cameronfen

I don't buy it. Both companies went into conservatership and the government spent 238 billion dollars backstopping both businesses. This doesn't include the more than 100 billion dollars that were spent buying debt and their mortgages. At the peak their combimed market cap came out to somewhere around 170 to 200 billion dollars and combined they were no where near that value during the recession. At the time, the New York Times said this bailout "could turn out to be the biggest and costiest bailout of private companies ever." Sure the government made out like bandits after the fact but thats like punishing WEB for quadrupling his money bailing out BAC. The reason the government didn't take a 100% share is not because they couldn't people would have sold their shares for pennies on the dollar, but because it reeks of socialism when government nationalizes a business and thats not politically feasible. Thus I think it was well understood that the government owned the thing. Maybe they shouldn't have rewritten the contract, I dont know about the thesis on the thing, but I think everyone was aware that this was basically a nationalization in everything but name.

I'm not invested in Fannie and Freddie for a variety of reasons, so I don't know the intracacies, but they would have gone bankrupt if the government didn't bail them out. In what world *should* (not saying what will happen as the government can do stupid things to attract political support) government make whole people who purchased pre-bankruptcy equity. If the government was any other market participant the preferred and the common would already be worth nothing.

I don't want to be an a-hole, but the average wealth does not change when you have one guy with a billion dollars and 9 others with zero. This still averages out to be $100 million each.

I think even more conservatively, I only buy options to get more leverage and never write uncovered calls. I can never have negative equity and that is why its easier to sleep at night. I may try a little levereging on merger arbitrage plays like buffett but I would not be willing to take a morgage on an asset highly correlated to stocks to buy more stocks.

May not be worth 35 billion I have no idea but it certainly has a moat. It is known as the space for tech start up coworking space. Part of the rent pays for the networking oportunities. Bc it is known as the place for tech tech people go there and thus it has network effects. This differentiates it from traditional temp offices. Is it a really impressive moat? Idk. But it can certainly charge more than regus.

I have decent amount of expeirience with deep neural nets but mostly in LSTMs and not conv nets. My friend has a ai trading strat that is incredibly successful, but I told him if I worked,in the area I'd find something else. PM me if interested in discussing more.

Generally, it's stupid to stupid to subsidize domestic businesses (generally...). Why? When you trade with someone else both sides win. The seller because they can sell above cost and the buyer because you would only buy if the thing was more valuable than how much it costs. Subsidies are a tax on the domestic population, for the benefit of international buyers of your good (through lowering of your products price. Thus basically you are taking money from your own citizens and giving money to other countries.

Its been working for a while I think. But ya they fixed the google thing.

Outline.com. It works for wsj, seeking alpha. Probably VIC. And anything else you can think of.

I think there is a high probability that Tencent is undervalued. Here is a post by Saber Capital (I think John posts here but idk the name): http://sabercapitalmgt.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/Tencents-Wide-Moat-Manual-of-Ideas-2017.pdf Mainly compare the ARPU versus facebook. Obviously they are different businesses, but Wechat may be even better business than fb. The average person in China spends half their time on the internet on Tencent properties. That's not being monetized hardly at all compared to western standards.

I guess I should add, low correlation to the actual real estate because a lot of times in these remote areas this is the only lodging that oil workers can get. Much, much more correlated with oil prices.

Relatively large company for this thread. TSE:BDI - Black Diamond Group (different than the ski equipment company). Note: I am lazy so I am writing this up off the top of my head so the numbers may be a little off. I got this idea after seeing oil spike and looking at other oilfield accommodation companies (i.e. Civeo). Basically, BDI provides (basically monopoly lodging) to oil E & P companies in remote areas in the oil sands. They have another segment that does modular unit rentals (i.e. mobile first aid trucks, mobile schools, etc.), but the lodging business is the main driver of the thesis. I've listened to Imperial Oils conference call, they are looking to go from 180k barrels a day to 240k barrels a day (a 33% increase). Suncor is looking to increase FCF by 500 million a year (a 16%) increase. The local economies in Northern Alberta's construction business seem to be booming based on Western One results (another equipment leasing company). Western One attributes this to increased oil activity. At it's peak, BDI had a market cap of 1.5 billion, currently the stock is trading at 150 million. It has slightly more rooms than it did at its peak (roughly 15k rooms), and it bought another line of business, less correlated (but still correlated) with oil from Western One (another CoBF thread) when Western One had liquidity issues. Currently, EBITDA is around 35 million and total EV is roughly 250 million. In 2014 when everyone and their brother were extracting oil from the oil sands, this company had EBITDA of 150 million (and a market cap of 1.5 billion). If you ignore Britco (the business BDI bought which has EBITDA 20-30 million a year), on a per room basis BDI is valued at 16k EV. Civeo the market leader (and also way down from it's peak) is trading at an EV/room of 30k and applying Civeo's multiple to BDI would result in the equity going to 370 million (and getting Britco for free). Civeo is the market leader, but its purchase of Noralta was at an even higher EV/room multiple (although Noralta seemed to be doing very well compared to both BDI and Civeo, but is also half BDI's accommodation division's size). I think using the Noralta multiple, BDI should have an EV of something like 860 million. Now BDI may have the most attractive relative valuation, but if the market returns to 2014 levels, all these companies should be 5-10 baggers. Managment is decent to good in my opinion (see the Britco acquisition as well as a requirement to own a multiple of earnings as shares in the company), but I didn't investigate that thoroughly and would be interested to hear others thoughts. Other companies to look for include Horizon North Logistics.

Long ago when I actually ran, my 10k personal record was 34.14: http://gocaltech.com/sports/track/2009-10/releases/T-FRecordFalls_0910