Spekulatius

Added to PM, RTX and OUT.

Looks like the inverted yield curve is getting fixed, but not in the way that people expected. Now LT interest rates go up rather than short term interest rates go down.

They went back to 2019 valuations. Big deal since interest rates are much higher. Utility stocks have served as bond substitutes and have become fairly unattractive, imo. Health care got a huge bump during COVID in terms of valuation multiples that are now receding. i do like some plays especially health insurers but I think valuation wise, we are just looking at mean reversion here and I am not even sure we have overshot in this correction yet.

This is true, but Trudeau also did not produce evidence for his accusations, which is what makes this situations messed up. I do agree on Modi, he has autocratic tendencies. Works great as a foreign investor if they leave you alone or even better they nurture you, but if they turn against you, you are looking at a zero. Now Modi did get elected fairly, so one can only hope that checks and balances are intact in India.

How do you define unloved? What metrics would one use to quantify "unloved"? Discount to historical valuation metrics like EV/ EBIT?

Try Dry Riesling's from the Finger lakes and thank me later. I get mine from Buttonwood winery (member of the wine club) - they have very reasonable shipping. Those finger lake wines are harder to get in stores (perhaps a wine discounter will do it in your area). FWIW, Kenwood was taken out by Pernod Ricard in 2014. Been buying their wines since I moved to the US (lived 3 miles from their tasting room for a good while). They had awesome fall sales (50% off almost everything) for friends and family which was almost everyone who lived in the area :-). Unfortunately the new owner (Pernod Ricard) has ceased these sales, although they do have sales that are good deals from time to time. Sign up for free to get on the mailing list. The Jack London wines are very good - and Pernod Ricard has improved this vineyards and the marketing since they owned it. That said, wine is not a great business - to many rich people are in it just for the status and the bragging rights, I suppose.

A classic - durable portfolio in one picture - arms, tobacco and beer.

Sobering up - now that is a bleak outlook. Maybe they are switching from high end Russian Vodka to Bud light that's on sale with a coupon. Also Ikea is constantly run sales - not sure that means much. @dealraker buying wine at Walmart left me already in dispair - almost forgot about that one until @John Hjorth posted. Why not just buy the house brands at Costco to damage the liver with stuff that's worth it? I just opened one of these bottles the other night to support the Pernod Ricard cause: https://kenwoodvineyards.com/wines/jack-london-series/jack-london-cabernet-sauvignon-2018 (bought this one on a sale for ~$20 if I remember correctly)

Added a bit more RI.PA / PRNGY today and NTDOY yesterday. I have also been reading up on HEIO.AS (Heineken Holding) that @Dinar mentioned recently. Looks somewhat cheap, but they have been missing their earnings forecast for the first half and now backloading the second half. They will have an update mid October and at time, the stock could get wobbly - at least that was the case last year.

I don't know the answer to that question, but the stock does not necessarily looks all that cheap. They have earnings of ~$3.1, so that's a 18.4 PE. Maybe NEE deserves a premium to the utility sector (which i view as generally unattractive at current interest rates), but then we have the issue with the drop down MLP NEP. Dropdown MLP are nothing but trouble, they work for a while as long as they can show rapid growth, but once they become too large, growth tends to wane. They are also always at the mercy of capital markets for fresh equity and debt. not a great combo if things become a bit more tight in capital markets. My thinking is that NEE as the GP needs to keep NEP alive and most likely they will have to fold this back in the mothership at some point if it's cost of capital becomes excessive. So more dilution, slower growth is on the horizon. This is going to take a while to work out. In the meantime, there are a lot of dividend growth investor apes in this stock, some are still buying the dip and there is tax loss season coming. Of course Brad Thomas is in this one too: https://seekingalpha.com/article/4632662-nextera-energy-one-of-best-times-in-5-years-to-buy-this-dividend-aristocrat I know this is more thinking out loud (and writing it down) than answering your question.

Higher interest rates are not kind to renewables, which require enormous Capex and cheap financing to work. there is probably a lesson for BIP there as well. Utility stocks look very iffy to me, due to relatively high valuations and slowing dividend growth. they were a bond substitute during ZIRP and do not look competitive with high grade bond funds that yield 6-7%.

