bizaro86

ABNB calls. I have a couple of geographically distributed airbnbs, and Q1 was as crazy as I've ever seen it. Other hosts said the same. I got 3x more than same dates in 2019 for some listings. I think they're going to blow out earnings, but I'm a wuss, so I bought the calls for later in the year so if I'm wrong I'll still have time value to limit my losses. The market is expecting huge volatility - short term options are very, very expensive.

Do you think BRK is a good inflation hedge? Pros: railway and some other businesses (eg See's) have pricing power Cons: little fixed rate debt to get less valuable. Utility cash flows are a fixed % return on capex, but paid in depreciated dollars. The longer duration insurance float is a risk - they took premiums upfront in past year dollars and will pay the claims at higher inflated prices.

I'm not an American taxpayer, so Munis don't interest me. My only current fixed income is a big slug of CSU.DB (exchange traded debenture on the TSX) trades at $145 per $100 of par value. Coupon is inflation rate linked at Canada's CPI + 6.5%, maturity in 2040. Only reason it trades this low is that they have the option to call it with 5 years notice. But they haven't even though it would have been economic for them to do so since roughly 1 minute after they issued it. Basically you're counting on John Leonard continuing to treat everyone at least fairly, and if he doesn't you'll still get a decent fixed income return at current inflation. Payer is CSU, which has one of the longest threads on the board. I think it may be difficult to buy as a non Canadian, and of course it is very illiquid.

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I actually quite like their app. Stable, fast intuitive. It can handle everything I need including option combos and is less complicated than TWS.

I think a big part of it is an owner mindset. Murray Edwards is a low cost operator and has become a billionaire by purchasing cheap oil and gas assets and sweating them. That mindset has become culturally ingrained in CNQ, basically owner operator culture. Re: CVE/SU, I have less insight there. Both (especially CVE) have been on the leading edge technologically, but I'm not sure that is a big asset in this industry. The barriers to entry tend to be based on land ownership not technology ownership. CVE management has also turned over basically 100% since I left the industry, and new management does seem better than previous management, so my thoughts may not be relevant. SU is probably the "grand dame" of the industry, and CVE and SU both have better oil sands land bases than CNQ. I have no educated opinion on SU management.

CNRL has the best management in the basin, imo. I worked for a competitor for a long time, and the field I worked on was about 2/3 CNRL and 1/3 my firm. They had twice as much production/wells, but less staff at every relevant position (engineers, operators, geologists, etc). Their well results were comparable to ours holding geology/secondary recovery constant (part of my job was competitor tracking). They are also value investors in the "buy low and never sell" mold. I think they are the natural owners of most assets in the basin, and I keep their shares as my long term O&G exposure. I'm always amused that everyone calls them "Canadian Natural" which is their strongly stated preference. I actually had a regulator send me comments on a document I had submitted that referred to them saying, "They prefer to be called 'Canadian Natural'." I responded that I had used the legal name of their operating entity and since they weren't a party to the application their opinion wasn't relevant. Just shows the level of regulatory capture they have from being the biggest in the basin. I was pissed off at the time because they delayed my application over that and I had followed the rules correctly by using the full legal name of the operating entity in question (a subsidiary of CNRL).

TZOO

I posted a similar thread a couple of years ago that generated some discussion of different names: The one that might be an interesting add here is SBUX. PCYO is sort of the Denver version of JOE, no dividends and likely 10%+ going forward. AER might be interesting. Russia issue punished stock in the short term, long term compounding seems likely.

Thanks for sharing this! I find this quite interesting. High quality packaged food in a growing emerging market, Mexico is probably also a net beneficiary from near-shoring and any move away from globalization. Decent dividend yield, reasonable history of growth. Biggest risk would probably be not being able to pass along input inflation. I didn't know they were publicly traded, but am familiar with the products. I quite liked a number of their Herdez branded sauces/salsas when I was in Mexico a number of years ago. Previously I was only able to find them in the small/local Hispanic grocer, but lately I've noticed a number of Herdez choices in my regular grocery store choices, taking share from US based salsa brands, probably on a perception of authenticity/quality. I'm not sure how meaningful that will be but it doesn't hurt. I've also observed they have significant share of shelf space in the large format stores in Mexico (Wal-Mart/Mega) for their Herdez brand. I didn't know until you posted that they own the McCormick brand in Mexico, which has a much wider variety and higher market share (imo based on shelf space) than the US equivalent brand. Valuation seems reasonable and dividend doesn't hurt, down significantly recently. Curious how you came across them?

I thought this substack piece was pretty interesting: https://turningroughstones.substack.com/p/how-45-different-best-ideas-played?s=r The author went through the 2021 "Best Ideas" contest on Seeking Alpha. He excluded a few things (warrants, crypto). I'd probably have kept the warrants and excluded the crypto personally, as my investable universe doesn't include crypto but does include warrants. Contests aren't necessarily a great source of ideas, but I did think it was interesting how he broke the results down by style. It shouldn't surprise this board that value was the winning style, and given the market in 2021 commodities were next. I would have thought growth type opportunities would be better for a contest type situation, as they usually have a higher underlying volatility. I suppose that might make them more likely to win but lower overall average returns. Although he declared the winner a value special situation/oil play (UNTC), which is basically the opposite of a growth stock as they're actively liquidating... I also thought it was interesting (although not especially surprising) that he concluded less popular authors had better returns.

Not Spek, but I'm a long term ROST holder (and adding below $90). I think management is quite a bit better than TJX, and I expect better growth from all the whitespace on their map.

I left a sarcastic response earlier, but in all seriousness I think Reed Hastings qualifies. First he took video stores DTC and scaled it for cash flow. Then he took that cash flow and spent it buying content for streaming, inventing a new category. Then he realized the studios would figure that out and started producing internally. I looked at Netflix when streaming started and figured the tech barriers were too high and passed. Oops. The only strategic mistake I see is a lack of M&A. They should have bought more established content. If they had bought Lucasfilm and MGM they'd be in a better position.

Coast Wholesale Appliances got taken over (or under, imo) by the majority shareholder. They have a great business model (I've been a long time customer for my rental properties) and had lots of high ROIC growth ahead of them. The valuation didn't reflect the business quality, so even though I made money I was pretty annoyed as I think it was a compounder. The one that really chapped me was Canadream. They are an RV rental business in Western Canada. Tons of demand, and they were expanding every year (again at high ROIC). Tripled in the time I owned it (under 3 years) but the takeover was still at a low multiple. They had a huge runway, and were improving utilization every year. Plus it was such a capital intensive business and such a small company that they had great reinvestment characteristics, so again a compounder. In both cases I think I lost a compounder the market hadn't recognized early in the growth phase, so the one time boost was almost certainly outweighed by losing the long term performance. Canadream especially I think would have easily been a 10 bagger.

Maybe if someone wasn't buying all the volume the rest of us would be able to get a few more shares down around that $10-11 range.

If you're seriously considering buying real estate outside of the Canadian city where you live I'd consider Calgary. It's cheap compared to most of the US, and VERY, VERY cheap compared to Toronto/Vancouver. When you add oil at $85 the near term picture looks pretty good. Also, if you ever plan to do the "leveraged recap" plan mentioned above mortgages i Alberta are non-recourse as long as you don't get mortgage insurance. But 20% down in Alberta is probably the same $ value as 5% down in TO. Since you're still in Canada it'll be easier to get a mortgage with your existing banking/credit info. I'm biased (I own quite a bit of Calgary RE) but I also haven't been this excited about the setup for RE here since 2009.

Spent some time looking at this, and will answer my own question for the benefit of others. It is MUCH more user friendly than screener.co in terms of entering data. I've become used to the idiosyncrasies of screener.co, but after 5 minutes I'm probably just as fast with this. Plus its considerably cheaper. So I've cancelled my screener.co and bought the Tikr annual subscription instead. The one piece of feedback I have is that for some screener variables CAGR isn't a good metric, and instead a trailing average is better (and that's something screener.co does do). For example, I often screen on Return on Equity. And I like the 5 or 10 year average ROE quite a bit better than the prior year or any CAGR based metric.

Has anyone used both this and screener.co? I have had a screener.co subscription for a number of years, but am thinking this might be a good replacement with some added functionality. Anyone used both?

Can one have a vision fund without being a visionary?

I dont think inflation helps utilities at all. The primary source if value is the regulated rate base, which is denominated in USD and guaranteed a return. Inflation makes the real value of that regulated rate base smaller.

I'm not saying they did well- anyone who owned AOL at the peak should have sold immediately. But AOL shareholders ended up with a lot more money than they would have otherwise had. Some of their losses got transferred to to Time Warner shareholders. It seems to me that if you have very overvalued stock the best capital allocation is to sell as much of it as possible. A stock acquisition is a backdoor way of doing that.

I think Berkshire has mostly not issued stock because the shares have mostly been fairly valued to undervalued during their history. There have been a few times they got pretty high and iirc thats when he did stock acquisitions (ie BNSF). A stock acquisition can be very good for shareholders if done with overvalued paper. For example, Steve Case doing the Warner deal may have generated more value for AOL shareholders than any other corporate action ever. The value was all transferred from Time Warner shareholders.

I have cable broadband, but would switch to the telephone company broadband in a heartbeat if it was cheaper. They both laid fibre in my neighbourhood, but so far every 2 years when our deal is up my wife calls and says we'll switch if they don't give us another deal and they do every time. We've lived here for 12 years and never switched or paid full price.

The Canadian brokers all sell order flow - so your order is sitting at a HFT awaiting a match.

Yeah, if you're planning on doing more than one trade outside of N. America it probably makes sense to sign up for IB.