Spekulatius

Fangman = hangman. AMZN, GOOG, AAPL and even META - all the earnings today suck.

Today is the day to let's turd's go because they really want to fly.

Sort of funny that energy equities are crashing today. I guess you have to sell something to buy tech and blue chips like $CVNA and $TSLA.

Added to $CNC (I reduced the position a couple of month ago)

Congrats. There is something missing however - a little minibar hut, next to the pool.

Inflation benefits some business, but hurts most. Yes capital light insurance, distributors or Visa, Mastercard like business benefit, but many service companies have issues for example. Some shortages juiced profit margins (PC and automobiles being a great example) , but those are going away and get replaced by supply gluts or demand and supply chain whiplashes.

I just checked and up ~9% so far. Get 4-5% on MM or other income funds and I can do 13-14% without taking any further risk and see how this unfolds. I did some more sales and sold AMZN in my tax deferred accounts AH. That stuff has all been ripping.

We might be done raising in March, but then we still have the "keep rates up for longer" to prevent inflation flareup. If we do keep the 4.5% short term interest rate for a while, some income investments are attractive relative to stocks. With this jump in equities, i could pretty much lock in the gains and go all cash /MM/STIPS and lock in an almost 10% gain for the year. (from gains and expected interested from MM accounts). Tempting. Not that I would do it, but the opportunity cost from going into cash is not as large any more as it used to be under ZIRP.

Reduced $JXN (which is really ripping) a bit more. Reduced $CASH as well.

Regardless of what Powell is saying, they still raised Rates by 0.25% and they pretty much said, they will raise rates again at the next meeting in March. This still does not sound that great to me.

Reducing $JXN just a a bit in tax deferred accounts.

Based on his response, Adani is screwed. Now they are appealing on national interest. LOL.

This is a short one from Motley Fool about Buffett buy framework, which I found very insightful: https://www.fool.com/podcasts/motley-fool-money/2023-01-28-lessons-from-buffetts-investing

I agree the Citicorp meets the cannibal framework. Banamex is actually one of their better business, so the sale is a bit of a headscratcher to me, especially with Mexico overall being depressed

How is a regulated utility like AQN allowed to rack up that much debt? I think the capital structure of the regulated entities is given by the utility regulator. Then there can be some debt added to the holding company. Now the cost of holding company debt is not pass through (the regulated entities debt may be, but with some delays). Tikr.com has the debt at 8.4x EBITDA. I see 7,7B CAD in debt. I have trouble determining what they run rate cash flow is with all those adjustments. Seems to me that AQN need to raise some equity with all the debt become due at much higher interest rates.

I use the global screener in Tickr.com. I look for 8% annual CAGR share count shrinkage. Edit> found that I I go to just 2021 rather than 2022, I get better data:

Enron wasn’t an isolated case. There were a bunch of independent power producer that went bankrupt with Enron - Calpine, Mirant and other got severely damaged like El Paso and a few others. Then we had Worldcom, Global Crossing in telecom and many others. The US had a severe recession then. The classical cockroach syndrome - a cockroach is never alone, especially when the government is deeply involved. That does not mean that the entire economy is a fraud, just the part that is build on easy credit and with high debt and possibly government involvement.

The real problem with Adani is that the Indian government / Modi is likely a participant in this fraud (if that’s what it is). Modi strikes me as someone who is an enigma for me, with stuff like this: https://time.com/6249393/the-modi-question-documentary-bbc-india-controversy/ If Adani is a fraud, then maybe the Indian economy is a fraud too of sorts.

On Discover - their charge off rate for 2019 was 3.2%. If you ask anybody - 2019 was hardly a recession. While 3.2% is higher than current levels, the current CC chargeoff rates are extremely low. I think it's important to set these numbers in perspective.

SYF, ORCL, HPE, DDS, CASH are a few that pop up in my screen. AZO doesn't make the cut because they are valued too highly so the speed of their buyback the last couple of years is too low. PFSI is another interesting one that has recently started to buy back a boatload of shares.

Sold most of my COF to reduce risk here.

I do agree that CVX has done better than most on capital allocation and that’s why Buffett bought the stock, imo. However, buying back <5% of the shares over more than a decade isn’t exactly a cannibal. If you want to look at cannibals look at something like COF which reduced shares from 510M shares in 2016 to 383M shares now. That’s a 25% reduction in shares. I do have a cannibal screen looking for companies that reduce their share count at a rapid pace and there are no commodity companies in it.

This is going to be interesting to watch. The inflation in Japan is picking up steam - the latest print was 4.2%. It’s interesting because they didn’t have inflation even past the epidemic until now. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/1-consumer-inflation-japans-capital-234353233.html

CVX dilutes shareholders when shares are cheap and buys back shares when they are expensive. This is the way.

The Abraham tanks were sent because Olaf Scholz (German chancellor ) stated that no German tanks would go on the battlefield unless US tanks go first. Quite honestly, I think it was an excuse for the Germans to not sent tanks because they didn’t want to (at least thr SPD - ruling party had this line). So this created a stalemate and now when the US announced to sent Abraham’s tanks, that excuse was negated. I do think what the Ukraine needs to Leo tanks. It is lighter and way simpler to run. The diesel engine needs less fuel and can be swapped in less than 30 minutes, basically on the battlefield. I don’t think the tanks will be used near Bahkmut, thatsjust a stalemate killing field with little strategic value. The Ukraine is likely to use the tanks else where and I think severing the land Bridge to Crimea seems like an obvious target. We will see in a couple of month.