Spekulatius

Went to a meeting with a libertarian group and hat a chat with a fellow who is a risk manager for hire. He advises investors that don’t have their own risk manager and vetted investments and advises them on risk (portfolio, market exposures , governance). He worked at various banks and now has st up his own business with some colleagues. He told me that the biggest bubble out there that he is aware is private credit. He specially mentioned loans to private equity business (that have a hard time getting exits) that are financed by private equity loan funds as well. Apparently instructional investors are seeking exits and he sees those funds getting pushed to retail and pension funds looking for yay the last sucker. He mentioned specifically covenant lite loans, PIK etc. The private equity names he dropped were Blackstone, KKR. I asked him how big he thinks (in $ terms) the problem is, but he didn’t know. He did say it was big enough that he thinks private equity needs a bailout from this and they will get it due to their political connections. Make of this what you want and it’s worth what you pay for. It seems to me that we are a bit further ahead with the private equity party than I thought. nut again who sayyid if any of this is true from a random guy on the internet writing down what another random guy he met over some beers told him.

I think ABEV in Brazil is pretty good ( I own it) and it has recovered from its lows. Internationally, beer has done better than in the US, I think. Back on topic , I added a bit more ACVA yesterday.

He can’t help it. He think he is some sort of diplomatic Messiah who thinks he achieve whatever he wants just by showing up. That includes issues he has no business in, like the above. I guess he just needs this to stroke his ego.

Gheez, nobody needs 60-80% enriched Uranium unless they want to produce a weapon. This is not hard to Google either. @changegonnacome said it already. You made some valid point before, but this claim is totally off.

Another day another embarrassment: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-06-18/modi-pushes-back-against-trump-s-claim-on-pakistan-ceasefire Trump talking about a trade deal that nobody has heard of. Art of a deal, I guess.

While it’s true thats they probably cannot destroy these underground installations with conventional means, the entries can be repeatedly bombed and then those underground facilities become a tomb.

To be fair- we lived going from 10% to 7% , which is different than going from 4.5% to 7%. Path dependence matters in finance. On the other hand many people predicted that going from 2% to 5% would collapse the financial system but that clearly didn’t happen. @Blake Hampton likely will see a ~50% decline in equity markets at least once in his investing carrier. I have seen two and I survived the 87 crash, the 90’s crash, 98 Asian crisis and others I don’t even recall. The first one I had little money in the game but enough that it hurt (1990 specifically). So I think Blake I’ll survive a ~50% crash as well. It’s part of the game just like bull markets.

Why not continue bombing all the Iranian military installations to smitherines while Israel airforce has free reign? Peace deal can come later. A regime change would be great, but is a tough bet. Trump is just a bystander here and it doesn’t matter what he says.

If interest rates go to 7% , it is likely because inflation will be ~4% which means real interest rates are ~3% in this scenario. Seems fairly doable to me. The world will not come to an end in this case.

If you cut production in half, you need to double it to get back to where it was, which is very hard to do. The aerospace industry (and others) has learned this during COVID-19 and is still not back to the production rate they had in 2019. The complexity of the aerospace supply chain for anything that fled in mindboggling. The tariffs throw another wrench into the gears here as well.

Some perks would be nice a subscription to Hegseth’s groups chat. After all, we got bombing raids to Tehran coming up. I would also like access to Trump’s sons crypto chat group. These are probably upsell opportunities.

You would be surprised how few German people in the 30’s read Mein Kampf. Everyone had to display it on the bookshelf and almost nobody read it. I know because I asked.

Based on what we are seeing in Iran, it sounds like the X and tech brother experts that claimed that cheap drones and guided rockets are a winning formula against air superiority fighter like the F-35 etc were a bit early. I think the cheap drones in Ukraine are winning precisely because air superiority is not achieved by any side. Iran shows that if you have air superiority, you can do whatever you like. The Israeli Air Force now can bomb any target within reach of fighter planes in western Iran with cheap JDAM/ glide bombs and there isn’t much Iran can do about it. The cheap drones really don’t do much because they are easy to take down and they don’t have the reach or precision to hit high value targets. What Iran is doing is the equivalent of lobbing V1 rockets into London in WW2 with much worse results. Sort of ironic that the F-35 batch was cut in half due to cost savings. If we really get into a conflict with China, we would need all those F-35 we can muster.

Living in a nice townhome is one thing but making $600M in a year with his presidency is another. MAGA is seems is very easily monetizable, make of this what you want.

Note the Palantir commercial.

The poor are lays left behind by definition. The question is how many of them are there and if the numbers are going down, which they have over the years.

Does it get any better than this?

Essentially the thesis: https://valueinvestorsclub.com/idea/WILEY_JOHN_and_SONS_%26nbsp%3B-CL_A/8261156191 Unique business, not many peers.

Lol from X:

I meant WLY (Wiley) and corrected it in my post. I have no idea about GTLB short interest. I seems the shorts have been correct so far, but I think the crash after the earnings looks a bit overblown. I have a watchlist of tech stocks where I think the business has quite a bit of growth left and some staying power and that have come down to reasonable valuations. GTLB and BILL are on the shortlist , but I have not bought the latter yet. Had quite a few misses, but also quick substantial winners and some huge winners (ZS) playing in this sandbox.

This was a good one from Excess returns. Giroux is a portfolio manager at TrowPrice. He goes into great details in terms of his investment process. Many good nuggets in there.

I also had a bit out for Exor but it was a tad too low. I bought some techie stuff at the Friday close - ACVA (wholesale car marketplace) and GTLB. GTLB is a starter and ACVA is an add (I bought a position during the last downdraft and eased up a bit). I like the operational leverage with ACVA and it’s sort of a Carvana derivative albeit a much cleaner business model . GTLB seems to be a market leading development platform benefiting from AI and it seems the stock price decline was a bit disproportionate to the moderate reduction in the revenue forecast. Both have high SBC. I also mentioned WLY a while ago (starter) where I see a large opportunity for margin improvement and topline growth from AI licensing.

Saw this one the other day on my lunch walk. I am not sure it means anything. IMG_1746.mov

It is clear by now that Trump can’t stop wars from breaking out nor can he stop existing wars (Ukraine) I think this conflict is also related to Ukraine (Iran is an actor and somewhat aligned with Russia). The USA in both cases now goes out of the way to be not involved. Hegseth saying that Article 5 is a maybe and Trump said the main thing before.. I think it’s clear that Xi Jinping looking at this and thinking now may be the time to make a move on Taiwan while Taco Don is in charge. Another indicator of losing confidence in the USA is that the USD remains weak even when this conflict broke out. I can’t recall a situation where the USD was not boosted by a flight to safety when a war broke out or there was a conflict somewhere. This is Mr Market voting with their wallet here and I think it’s meaningful. USD is literally weaker than the Mexican Peso now. I guess Taco Don made the USD the US Peso.

Pretty good summary of the current situation: