Pelagic

Greater penetration across demographics. The firearm industry is making a concerted effort to attract women and millennials to the sport as well as groups where gun ownership isn't traditionally part of their culture. Essentially, we're seeing a change in the industry from the older white male demographic that has historically enjoyed firearms to a more inclusive slice of the American population. One gun is like one pair of shoes, you don't have just one. Gun owners love to show off their newest acquisition and even if it only gets 20 rounds through it all year it will be in their gun safe as part of their collection. Guns aren't terribly expensive and a day at the range with friends can be thought of like going golfing. Gun owners want to have a collection of "clubs" to take to the range with them and shoot as each is different. Between an increasing slice of the American population interested in shooting sports, active efforts by the industry to attract a more diverse demographic, and the easy availability of a wide range of firearms I think there's a case to be made for industry wide growth. Another factor that helps is great liquidity in the used market for guns. As you mentioned, they don't wear out, especially given the use conditions the average American gun owner puts them through, and with proper maintenance a firearm can last several decades and hold its value relatively well. The advent of online platforms that allow for sales between users helps spur the purchase of more new firearms - it's easier to justify a new purchase if there's a healthy used market for the product one can sell it into with little depreciation. I also think there's a novelty factor to just owning different guns, they all shoot a little differently and gun owners want to have choices. With that said, the industry has a vested interest in marketing to new users, if that starts to die out or shooting sports become less popular growth will slow down. Gun owners interested exclusively in home defense are a separate and much smaller subset of users and I think a lot of your points make sense with them in mind but users interested in shooting sports and to a lesser extent hunting will continue to buy new (or new to them used) firearms well in excess of their "needs" for hunting or sporting.

How do I like to read? Well I'd prefer a hardcover and a comfy chair. Unfortunately I've gotten in the habit of putting books on my iPhone lately and reading them there. It's probably terrible for the longterm health of my eyes but it's very convenient to have what you're reading always with you. The one thing I miss about physical books is you can't really share digital copies. There are so many books that I've read digitally that I'd like to give to friends to read, it's a lot easier to hand someone a book than to give them your login info. Almost think it would be cool to have a library of books in hardcover but instead of pages they hold a usb or something for the person that wants to read them.

meh... if you really want to call it your last stand and go all in AAPL has weekly options #YOLO 8) I think it's fake or at the very least greatly embellished. I see it more as an attention grabber to highlight how clever he thinks his options position is using the call spread to finance the put purchases.

Anyone else watch Shark Tank? One of the pitches was a chip made with crickets. Basically a corn tortilla chip enhanced with "cricket flour" most of the Sharks said it tasted good. Your friend better step up his offerings lest they corner the insect edibles market first ;D

A good read that quantifies the challenges of getting into space using chemical fuels, it ain't easy and you need a lot of fuel. https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/expeditions/expedition30/tryanny.html

I really enjoyed reading this one as well. It's amazing how game-changing stealth technology was when it was first discovered, the story behind it is pretty good too part Cold-War espionage, part clever engineering.

That's awesome. As a dog owner I've become fascinated by the lengths pet owners will go to assure their pet is receiving high quality food. I wonder if your friend could pivot his business into a high end, no fillers, no preservatives, high protein dog food or food supplement for dogs. I'm sure there are pet owners who would buy it if you told them the worm based protein is hormone and antibiotic free. Personally I prefer to eat worms after they've been transformed into lean muscle by chickens but there are a few diets based on eating lower on the food chain so who knows maybe he'll have some success ::)

Care to explain the mechanics and reasoning behind doing that ? This was the first oil boom and Calgary had little experience with the boom and bust cycle. Jobs were plentiful, adventure was everywhere, pay was good, and as in booms everywhere; people bought ‘toys’ and expensive houses – sure it would never end. Dome Petroleum was the ‘darling’; and I was a 2nd year petroleum engineer flying up and down the McKenzie Valley pipeline, teaching Cariboo to walk under elevated pipeline, & doing engineering tests on cold weather metal fatigue and heavy drop parachutes (D9 cats yanked out of a Hercules in flight, & dropped softly onto a 50m target, when the plane is going at 200km+ an hour). Then the bust struck. Petroleum Engineers with 30yrs experience couldn’t get a job, & went from king to bum in under 6 months. It lasted a long time, folks couldn’t pay their bills, and mortgage foreclosures went through the roof (often every 2nd or 3rd house on a street). Alberta’s depression era laws were still on the books, & they had the effect of making recourse loans ‘non-recourse’ under certain conditions. If you had title, you could essentially ‘quit stake’, sell your property in a public auction, and just give the banker the proceeds; if it wasn’t enough to pay off the mortgage – the banker had to take the loss. Block party auctions were common, underwater homeowners would put their property on the block, and ‘enforcers’ would ensure that nobody offered more than $1 - or competed against the selected ‘winning’ family (cant bid if you’ve been rabbit punched, & are on the ground with a boot across your throat). It was community action, and it saved a great many people from poverty. I went to university with many of the sons & daughters of these people, and many of their dads owed their companies to a successful win at poker – when it was common for roughnecks to ante up their partial well interests, so that the winner would have a better chance at building something. They were being wiped out, and there were more than a few suicides. I found it utterly amazing, & extremely odious, that Canada’s banks didn’t know their sh1t; and that this level of misery had been allowed to happen. I changed majors to finance, researched what had made it so bad, left Calgary, & swore it would never happen to me. I learnt these things are recurring, what you can do to avoid getting burnt, and how to exploit them. It turned me into a counterculture value investor, & I have been forever grateful for it. Not much different to the experiences of many of the ‘greats’. SD Great story and lesson. Will need video of paradropping CATs ;D

I like it. Much of your description of the industry reminded me of my own industry where there are many fragmented small businesses with few employees. I assume when you're purchasing a cleaning business the asset you're ultimately buying is the clients and perhaps their relationship with the cleaners. Have you looked at the numbers in terms of new clients acquired per purchase? It sounds like what your business will evolve into if you continue to scale it is a platform for small residential cleaning services to operate under your brand so to speak with the economies of scale that come with it. Have you thought of steps you might take to build the brand and acquire new clients organically rather than buying them through new cleaning businesses? Sounds like you have a solid plan to work with. Maybe consider spending a few $1,000 on a decent app for scheduling - who knows you could sell the whole business to one of the bigger players in the freelancing space like taskrabbit for a nice multiple.

Thoughts on Zargon's debenture restructuring proposal? http://zargon.ca/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/Jan-6-2017-Presentation-final.pdf I guess this first question is will it be approved? Should it be approved it seems to reduce equity upside to around $1.25 for the short term but dramatically reduces debt and buys the company another 3 years to get things together or sell itself.

It's the mandatory 3 day work week there, what else where you supposed to do. Has anyone else watched the Mars series NatGeo put together? Musk and others get quite a bit of time in it to discuss their thoughts on Mars colonization. The first couple episodes were good, it got a bit too dramatic after that though.

In the same vein as tax cuts I think there's going to be a push for a repatriation of funds held overseas either allowing US firms a tax holiday to bring them back home at a lower rate or setting a lower rate permanently. This will likely be even easier to pass through congress than corporate tax cuts. Trump's plan for repatriation The real question for investors though in both cases, repatriation and tax cuts, is what will companies do with the excess cash? It's hard to imagine an easier way to achieve a 23% boost to net income than waking up one morning and finding Republicans passed a bill lowering corporate tax rates. Will this lead to more investment in US companies from foreign investors since US firms are now capable of returning a larger portion of earnings to shareholders? A capital flow out of more taxed companies abroad into less taxed US companies - it's interesting to think about.

Here's the cuts by country http://www.opec.org/opec_web/static_files_project/media/downloads/press_room/OPEC%20agreement.pdf So 1.2 mmbbl/d from OPEC and another 600k from non-OPEC cooperating countries, presumably most of that from Russia. Won't hold my breath that they stick to it but for now it's bullish.

