yadayada

Good question. I guess I was thinking about servicers throughout the supply chain which was probably lazy on my part. Macro services pipelines so they are less directly effected by oil price drops but they are still impacted. The companies that I would expect to be hit hardest are the upstream servicers. Especially the ones servicing shale companies. yeah plus some of those firms also have a good part of their business in LNG or maintenance. Or in enterprises case only a small % in oil revenue.

The way I see it, if you are like 95% invested, there is always some stock in your portfolio that is up a little. So let's say you put 10% in something, and it is now up 10%, but the rest is down (unlikely if you bought cheap enough), you can always sell this one if you encounter a homerun type opportunnity. And now you will have over 15% available! And you don't have to worry much about selling the cheapest stock. Because they are least likely to go down as most negative events are priced in already. And if it is likely that a market crash will ruin your portfolio, or performance, you did not do a good job at buying cheap enough.

Honestly, yes. And it is not like the rules are well enforced anyway... They caught cohen practically redhanded and he still seems to get away with it. Just seems like a waste of energy and government money to chase after them. You want to play the stock market game? That is part of it. Don't like it? Buy an index fund. Allthough they could make a rule where insiders would have to make their trades public within a day or so. That way they cannot dump large amounts to unsuspecting outsiders. I think it is better to have too little regulation then too much regulation.

natural selection at it's best! It is funny how we say, well yeah natural selection filtered a certain gene! that is natural! Or you see a coyote eating the insides of a zebra that is still a live, and people are like 'ssssh don't interfere, it's nature!' . But somehow when some idiot is too lazy to work but rather gets good feelings or easy money and someone else takes advantage of that, we suddenly feel the need to interfere.

I don't think this deflation is bad. It leaves more money to spend on other things. So that should be good for the economy. The bad deflation is usually caused by too much debts, a failing financial system and is a sympton of what is bad. By that logic, a deflation in the price of computers should also be bad.

service firms people....

I think it has more to do with enourmous amount of money being pumped in the system. That basicly has nowhere to go. Interest rates can be low without that. So That is probably why it is not correlated.

Hawaiian air was a good one at 14$. Not so sure at 20$. They even have some sort of rare moat within the airline business!

grateful for my really big the nice weather today.

You always see that in markets. Just like the stockmarket. There is some news coming out that is basicly old news, and stock still pops or drops. Even though odds of it happening was close to 100% based on public information.

yeah i did... All I get is error's. I am completely clueless with this type of stuff.

All i get is error :/. I want to track the price of these: http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=OUTR160115C00050000 In google docs. What is the command for that? I want to punch my monitor at this point.

looked at it, and looks cheap. I cannot find my notes. There was something about it that could give some upside.. It looks like FCF is also higher then earnings. Allthough debt is over 10m$ and earnings are choppy.

Good blog but sort of disagree with him here though. Not sure if I like his logic and his example there. I think it is a bit too abstract and he is jumping to conclusions: http://www.philosophicaleconomics.com/hard-money-deflation-or-economic-stagnation/ Thoughts?

I think evolution designed people for being very efficient in small groups, not in large groups. Evolution did not technically design anything, but you get my drift. If you have a small group of people with some very smart people in that group who listen to the smart ones, then that group is going to be very efficient. But with larger groups there will be more divide. That is why the army has such strict discipline and is not a democracy. And that is why democracy works better in some scandinavian countries where tough decisions are handed over to small groups of highly educated people. It is very interesting to think about. We could probably fine tune democracy a lot better if a lot of people at least realized this concept and the importance of knowing your circle of competence.

OPRX is another one. Huge operating leverage.

Outerwall LEAPS

None of this changes the fact that competition, either from new businesses or existing ones, should erode profit margins from record levels unless the required return on equity rises. That is not how oligopoly's and duopoly's work. Just look at companies like micron or western digital. Sometimes fiercely competitive industries evolve into not so competitive industries. This is because there used to be some weak players. And the strong players were preying on the weak ones with price wars. But as soon as the weak ones are gobbled up, there is no incentive to continue price wars. A little bit of market share might be gained, but at a huge cost. Sometimes this evolutionairy process can take decades. My reasoning is that we are seeing more and more of this. Barriers of entry for new players and the fact that everyone loses with price wars increases profit margins. Only thing that can disturb this is if some new technology comes in from the outside that is not bought out.

Having good capital allocators in charge is a really nice hedge against market downturns. If the value is not impaired, they can take advantage of the situation by buying back stock. So in that case, down turns of the stock market are actually a positive for long term holders, as it will enhance your long term returns.

You could make the argument that in order to develer, Japan and Europe actually need to print money. Ray Dalio makes this exact argument. print enough money to get GDP to grow at a good rate, and keep interest rates below that GDP growth rate...and over a 10 year period or so, if you're lucky, you will have a "beautiful deleverging". That being said, i'm not guaranteeing this will happen. Plenty opportunities for road bumps going forward. If Japan can beautifully delever (ie no precipitous fall in its currency or bonds) at 260% debt to GDP, taking in only something like 12% of GDP in taxes and spending double that currently - I'll shit myself. Beautifully delevering would seem to work better if the other major economies did not also have to do the same. Its like a druggy going to a rehab clinic when the nurses there are also druggies trying to detox and the doctor is a pusher...its probably not going to work as well as a clean rehab clinic is it? And in the case of Japan, its going to be trying to do that in a drug infested rehab clinic for a few decades. Anything is possible, sure - but the odds of a successful exit seem so minute to me that they are not worth considering. So not that I am an expert, but with those numbers, its over for Japan - they are going to default on their bonds (direct default) or on their currency (indirect default). I hope that Japan will end horribly, and will be a wake up call for the rest of the world.

If you look at schiller's PE, you are basicly saying that history will repeat itself. Which is not a bad argument. But you can also easily argue that this time is different. Competitive dynamic could be different (higher profit margins due to consolidation), and more conglomerates. Also Asia, and the rapid rise of the middle class world wide. We are not just selling most goods in Europe and the US now, but also various asian and south american countries. In the last 60 years, there has not been a case where over a billion people are working their ass off to get to the middle class and higher. They were mostly held back by opressive regimes and communism. I don't think there will be another lost decade.

Some of their arguments are really aweful. I can see how copper and steel could come to an end though. But extrapolating on the past seems stupid. Especially with oil. If you see almost 20% of earth's population being lifted in the middleclass, going through an enourmous economic boom, I think you can say that that is something that has not really happened before. I don't think it is even comparable to Japan. If you want to compare it to Japan, the average chinese person has not nearly reached the levels of wealth the average Japanese person reached at the height of it's boom.

Thanks for the PDF link. A few problems I have with the libertarian views of completely free markets (allthough they do make a lot of good points as well) are: -Somehow unions are bad. But corporations should not be restricted by government at all. But it seems Unions usually arise when corporations start to have too much leverage. And so they are easily a result of a free market as well. Yet in a libertarian eyes, Unions are bad. -They fail to take into account ignorance, fear and greed. They make sort of the same mistake as socialists. Socialists forget that humans generally think of themselves first. And Libertarians fail to see that humans generally short cut their decisions, and are very much affected by fear and greed. For example if you don't insure bank deposits, you can easily have some crash, or rumor cause a collapse of the financial system. Even when there is not much wrong with it... Same with regulation, and things like patents. I fail to see how patents would be a net negative. And certain regulations are good. Allthough most of current regulation is bad in my opinion. It also seems that you should have some sort of safety net. Sometimes people's skills become obsolete. It doesn't hurt if there is some sort of safety net to transition them to a new profession.. Finally they ignore the problem of politics. You cannot study economics without taking politics into consideration. As long as politicians have huge incentives to promise 'free' stuff, you will have a problem with government debt. And thus you will need a printing press. Unless there is something that keeps government spending in check.

all the low cost stuff will be drilled out though at this pace within a few years. Meanwhile demand steadily goes up. Only need a very small shortage and you get a price spike. And unlike most other commodities, demand is pretty stable for oil, and you cannot recycle the stuff.

anyone? Something somewhat recent that does not ramble on for 800 pages. TIA