Spekulatius

It’s is remarkable - every time I sell dividend stocks, I increase my income as the proceeds roll into 5%+ yielding treasury MM funds. If you are retiree or close to retirement, now is the chance to derisk your retirement funds, imo. I am not a bond guy, but this is the best risk reward to park in cash since 2000/2001.

Selling most of my USB - I don't like owning bank stocks with this more and more inverted yield curve. I am also reducing ORI a bit more - seems fully valued to me.

Brandolinis law always comes to my mind when I see these UFO theories. That stuff was popular since at least the 70‘s and flares up in popularity from time to time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini's_law The conspiracy crowd seems to think that the onus is on science and now the government to debunk this stuff. That not how science works, you can’t really disprove something (in most cases)l the burden of proof is on those who make a claim. But anyhow, I enjoy these things but regard them as entertainment.

I personally would for the most part discount a simulation that confirms an experiment result after the experiments result was published , especially on some field like material science. When you look into these simulations, they are often not truly derived from first principles only but use fudge factors that often can give you any result desired. It’s another matter if a simulation actually predicts and experimental result. On verification, I don’t think it will take more than a few month. If we don’t see replicated results 6 month later max, this is a dud.

Some strange stuff going on there - the drop in resistance at ~260K in that one chart isn’t superconductance because there is residual resistance at that temperature. Then the residence goes up again at 225K. Makes no sense to me. Anyhow, their sample becomes superconducting only at 110k, which isn’t that different from existing superconductors. I think a lot of the research looks shoddy and unconfirmed at this point as everyone races to publish. There could be something to this , but after seeing this, I am even more skeptical. I am open to change my mind if a truly compelling research’s result get confirmed a few times at different reputable labs. I am getting cold fusion vibes here.

$150B to destroy the Russians ability to create havoc is peanuts in the great scheme of things.

Lot of weird stuff going on with this superconductor discovery. I think it's a false alarm.

Russia is like Germany in 1917. Germany pulled back to the Siegfried line but they almost lost all the offensive capability. I dont think they can free up manpower do another offensive yet (the analogy to WW1 stops there). I think Ukraine needs to systematically dismantle the Russian defensive line and needs to find a way to do so with acceptable losses to their own forces. Again, increasing the conscription age from 27 to 30 tells us something - Russia runs out of Mobiks at the frontline. They need a constant supply to put them into the front line meat grinder, otherwise the front will break down.

They have actually shown ~17% revenue growth the first half. As to what is going on near term, I have no idea since italian co's generally don't provide much guidance. I do note some smaller players like PRFT have provided very lousy numbers but I think they are playing in a different sandbox. Italian competitor Digital value on the other hand has just shown very robust numbers. But yes, I share some concerns.

Odd lots is probably one of the best Podcast on economy / business out there. I found this episode on how the current Biden administration looks at antitrust very insightful. They are clearly taking a much broader approach than before and quite frankly US antitrust since the mid 80's didn't have much teeth. That has now changed and my guess is that even if the administration changes a tougher antitrust view willr emain in place. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-07-31/the-doj-s-jonathan-kanter-explains-the-bidenomics-approach-to-antitrust?srnd=oddlots#xj4y7vzkg

Added some Reply (Italian IT consultancy). Stock took a dump post earnings due to lower margins. Looks cheap to me. Will benefit longer term from AI (I think)

Or the British air Raid on Berlin in late 1941 causing a huge diversion of resources for the Nazis to protect the capital and other German cities. These drone bombings have little direct impact but they hopefully cause secondary impacts as far as Russia needing to move air defense units from frontlines to protect the capital. FWIW, I think next year, Ukraine will probably have their own cruise missiles developed to hit Russian targets with a few hundred pound warheads deep inside Russia. After all, I think even 30 year old western tech will do the job nicely and they sure will get access to that. Most obvious target will be infrastructure close to the frontline and all the bridges in Andrew hundred Km within Ukraine borders will be accessible and become target. Crimean bridges will be gone quickly, Railroad stations, refineries, energy, barracks will become a constant target. On the Russian manpower issue, the recent increase in conscription age from 27 to 30 years shows that there likely already a shortage and they are getting ready for the next batch of Mobiks to get into the meatgrinder. Wagner is gone or absorbed and I think they cleared the prisons of volunteers by now anyways.

