Spekulatius

Other datapoint is that utility power rates in New England are already very high and receiving more and more backslash from the public. I think over the last 10 years the price of power in NE has increased more than in Europe https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/APU011072610 2025 is not in the chart and has seen another jump based on my last bills before I sold my house in MA. This imo does not bode well for NGG ability to push through price increases with regulators there.

No wonder people role the dice on Mamdani with candidates like this. Adams is already out - this guy was totally corrupt.

Being a customer with them is when I moved to Long Island. They have separate accounts for each state. I also was customer for Gas and for Power as well in MA and those were separate accounts as well. I can confidently say that IT wasn’t their strength. I guess when they rolled up all these utilities, they never bothered to integrate anything.

You either have a loaded gun or your dig. True all the time but especially in this economy.

This fellow is correct, I think.

I am using PSA, MAA, CPT (Reits) for a similar purpose in my IRA‘s. Reits have a worse tax treatment in taxable accounts but in tax deferred account they are great.

I agree with it. While Keeper does not look excessively overvalued, I can find similar business in the USA or Europe. I don‘t see reason to go to Japan for those. I research Japanese companies because I find certain business with valuations that I get only there. I don’t just buy low P/B either. there are some great growth stocks like Elan 6099 (uniforms, supplies for nursing homes etc) that I think are unique Japan and I have not seen anywhere else.

Bought a little more MAA for my IRA dividend portfolio. I recently added PSA as well and CPT a while ago. I also added a bit of FDS and FI.

They have high leverage and imo are poorly managed. I think you can find better utility stocks but frankly haven’t looked much. I owned it in the past for similar reasons and won’t buy it back unless it become stupidly cheap for some reason.

This is a good take on Meta. On power centers / power generation , I have a differnt take. Short of a new generation of nuclear reactors that is probably decade away from commercialization (yes these things laws take longer than people think, there is no silver bullet out there) Power generation is a mature tech and there are no quantum leaps or Moores law like progress expected.. Thats why I think the AI boom will raise power prices through the roof and the winner will be whoever figures out how run AI with much less power consumption, not who figures out how to build ten power plants cheaper than the other guy.

They can both be right because Denmark <> USA and the emigrant pool is differnt too.

Well, people call it being a basket for good reason. The idea for most here is to buy a basket of individually small positions and regard them as one Japan trade. We do this because we don’t really have an edge with individual stocks.

Sony Financial spin started trading $8729 Mostly a life insurance business and it does not look cheap. equity/share ~94 yen, earnings 11 Yen. They have potentially a massive problem with old insurance written at much lower interest rates that customers could cancel. Looks pretty iffy to me, trading around 150Yen/ share https://www.sonyfg.co.jp/en/ir/library/annualreport/

My wife is dialysis nurse and has seen this first hand many times, People with multiple organ failure ending up with dialysis, mostly permanently. The virus can do a huge number with your body. I personally am a big believer in Vaccines and think they are the closest to a free lunch in medicine acht you can get. i always ask thy doctors or to give me all the shots he can give me. i just got Pneumococcal vaccine on my last visit. I will get Flu and Covid refresher shot later this month.

I get my shots later in the day for this reason and felt my immune system working overtime pretty good the same evening and over night (shivering) but was good the next day. Last year I had the Novavax (which is not an mRNA vaccine) and the reaction was way milder.

Japan export cement to the west coast for example. It is not a huge amount but enough to keep the prices somewhat in check.

It’s impressive but what do a Joe Schmoe upstart comes along and proves that well we don’t need all that stuff, we invented XYZ and can do this 100x cheaper and it’s almost as good. It’s not like this never happened before (Deepseek anyone), as well as in other domains (PC versus Mainframes/ Minicomputer).

On Meta - does anyone have any idea why META invests on bleeding edge AI? I get that they need to use AI ( and have done so for a while) but why do they need to spend like a drunken sailor when thru business is really just running social media properties l Could they just do what Apple does and license the best stuff, and then adapt it to their use case? The Metaverse Fiasko could very well repeat itself but on a grander scale.

ICE - your tax $ at work. Looks like a colorized trailer for a Charlie Chaplin movie.

I believe this is the right take . Yes, the bipartisan bill failed but it’s still Biden’s job things done and he dis not. I guess he thought either the Republicans would fall in line later or it wasn’t important enough. He was incorrect on both.

Bought some Tacmina pump 6322 for my Japan basket. It does not have a catalyst but decent to good fundamentals and half their market cap is in cash and securities. The stock trades at a small premium to tangible book. 2025年3月期決算説明資料 (1).pdf

China spending on AI is much lower than what is happening in the US. China spends much more on industries that have to do with AI (robotics, self driving cars, semiconductors ) specific use cases than AI itself.

Yes, but their home markets are tiny so the business that you can invest in export or have direct business in any other countries including the USA. So this is not really a solution.

Believe it or not ORCL is FCF negative by a significant amount and already levered at 4x EBITDA. What could go wrong? This could be a juicy short or candidate for puts some point.

I also forgot 25% tariffs on heavy trucks which may or may not stack on country tariffs. https://www.cnn.com/2025/09/25/business/furniture-truck-tariffs-trump Furniture is at 30%. I don’t think it’s enough to get the furniture industry in NC back.