CorpRaider

LAMR

Lurker for years, my first post on this forum. I had the sae thing in late January. Extreme stomach discomfort that started quite suddenly leading to bouts of vomiting. I couldn't even drive myself back home without puking into a bag. The stomach discomfort got better in 24 hours (mild fever also went away). Then the coughing started which later days. I'd wake up at nights to cough for few minutes each time. Chest tightness also began. I'm a lot better now, but my chest tightness isn't fully gone. If I fully relax my body I can feel a tiny bit of resistance to talking in a whole breath of air. I also have asthma and using my inhaler helped! CorpRaider, keep hope and stay happy. Positivity helps the immune system. Thank God for Netflix. I watched a ton of comedy when I was going through the bug, whatever it was. Stay hydrated!! I never considered Corona seriously but it does look like the symptoms are correlated. Now if there was community transmission in late January, just imagine how off we are with the denominator. I've been thinking about this a lot lately. The hard thing with exponentials is that it's easy to be way off if we are even slightly off in any parameter. What if we are wrong on the start date by a couple of weeks or so? Orthopa's anecdotes and line of thought seems reasonable to me. Thanks! I have little doubt about the denominator. I had to really search for accounts of these symptoms.

Less than BAC and USB at least...finally.

Man, I think I might have this thing. Started with stomach pain and "discomfort" for like 24 hours then horrible, worst in my life, stomach flu symptoms, high fever nasty chills and aches for like 24 hours, now I've still got some stomach "issues" but with a little cough and mild tightness in the chest, no fever. Hopefully, it gets better from here. I read that a small percentage of people have experienced severed nausea etc then the cough and respiratory stuff...with corona. If I could do the drive thru google test, I would, but I'm not going to go contaminate the hospital unless it gets a lot worse.

I want some but decided to wait till close to TBV.

BOMN

Which Canadian banks you guys buying? Waiting for tangible book?

Just a little: BRK.B, LAMR, VNQ

SLG, I guess.

I propose that South Korea be moved to the developed economies/countries in all indexes based partially on the handling of this virus.

I do generally try very hard to avoid companies with organized labor + defined benefit plans. What kind of longevity/benefit assumptions are we talking about here? Couldn't covid-19 materially revise those downward for the boomers and older (i.e., pretty much everyone who will ever draw a pension). By "raising equity" does one mean, "modestly reducing buybacks?"

Staples, including Costco.

Since no one is getting tested it is hard to decide whether to wait until there is a positive in your state/region before pulling your kid from daycare. For all I know we already had it. We have had like 4 mystery viruses that sound like they could be the mild version of this one over the course of the fall and winter.

Looking forward to my 0% interest only 30 year mortgage.

Wells and Fargo.

Peter Lynch used to trade around his positions like that, I think.

Makes sense to do less with all the insane PE and VC money sloshing around. Time to be fearful.

I have no opinion on that security but I think people could make quite a few arguments in favor of the money center banks versus smaller banks over the medium term and longer: Scale and ability to even make table stakes for the necessary tech investments (only like top 8 banks have a piece of Zelle for example), and lower costs per economic unit (account, customer, loan, whatever) for those investments favors; other scale advantages leading to sub 50 bps cost of deposits before massive costs coming out of the business (they can pretty much take any loan from these small banks if they want it), regulatory capture and potential eventual Canadian-style bank oligopoly. The MTB CEO recent annual letter does a pretty good job of setting up the arguments in favor of the mega banks and then attempting to counter them arguing that (super) regional banks will remain viable.

That was my conclusion. WRT Wells it seems unlikely they let it tick across the line because of the banking relationship.

ICE and Expedia, a couple of days ago. Seems like CME is a better business than ICE b/c of the futures (right now), but Sprecher seems like a beast to me. Obviously Barry Diller is strong like bull. Dara is still on BOD. I don't get why they decided to emphasize VRBO over HomeAway. Just "library card" positions, as Tom Gayner might say.

40% chance he's quoting total return for CAGR. Remember the Beardstowne ladies? haha

Will Danoff from Fido Contra Fund was on the Long View podcast (from Morningstar). Also, Peter Attia interviewed Sam Zell on the Tim Ferris podcast (did you get all that). It was good. Worth a listen even if you've heard him do his thing many times before.

Yeah good points. Thank you for your response. I've just been looking at some banks relative to WFC over the past week and had that question. Related stream of consciousness: I was looking at the MTB and the USB proxies too (not really as comps to FCNCA, just kind of fell down the rabbit hole). I definitely would prefer some ROA ROTCE factors in there (like they have). I like the USB formulae the best (I think the MTB one was kind of vague, e.g., we are good guys and will do good things). I noted that MTB reintroduced options (I might guess what Wilmers would think about that). Rene' Jones comp has really jumped up from ~$4MM to ~$7MM. ...I like WFC, but I should probably grab a few shares of these others and start getting print annual reports. I did like the Jones MTB letters. The latest one discusses the ability for regionals to compete against the scale of the money center banks, particularly with respect to tech spending.

Any of you guys still involved with this one? If so, can you give me a quick proxy check. Am I reading this right that they get their equity compensation based solely on TBV growth (i.e., they explode the bank size and compensation by rolling up a ton of acquisitions...like a lot of CPG managements that were/are compensated purely on growth with no ROE/ROIC provisions)? I understand management holds a ton of stock so that may counter any bad incentives, somewhat, but....

Wow, does he always write so much about macro, market and political commentary stuff?