Rich Howe keeps a pretty good Spinoff calendar on his website: https://stockspinoffinvesting.com/upcoming/ On a related note, investing in Spinoffs has become much harder than in Greenblatt's time in the 90's or early 2000's when he made it common knowledge. I think the companies doing spinoffs have caught up with the inefficiency in the market and dedicated investor base for spinoff and they are now spinning of their hairball business loaded up with too much debt and often hard to access liabilities (See GTX, REZI, ZIMV etc). I think it has gotten to the point where it is better to invest in the RemainCo rather than the Spinco in many cases. of course there are exceptions from the Rule and still bargains to be found. My guess so is that if you were to buy all Spincos stocks at the spinoff date, you are going to considerably underperform.

On Element 115 (Moscovium), it is easy to make a claim but what does access exactly mean, since this has a half time of less then 1 sec? it is also easy to predict what this element will be like, before it is synthetically produced, you just need an enormous particle collider to just make a few atoms of it that exist for a few seconds before decays. I am constantly surprised that people still listen to Joe Rogan. He is one of the worst prepared interviewers that I ever have come across. I listened to a few podcasts years ago to see what the fuzz about him is all about and decided it’s waste of time. Even more so for anything remotely related to science. There is just so much better stuff out there. Try Big Brains from UofChicago just to name one example.

He was one of the best players in the world in the early 70's with the total Fussball system (from Ajax Amsterdam). I also remember that he caused the first penalty kick against the German team in the Worldcup final in 1974 creating a lead for the Netherland team (which later was won by the German team)

On WTW - you would think that it this can be fixed bit examples like AAP showed to me again and again that sometimes these things sometimes never get fixed. Might have to do with structural issues, employee base, management or more likely all of them together. So in my opinion, you want to see a fundamental change (management) and then see some evidence that action taken is actually producing some results. I think WTW is fortunate that the business itself is so strong and cash generative that it is almost impossible to bankrupt, but you sure can run almost anything into the ground given a long enough timeframe and competitors eating you alive slowly but surely.

RIP. It's a classic of the late early 90's. Also it's scary that she is a few month younger than I am. I could be famous and dead now.

Even the best sector sector has a turd: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/wtw-reports-second-quarter-2023-100000126.html The disconnect between the best in class operators like AJG / BRO and WTW is mind blowing. I think WTW became a hedge fund hotel after the W merged with TW and then there was this AON drama. WTW EBITDA margins of <15% are less than half what BRO makes.

I would guess that for 90% of the people, it has worked out well to buy their home rather than to rent. That's about all you need to know, besides doing some basic rent vs buy comparison when you buy. Unless rent vs Buy cost comparison looks very lousy when you want to buy, go ahead and purchase your shelter and never look back.

@Castanza Maintenance cost of a home is ~1% of the home value annually, if you just maintain your home and don’t do major renovations. Then you have insurance, taxes, that’s another 2%+ annually on carry cost (depending on where you live).

It is going to linger but keep in mind that P&W is only a part of RTX business. There is the Raytheon defense business and avionics as well as the P&W defense business. I think they can ride this out.

Buying the dip on RTX today. That said, the news with the engine issues does sound troublesome.

BRO Q2 earnings look phenomenal. Almost ~25% topline growth and even higher earnings growth. <1% share dilution rate. Of course they benefit from large acquisitions last year and the organic growth due to the hard insurance market, which creates a lollapalooza of sorts for the brokers. https://investor.bbinsurance.com/news-releases/news-release-details/brown-brown-inc-announces-second-quarter-2023-results-including Still nothing but astonishing for a more than 80 year old company.

Its the same in the Bay area - the business downtown are dead and the satellite cities like South San Franscisco become super vibrant. Further away from the large cities, there is no difference to pre-COVID-19 - nature has healed there, at least where I live. I am speaking for small towns like Lowell or Nashua NH. If anything, they have improved a little.