of guns already in circulation , it not really going to do much either. The only solution to the problem would be to start over and pull all the guns and circulation and start anew, it that’s not practical and not consistent with the constitution either, so dice. Another factor is of course that gun violence is about 4-5x more likely to get committed by blacks and blacks are the victims by about the same factor. If you take out the violence committed by 18-40 year old black males, the US would like a whole lot more like other countries in terms of crime. It’s driven by socio-economics obviously and it is what it is.

Can anyone come up with a good reason why MMC is better buy than BRO currently? The valuation in terms of PE and FCF yield on equity seems to be about the same and BRO may even be a bit cheaper based on 2026 estimates. What I am sure of is that BRO has superior management compared to MMC. Other than diversification, I don’t see a compelling reason to add a new insurance broker holding rather than buy more BRO. I don’t own enough BRO yet that the position size worries me.

Worth a NYC visit by itself, IMO: