dealraker

From chips to tariffs I'm expectin' the fixer to fix, packpeddlin' moonwalk style - saving face maybe? In Monopoly you often get to go back to start, but we get to call them "deals." Didn't say anything about disaster, and budget deficits are ignored by nearly all investors including me. The US Treasury bond market is Trump's adversary but he is outrageously bold and fearless with lenders. I would even suggest that this is the most overlooked potential economic issue in the US today. Trump has never feared debt or its owners and he's always been successful at making a deal with these lenders that gives him benefit and creditors the shaft. Those skills put to work "for" the US? I think so, but we will see. Now that's where the risk lies.

Trump is now empowered far more than any other in my lifetime, by a huge margin. It is 100% his game and his score, no one else's. You are obviously almost every day slamming clearly the absolute massive literally incredible successes this man has achieved so let's not do the chicken-little and cry to mamma that something is pathetic little sleepy Joe's fault. Trump is doubling his net worth about every few months, the guy is damn good at deals - deals that deal the good cards to him. Let's celebrate this too, we all know that you especially want Trump to get fabulously wealthy. Yes Cubs I assure you, it is 100% about money. I'm looking after mine, I hope you are doing the same.

Biden? What's the reality check? What's his role today, what's his relevance?

While I do not regularly read the politics thread I have read this morning many of the posts. What Trump does so successfully is gain followers and believers...and "haters" as we say...while distracting (not necessarily on purpose) people with his impulsive rants and random conflicts. Along the way he is incredibly good at finding financial survival, crypto is the wildly successful game this go-round. Often the game he plays isn't much ethical or legal, but that isn't important as it just tends to work well for him. The problem for us as a country is that while Trump vastly meets and magnifies the needs of those with life-script, even life-defining grievances (over a decade of many posting on COBF is a clear indication of this), he is terrible at basic fundamental business and finance. Trump loves spending and he has zero discipline as to saving or being efficient. DOGE is meaningless. My view is that the budget deficit percentage is now heading towards 9% under Trump and it will get worse. I also believe that while Trump today is still doing his dance of creating events that stir and attract attention, the consequences of his deal-making will control him ever increasingly over his tenure. Trump is doing what he has always done, there's really nothing new about it...he's just now nearly the entire focus of the world. I don't think anything we'd actually hope to improve is getting improved by Trump. Of course tons of people (evidenced right here on COBF) think when Trump uses his gravely voice to rant that whatever his topic is the problem is simply solved completely. Yet you'll be discussing the same issues in the future as in the past, nothing is getting changed. Trump has now financially survived. I'll give him credit for his unorthodox method of doing that, it something I relate to, something dear to me actually. Having grown up without parents in a family of multiple suicides and literally changed for the worse (collapsed is a better term) family business settings, I continually can't fathom how I got to where I am now. What you focus on grows. For us with Trump that's going to be conflict and impulsive actions that result in chaos and conflict. Yes as Cubs reminds us endlessly this is absolutely what we voted for. Let's see how much better off we are whenever Trump is no longer controlling all our lives at all times.

Yes.

Keep in mind I've owned Erie for a while. I am literally clueless on the business model, I've not been able to get my brain to figure it out. I consider Erie sort of an outlier from the brokers, somewhat similar but way different too. My former business partner who runs a business that primarily uses Erie is the only reason I bought Erie. It was his idea and he's done so well in the insurance business it simply astounds me.

I think it was March of 2023 or so and here we were discussing the brokers and their expensive levels. I mentioned that I'd been put in charge of a family trust for a few years, that I was putting 25% of the money in AJG and 75% or so (I don't know if I mentioned percentages or not) in Berk. AJG was $185 and Berk was a bit over $300. Both turned out well so far but buying AJG did not "feel" good at all, it was very expensive in my head compared to Berk -and Berk seemed a good buy to me. Turns out AJG probably wasn't expensive and that's sort of the picture that repeatedly slaps me upside the head...that the brokers aren't as expensive as we think. Of course I'm especially tainted in that in the 1994 era when I got invested in the brokers the PE's were far lower than what's developed since then. I'm not sure, other than some major industry change or crisis, that we can expect those prices to return.

A brief summary of the negative view of Erie. Seems pretty logical that something must change. https://www.sprucepointcap.com/research/erie-indemnity-company

This is all out of my ability to even guess. I am reading...reading what others with some credibility have to say.

For what it is worth Jeffrey Gundlach is in the camp of fearing the restructuring of longer Treasury bonds by simply lowering their coupon. He says stay away from any longer US bonds with a high interest rate. My view is to forget thinking there are rules, standards, or even laws when you have our current guv. Nothing of the past is necessarily relevant and neither are the traditional interpretations of contracts.

Yes...this is my view Ralf, that the real excitement is going to come within Treasury debt.

This morning I added to WTW and AON. Flush with cash and cash-to-come from a real estate deal closing next week, I added significantly to WTW just below $300 and AON just below $330.