Debt is not always deflationary. One way to get rid of debt is inflation or even hyperinflation. Inflation or hyperinflation is a result of political failure to deal with economic realities and is a soft default on debt. Inflation is a political choice or political issue and in many cases is a whole lot of more palatable than deflation.

I watch sometimes WION and it does feel like government propaganda. This is not the case with Al Jazeera, even though Al Jazeera is controlled by Qatari government. On another note, I am also surprised that some people here think it's a good thing that the Indian government would sent out kill squads to Canadian citizens in Canada because they are accused of terrorism in India. Personally, I would be distraught if the German government sent out a hit men to Canada to kill a Canadian citizen of German origin (or even German citizen). Such a government should be fired in my opinion, doesn't even matter if the accusation is true or not.

$CASH (rebought), a bit more BTI and a starter in $CNHI Also have been adding to PRNDY / RI.PA recently.

Underconsumption? They just need to give these Moonlight Clan people some stimi checks - they will spent it. Problem solved:

Some pretty good stuff on Amazon Prime video: The Covenant: https://www.amazon.com/gp/video/detail/B0B8NZG52Y/ref=atv_dp_share_cu_r Dungeons and Dragons: https://www.amazon.com/gp/video/detail/B0B692N4KW/ref=atv_dp_share_cu_r (much better than I expected, Sort of like the old Indiana Jones movies, Chris Pines does an excellent job playing this with some irony). Running Scared: https://www.amazon.com/gp/video/detail/B002R1UQW2/ref=atv_dp_share_cu_r (older mobster and action movie, pretty hard hitting)

Totally OT: Cholesterol intake has very little to do with Cholesterol in your blood. By the way, Eggs last a long time even outside the fridge. In Europe we used to store them in the pantry since fridges tend to be much smaller there. I am pretty sure they were there for 3 weeks if not more. We typically bought a tray of eggs:

I guess the "stolen wallets" don't just apply to the small fries, this also scales. In my opinion PDD is most likely to be fraudulent of the big tech co's in China with no CFO and an obvious '"fall guy" signing up the financials, as well as other red flags.

The spy ballon that wasn’t:

Pretty interesting video about Shanghai and how it has changed: The fellow used to live there and left early 2020 with the Covid-19 outbreak. He noticed some changes and the very few things that stayed the same.

The ultimate battery uses matter/ antimatter annihilation. Might be a few years out until commercialization and safety issues need to be worked out.

Largest deposit means little, the devil is in the details. For example Germany has a huge lithium deposit in the Rhine valley , but progress to mine it is pretty slow: https://www.mining.com/vulcan-energy-to-mine-60-more-german-lithium-than-planned/ Lithium is not particularly rare and there are actually quite a few deposits allover the world. To mine them economically is the harder part.

Wagner is still in business and the boss is Sytii: https://www.wsj.com/world/africa/wagner-africa-sytii-prigozhin-gold-12a45769?mod=trending_now_news_3 Quite well diversified - security muscle, media business (misinformation, troll farms, political advertisement beer), gold mines and who knows what.

This is correct. You could use the same logic for a janitor job. There are many issues. Studies have shown that high CEO pay is actually correlated with worse stock performance. Second issue is that boards are not independent in that US and mostly run by the CEO and it’s the board who sets comps, so essentially this becomes circular. In my opinion, boards should be indepedent.

Since we are comparing workers pay with BYD, why not compare CEO and top management pay. this is 2 years old, but it looks like the highest pay in BYD is 8M RMB which is a bit more than 1M USD. GM CEO Barro pulls ~$29M annually. So if workers only ask for 3x more than comparable workers at BYD, management is getting a bargain, relatively speaking. By that measure, Barra should be getting no more than $3M or about 1/10 of what she is paid currently. One could say Barra and co are only a few people, but I think these salaries are pulling up all the salaries for the people underneath, so they are contributing to the bloated cost structure. In addition, they are arguable doing a lousy job as far as creating shareholder value too.