ZenaidaMacroura
-
Posts
377 -
Joined
-
Last visited
Content Type
Profiles
Forums
Events
Posts posted by ZenaidaMacroura
-
-
I was talking with someone the other day about online retailers that bring last mile delivery in house (or were in the process of attempting to). Does anyone know any public OR private online retailers that are making this an initiative? As far as I know only Amazon and Wayfair?
-
Congrats!!
It was like 18ish months ago when I first hit a mil, I don't think I did anything to celebrate other than throw up an obscure fb status:
"the first one is the hardest" -Drake ;D
-
I think pretty everyone know about the reliability difference.
How come the German and American auto companies don't try to improve reliability? Their management just don't care?
Different engineering philosophies
German: precision, handling, styling heritage. they don't see upkeep as some tremendous failure -its part the course for the handling and precision they trumpet.
Japanese: reliability, efficiency above all else.
-
Anyone know of a good way to get $10-100 Billion plus in private capital into mortgage entities immediately after shareholders holding billions of dollars in private and common shares of a similar entity are liquidated by the incoming Treasury Secretary?
I'm long the preferred (in my PA and through a partnership) but I have this tiny nagging voice that keeps telling me investors have goldfish memory. I know it's not as direct, and the time scale is way different, but there always seems to be a new crop of investors who rush into the void to buy the sovereign debt of a country like Greece, dismal track record and all.
-
Scott,
What exactly does a DRM copywriter do?
-
Total neophyte here but there are people who comment on Asian markets and say that the lack of a burdensome property tax is the reason why Asian Real estate is in a bubble (you just have to stretch for the initial purchase/your family just has to give it to you -there's no upkeep/nothing compelling you to divest a property that is unused).
Thoughts @ eric?
-
I bought 1/100th of a put option on VRX @ $9 w/ a strike price of $33 expiring on 1/20/2017. Friendly bet with a friend & fellow annual meeting groupie.
Must be nice having access to bespoke options
-
I feel like rating agencies may be better off nationalized. The current setup has the incentives ass backwards.
The market should be privatized not nationalized. The government restricts competition by providing licenses, and then it provides a captive market by requiring firms to use these licensees through an array of statutes and regulations. It doesn't matter whether rating agencies are subscriber pay or issuer pay. A natural duopoly plus government restricted competition and a forced customer base is going to have serious problems.
Not to be adversarial (I have no opinion really, just curious) but why is a government restricted duopoly different from a natural one? Doesn't the government face the same pressure to do something to reign in the natural duopoly as it does to unrestrict the license induced one?
-
Did you guys see his returns?
Since inception net of fees is 5.4% vs 5.1% with the S&P 500. take taxes into consideration and I bet the index wins by a decent margin.
Paul,
Yes, I [for one] noticed that. [However I'm not sure I understand your comments about the S&P 500 - as I understand things, S&P 500 is measured before tax].
Earlier [after my first post in this topic] I looked up the quaterly holdings for SA on Edgar, and what stoke my mind [from a quick view on it] was that XOM was the second biggest position, next to BRK, in the fund. I would really like to read more about that SA thesis [based on value investing [pricing power etc.], but I'm not entitled to, as a non client.
However, that does not change my mind on or my perception of the SA BRK analysis.
Is XOM a relatively recent pickup?
-
Sorry to bring this back from the dead -if the company was capital light and instead of acquisitons it paid out most of it's adjusted net income (buy backs/dividends) -could you use ROIC + Organic rev growth?
And I guess at some point the ROIC would become meaningless if enough buybacks/dividends shrank the "Invested Capital" figure?
-
Not just coat tailing Burry. Saudi Arabia and other "water poor" countries are buying US farmland and shipping the crops home.
Great info, thanks. Land is so ubiquitous it would seem there would be a way to play it if you looked broadly (including internationally) and long term. I do think land values could take a hit in a credit crunch along with everything else, but populations are growing and the true value of basic food/ water commodities (particularly those without a futures market) could be vastly different than nominally believed. I've been thinking of the Saudi purchases along with Canada/ other EMs as partly a currency hedge but that may well be missing the broader picture.
As Mitchell wrote:
"land is the only thing in the world worth working for, worth fighting for, worth dying for, because it's the only thing that lasts"
The nice thing about land is its quantity and general properties are clearly known (unlike precious metals or oil for instance). There will always be less of it per capita until the world's aggregate population starts declining, and at that point we'll have bigger problems to worry about.
I might even go so far as to say that if I had 100 billion and wanted to do no work for the rest of my life, buying land in 3-5 years once the next commodity bull market begins might be the most logical secular trade. But I would definitely wait for a credit crunch to get some good prices.
I am pretty sure if I have 100 billion, SPY will do me just fine for the rest of my life also.
100 billion in most things would equal "being fine" the rest of your life.
-
Would the Gov be able to wipe out current owners and then turn-around and get new investors?