I'm a tad annoyed with what seems to me (and I'm probably WRONG) an endless support for stock prices and bottom calling. Regardless I did add some to Alphabet and Meta recently and today added to Willis (WTW) and Aon (AON). My business partners and I had - outside the operating businesses - bought 450 acres of industrial land with what we thought would likely be a ten year workout. And we've already gotten rock solid deposits and contracts to close now within a week - surprisingly/astonishingly selling it all in just over a year. So relative to my overall picture I am flushed with cash. I absolutely enjoy owning certain businesses. Today I received the book from Lars on Fairfax and I'm so excited I just about peed in my pants! I have a long-long- and longer multifaceted connection to Fairfax and this experience gives endless good feeling to me.

+10.

"Come on Jay, you know my successful sell is to constantly act like a deranged dumbass, it is your job to bail me out dude."

Choosing who to read as to COBF has been the best decision I've made. The posters who dominated the climate, their hyper-sensitive grievance rage, on COBF well over a decade ago still dominate today...or at least did a couple of months ago when I read the last of those posts. My view is the attempts of these posters towards macho alpha presentation is actually a fragile frailness and wide open obvious panic when anyone disagrees with them. What I still read today, but will gradually work on avoiding, is the endless responses to those posts. The video of Charlie Munger discussing Donald Trump is simply my view, nothing more and nothing less. DJT's incredible talent at gaining attention is a net negative to business and investing leading to a sad and awful decade plus of wasted world energy and focus. It matters little what someone's goal is when that person has no skills towards attaining that goal and surrounds himself with even more inferior helpers. Most days of the week I leave my home to engage in volunteer work. What do I encounter? I exist in a world of people with mostly similar views, that others are the problem...that government is the problem...that Trump and only Trump can fix it. Yes I live in what is described as the most Trump support area of the US of A. But I also see an incredible dependence of these people upon the very government they claim to dislike. As I've said before, it is believed that Trump will greatly harm others while helping "us". That's without a doubt the most generalized irrational thinking in my lifetime.

A little chat from Richard Bernstein who I have followed for some years:

Yes.

I think we can assume for the next good while that railroad costs overall aren't headed too much lower. Yes OR's can go down with more freight, but it is - and honestly has been for some time - simply the NEW NEW THING where if we are going to make any money owning railroads then volumes are going to need to increase. Buybacks at any price and cuts to all things all times simply ain't gunna cut the mustard any longer. Next door to me here in the Lexington, NC area the hump yard that NSC shut down completely is continually more active with more employees. It was just as all the local employees said, most likely nothing but management making the numbers for a compensation period and not sustainable.

Yes...if you believe that humans, STB, and congress are capable of acting rationally. Just imagine though the irrational reaction we'll get from that one god-awful derail and all the tragedy it brings.

At some point there will be some type of somewhat increase (I obviously love the "some" word) of freight resurgence that notches up with a bit of sustainability. Right now there's a small increase but that's of course the beat-the-tariff game. I see a bottomless 2nd or 3rd quarter of rail freight - or something close. The industrial revolution to the tech revolution or whatever I'm trying to say, it just seems freight has had a decade of stalling growth for the most part. The rail co's have made the numbers by all kinds of goodies within and many probably didn't do a whole lot of good for the long run for shareholders. Driverless trucks? Yea, I'd surely believe they come it seems logical to think of this as a significant negative for the railroads. Still, aside from even that, everything is cyclical and cycles last a lot longer in many cases than people tend to think. So freight, the type the railroads handle, comes back? Or we hope it does, or whatever. It just seems the stuff the railroads deal with is in sludge mode, stuck at a level that suggests more isn't necessarily needed? I've thought for years that trucks would be recognized for the massive damage they do to roads, that taxes would go much higher, that some attempt to move hauling more to the railroads would come. The experience of driving with truck smothered highways isn't something most would find positive. Yep, things associated with more use of the railroads just has not arrived yet. Will it? Volumes pretty flat for a long, long, long time.

A little more target for our very special gang to assault: Howard Marks: Just a couple of months ago, the U.S. economy was performing well, the outlook was positive, the stock market was at an all-time high, and there was much talk about American exceptionalism. Now, if Trump’s tariffs are put into effect, the U.S. economy is likely to experience a recession sooner than otherwise would have been the case, higher inflation, and extensive dislocation. Even if the tariffs are reversed entirely, it’s unlikely the other nations will dismiss this incident and conclude that they have nothing to worry about in terms of relations with the U.S.

Cod Liver Oil, I agree verbatim with what Eldad says above.

Interestingly Trump is getting weaker sooner than I thought. My guess previously was his peak power would come about halfway through his term, then events would whallop his goofball school kid presentations. But I'm thinking now with him caving so soon on this that his toughness is far less than what I thought, that events are gaining control. There will probably be setbacks, but when we look back my guess is Trump's peak power was about election time or shortly thereafter. Too many opponents for Trump to handle, most don't even know who he is. Life is great, if you can stand it!

I guess now all those businesses that were being "forced" (seriously LOL!) to instantly move to the US actually don't need to move to the US after all. That was quick. Probably why none of them were planning to do so anyway.