Just finished reading this and really enjoyed it. The author makes a persuasive argument that the growth in US O&G production thanks to fracking and horizontal drilling is a tech revolution. I never thought about it quite in those terms but there were decades worth of learning and perfecting the process until it all finally clicked in the late 90s early 2000s. I thought the portrayal of the major oil companies at the time was also interesting how the "smart money" had pretty much given up on the US and here you have these scrappy independent drillers trying to make it big in formations that were very intensive in terms of the tech and know how needed. I also have to say the book made me rethink the way I look at leverage. McClendon and Ward seemed to only be content when levered up to their eyeballs. They took the approach that they had to be first into a field with the most acreage and leverage allowed them to get there before anyone else. They looked at leverage as a tool to gain relative advantage over their competitors rather than in the more absolute terms of financial stability I'm accustomed to looking at it in. While I don't plan on taking on using massive amounts of leverage myself anytime soon, I can see it's utility when you have to beat the competition quickly.

The aggregates business is pretty hard to mess up. Once you have an established business and construction firms are using your fill there's not a lot to it.

This. Americans in general like to think of our president as having power over a variety of things that in reality they only have limited control over. It's also easier to promote the narrative that Clinton was responsible for the economic boom of the 90s or that Bush caused the recession than it is to actually analyze the factors that contribute to economic events. Narratives mean a lot in politics and both parties are happy to use them so presidents are made out to be far more powerful than they actually are and assume responsibility for everything that happens during their time in office. It's funny how the narrative works both ways though where the opposition party is able to say if only a Rep/Dem was in power they could have done XYZ to fix things. There's little doubt from either side that the office of the president IS powerful enough, it's simply the policy choices they made that lead to the situation.

Somewhere in a portion that I caught, Musk compares SpaceX to the construction of the Union Pacific Railroad and Mars to the west coast of the US. I don't think Musk envisions SpaceX doing it all, just providing a means for people to get there and start tackling the problems on the ground. I still think they're going to have trouble finding early colonists who want to go live on Mars for the rest of their lives. The first century or so of Martian colonization will more likely be rotating scientific outposts with inhabitants living there for a year or two at a time to oversee the terraforming of the planet and study it. A century or so of terraforming should also go a long way toward making Mars a more hospitable place than it is currently, not anywhere close to Earth just quite a bit better than it is today.

Thanks for sharing. With Wal-Mart driving part of the cost cutting, are they employing a strategy where they lose margin or even lose money outright in their grocery stores while making it up by driving traffic to the rest of the store? Grocers have always been a low margin business, I remember reading a bit about Trader Joes and Aldi here in the US and I think the paper I read said their average store had between 3-5% margins which were considered high in the business can grocery-only stores compete or do they need to attach a high margin business to the store to actually make money. Publix is adding liquor stores to many of its locations, something I know Albertsons does as well. As a consumer I always feel a little guilty eating lunch at various fast food/semi casual places where the price of a meal is often between $8 and $12. It seems like you can now put together a steak dinner with sides for less than the price of fast food for two.

I think Hillary's strategy all along was to give Trump enough rope to hang himself with which played out perfectly. When he starts rambling on about things with very little specificity and repeating himself, it's hard to see him as presidential. The first 20 minutes or so on economic policy and trade Trump did better and seemed like he knew what points he was trying to get across, it went downhill quickly after that though. I'm looking forward to the VP debate, I think both VP candidates are more collected than either Trump or Clinton and we should hopefully see an issues centric debate without the baggage this debate had.

Or that most people just follow the paths our dear leaders provide without considering better alternatives ;) I do like the idea of not paving for a while then paving over the existing path though.