I wonder though isn't this the case with some soverigns -who keeps lending argentina money? :o
-
The filing is as of 12/31/15, so that's before the big 30% drop in BAC.
Its possible that its leftover from investments made in 2012
Scion Asset Management began around Q4 2013.
I think anyone who has read Burry will find that portfolio as stated very disturbing. How can he be long BAC and C now? There is something else going on here.
I have nothing to back this up but I doubt Burry is generating anything close to the returns he did at Scion Capital. This is not an indictment of his investing abilities, it's more a reflection of the market environment post financial crisis. He tends to invest in very distressed equities and resource companies (a la fairfax) which have not done as well as they did pre-crisis.
More generally, it’s interesting to observe all the sub-prime 'heroes' post-crisis. A surprising number have performed poorly over a multi-year period (Bass/Paulson/Whitney/Eisman/Whitebox/etc). As far as I know only Cornwall Capital have maintained their impressive returns.
I still think there are very few investors of Burry’s caliber. He's one of only a handful of managers I would invest with.
Do you mind sharing Cornwall's returns ? Thank you in advance
Cheers
GK
52% gross / 40% net
Where do you find information on cornwall post crisis/do they file?
-
to be fair, that's one of the few things i disagree with CM/WB on.
i've always fallen into the "better to have loved and lost" camp.
This was sort of a continuation/expounding of the “Tell me where I’m going to die, so I won’t go there” Mungerism.
So like "tell me what instances will cause rationality to lapse...anger. resentment. jealousy. Envy."
Those aren't as fun as Love (or gluttony) anywhoo.
-
loved your question, was the first answer I jotted down during q&aI'll post my full-length audio clip as soon as I can figure how to transfer the damn thing to my computer.
Here's the highlight of the meeting for myself:
Me: Hi Charlie, I'm JD from Phoenix. At Berkshire last year you said that rationality was one of the things that was most important to you. What advice can you give to someone who's looking to improve his own rationality?
Charlie Munger: Well I say if you start working at it young and keep doing it until you're as old as I am, that's a very good idea. It's a very good idea, and it's a lot of fun-- particularly if you're good at it. I can hardly think of anything that's more fun. I think I have a lot of cousins in this room, and--and I can say you're on the right track.
You don't have to be the Emperor of Japan to get fun out of rationality. You can avoid a lot of hopeless messes, you can help other people scramble out of their messes, you can be a very constructive citizen if you're always rational. And being rational means you avoid certain things. It's like, I don't want to go where the standard result is awful.
Where is the standard result awful? Try anger. Try resentment. Try jealousy. Envy. All these things are just one-way tickets to hell. And yet some people just wallow in them. And of course it's a total disaster for them and everyone around them.
Wish I knew that was you!
-
What's the thesis/insight behind optimal payments position?
-
Competition Demystified by Greenwald
It's been a while since I've read a business book that was engrossing AND doesn't whiff of survivorship bias.
-
from: (article not particularly relevant)
http://www.bloomberg.com/features/2015-gravity-ceo-dan-price/
Was reading about the guy who pays all his employees a minimum of $70,000 the other day -the article isn't really relevant except for this part:
The day-to-day work at Gravity Payments is pretty unglamorous. Gravity is a middleman between merchants and payment networks, namely Visa and MasterCard, which in turn connect to banks that issue credit cards. If you use a credit card to pay for a Habanero Soft Chicken Burrito at a Taco Time in Seattle, it’s Gravity that helps move $6.29 from your bank to the restaurant’s, keeping a sliver for its service along the way.Gravity’s finances aren’t public, but Price says gross revenue was $150 million in 2014 and will rise to an estimated $200 million in 2015. But Gravity doesn’t get to keep the bulk of that revenue; it must automatically pass most of it on to credit card networks and issuers. The amount the company retains—net revenue, which Price calls “probably a more relevant figure”—was $16 million in 2014, he says. Gravity’s 2014 profit was $2.2 million, Price adds.What exactly do these payment processor companies do for a small business? There seem to be a lot of them popping up in the limelight recently -do they basically handle what a bank might do with regards to merchant acquisition? If a small businesses already has a merchant/business account with a card issuing/merchant acquiring bank are payment processors kind of redundant?
It seems V/MA take relatively little versus the brand power/trust they bring to the table. Other aspects of the payment value chain seem to have "fatter" share of the interchange fee (thus are more susceptible to disruption). And even then it would necessitate a "capacity to suffer" in order for Goog/AAPL/AMZN to get to critical mass. I think AMZN might be the only one who's proven that willingness...
-
Anyone read the book yet?
I just bought it for Audibles -gonna start on it tonight.
Edit:won't let me access til 14th
-
Whenever I think about this issue I always go back to ERICOPOLY's discussion on this board of how much a rational person would pay for a "magic hat," in relation to valuing Fairfax.
Can you post/link the magic hat discussion? Sounds interesting enough.
Sorry to revive an old post but I found this tangent interesting enough to (hopefully) dig it out -if this isn't the reference then maybe someone can point me to it but I found it very enlightening:
Starts from there and goes on a bit.
-
Forgot to mention that no one is talking about NGL's or natural gas liquids which is a significant by-product of these oil shale wells and currently produced at around 1 million barrels per day in the U.S. or a significant pie of the 9 million produced each day and a much bigger pie of endless and miraculous shale oil.
This is not crude oil but, propane, butane, pentanes and others. The price for NGL's has pretty much collapsed and other than for some blending, it does not replace crude oil necessary to produce gasoline, kerosene, diesel and heating oil.
So when companies talk about the oil price, they conveniently avoid talking about the price that they are getting for roughly 25% of their production or much lower than WTI. It would be interesting to see what pricing assumptions are made for that stuff in their IRR.
Ethylene, plastic and I guess lighter producers are huge beneficiaries of what is going on.
Cardboard
I work at a place that cracks Ethylene -it's interesting a lot of people around here were nervous about the price of oil falling but the division has made the approximately the same amount of money (not much more or less) despite the volatile oil price. There seems to be a boom though and alot of plants are making long term plans to expand capacity (I think a huge swath is expected to come online 2017-2019). These are somewhat longer dated projects because the permitting/building takes a while...
-
Next, FB, the only one that actually makes money. The stock is presently about $85 a share, and with profits of approx. $1/share, P/E ratio of 85. This is the cream of the crop for social media stocks but shareholders won't make any money going forward as FB doesn't pay any dividends. Again in order for them to justify their mkt cap, they will need to increase profits 4-5 times and the more they try to increase profits, the more users they lose. FB is a fad in my opinion. Hardcore users will stay on it but the average person will get bored and move on. I shut my account 3 years ago and would never go back on.
I've read in the AMZN thread that if amazon tries to take a bigger share of profits they lose customers -I can follow that reasoning although I don't necessarily agree. But I don't think this is true for facebook. The appearance of ads doesn't materially impact the user experience and people tend to leave because they think they are spending too much time on it (and invariably, atleast in the case of my network/circle of friends they always come back).
This is probably one of the strongest network effect companies around. I think the fact that people have to deactivate or shutdown their account just to breakaway speaks to the stickiness. I never shut down my yahoo email (haven't logged into it in nearly a decade?) And my myspace account is presumably still floating around in the ether...
Anyhow I'm usually behind the curve as far as social networks/new techie stuff is concerned so take this with a grain of salt.
-
I've been looking at FOX and I think their sports networks, the most valuable long-term asset in my opinion, is not as great as they seem. They have long-term exclusive contracts with every major sports team in the city-channels they own, thus they have the same re-negotiation risk as EA and every other company that deals with the major professional sports leagues. Most of these contracts are 10-25 years in length so if debundling occurs before this time, they could be on the hook for major expenses that will be difficult to pay for. An example is Time Warner's $8b+, 25-year contract to distribute Dodgers games. They now want $4-$5/mth per user but no one else seems willing to pay. I think sports may not be as valuable as others presumed and Fox could be facing a decade of problems trying to recoup their expenses.
I think FOX is more dependent on the current bundling business model than even VIAB.
Does anyone have a source that summarizes Fox's sports tv deal commitments? Here's the best I've found so far:
http://www.whatyoupayforsports.com/category/regional-sports-networks/
Everybody vs. SportsNet LA (2014-present)
In January 2013, Time Warner Cable signed a 25-year, $8.35 billion deal for the media rights to the Los Angeles Dodgers taking over from Fox. TWC announced that it would launch a channel, SportsNet LA that would be devoted to the Dodgers rather than merging it with its existing Time Warner Cable SportsNet network that airs the Lakers and the Galaxy.
And while Time Warner Cable would carry the network, other providers in Southern California refused among them DirecTV and Comcast.
Dodgers fans who weren’t in TWC’s footprint, about 70% of the market went the most of the 2014 season without seeing the team on local TV, at least those games that weren’t aired on ESPN and Fox. In the final week of the season, the Dodgers put its games on an over the air station to allow fans to watch them.
So far, there’s been no luck in getting DirecTV or other providers to pick up SportsNet LA and there seems to be no end in sight to this dispute.
eh, I feel that's more a case of TWC paying a hefty premium for the rights and wanting to monetize by creating a separate network.
I went to UT Austin and a cursory glance at the Dodgers thing you mentioned reminds me of this:
I'm not sure its particularly comparable but It seem like there isn't enough content to warrant that price on a standalone basis if you're not already getting it via being in TWC's footprint.
-
wouldn't have met his wife and started a family if he didn't first become Mormon..... also interseting... he is a mormon
(at 4:54) he says "that wouldn't have had happened had the first one not happened". I didn't get what he meant by that sentence.
Buying vacation homes in the US
in General Discussion
Posted
oh man your description of the Keys sounds legit, never even considered it previously :D