Amazon doesn't have some magical device that generates whatever you desire in their warehouse and then ships it to you. They still need to obtain their sand or aggregates from somewhere, that somewhere will likely be a local quarry. If the quarry doesn't have to pay for a dump truck and a driver's salary because AMZN wants to handle that - great. As to the original question, I think picking disruptive tech companies is a lot more difficult for investors than it may seem at first glance. Early stage investment funds that focus on tech startups often build a large portfolio of companies where they expect most to fail with hopefully one or two being home runs that offset their losses in the rest of the portfolio. It's a different style of investing from the concentration found in high conviction value investments where there's a reasonable margin of safety - putting a significant percentage of your portfolio in a pre-cash flow startup just doesn't fly in terms of risk management, no matter how disruptive it may be. As an example let's broadly look at how Google invests internally. They have their advertising business that makes the vast majority of their revenue and produces a lot of cash flow they can then invest in a bunch of cool, possibly disruptive, ideas. From Project Loon to self driving cars to robots to whatever else their brightest engineers can think up. Is there a reason why your own portfolio couldn't be structured similarly? A core of relatively stable cash flow generative companies that then provide cash to invest in a number of potentially disruptive startups.

:o This has to be some kind of value investing sacrilege, selling down BRK to buy more SHLD.

At the local level there are massive inefficiencies that could be easily cured. I pay a lot in property taxes and feel we get very little other than ok schools in return. Let's look at police and fire. Here we have a county wide police district and county wide fire dept. In addition each little fiefdom that calls itself a city likes to have its own fire/police dept as well so theres a couple dozen or so of those running around. The concept of economies of scale doesn't seem to resonate with the smaller districts, it's a matter of pride or something, yet we still have to pay for their toys (they usually end up calling the county anyways). I'm not even going to make the argument for privatizing some local government services, which I do think is possible and could save money, at this point I'd be happy with a degree of accountability between the various levels of local government. Paying salaries and administrative costs of county, city and school board officials and employees can't be the most efficient way to do things. Local governments, much like their larger brethren, will spend as much as you give them. There is an impetus for them to spend all they can or else they will look like they don't need it next year or as a validation for their existence. We as property owners have little choice in the matter, they say the millage rate is X you pay X or lose your home. There's no checkbox where you get to say I'd like to pay for your schools, fire and police but I think I'll go with the private garbage collection service as they provide a better value. In fact there is a strong disincentive for private garbage, schools, security or any number of services to even exist since EVERY property owner is already paying taxes for those things. Sorry, a bit of a rant but looking at the return on investment of property taxes is frustrating, especially considering how much glaring waste there is at the local level here.

So, when does the next payment tranche go out 8) It would seem this is actually Iran's money being given back to them which has been held in trust since an arms deal with the Shah in which we never delivered the weapons in question. The timing of the hostage release to coincide with the payment is hard to see as anything other than a ransom, even if it's with their own money. We should have shipped them 35 year old weapons systems instead of returning the cash. I was trying to be humorous. I relearned my lesson not to participate in these topics. I'll stick to telling the occasional joke on the "I need a Laugh. Tell me a joke..." thread so it will be obvious. I liked your joke ;D I think the original purchase order was for fighter jets so maybe some old F4s that have been sitting in a boneyard for 30 years would work.

It's hard to believe that a dictatorial theocratic government that violates the most basic human rights of its citizens and funds the deaths of Americans has a valid claim to the protection of its own property rights, particularly when the property in question belonged to the government that it deposed just prior to committing an act of war against America. While I agree with your sentiment, I think it presupposes the money belonged to the Shah's regime and now belongs to the current regime. Perhaps its a bit naive of me but I like to think money spent by any government belong to its citizens. Iranians paid taxes which the Shah spent on arms which were never delivered, money was held in trust, the repayment is to Iranians not the current regime. I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for my share if I were an Iranian who paid taxes back in the 70s but that's how it should work in theory... More broadly, this isn't the first time Iran has released hostages to coincide with financial settlements, they used a similar tactic before releasing our embassy hostages in 1981. The optics look terrible for the US as anyone who doesn't understand that the US and Iran have been working out settlements since 1981 thinks it's a ransom payment and everyone now thinks you can successfully use US hostages as a bargaining chip when negotiating for other things.