Pelagic

The CLF calls really are great and it's not all Gonclaves' disdain for analysts, there are some capital allocation gems in there too. Personally I think every CEO of a resource company should listen to him, far too often companies just want to increase production for its own sake rather than looking at the alternatives available to them. https://seekingalpha.com/article/4256779-cleveland-cliffs-inc-clf-ceo-lourenco-goncalves-q1-2019-results-earnings-call-transcript?part=single

Being from South Florida, snow on the streets is a bit of a foreign concept to me. However, from an engineering standpoint, reading about your city's snowmelt system is fascinating. I wonder what the cost advantages (if any) are in terms of developing/maintaining the system vs. traditional plowing and salting. It's a very interesting system and there are many hard to quantify aspects of the snowmelt as compared to salt and plows. 1. This is used extensively in our historic downtown shopping district. 2. the lack of snow makes for a perfect outdoor shopping experience 3. there are now year-round runners who use the area creating more foot traffic in the shopping area. 4. Salt destroys both cars and shop floors 5. plowing can really rip up a downtown streetscape will all the paver crossings, curbs, and parking slots. Also, you probably saw this but all the hot water comes from waste heat from the municipal-owned NG power plant so the ongoing cost is negligible. I don't have a good ROI timeframe on the initial install which as you can guess is extensive and is only done when you are ripping up everything and replacing a lot of old infrastructures. They installed the first section in the late 80's and as far as I know, haven't had to do any serious maintenance. I wrote a blog post about the engineer who had the vision for the system if you are interested. https://www.sethgetz.com/2019/01/a-tale-of-two-cities-and-businesses.html Thanks, I was looking at it in terms of safety/traffic but in reality it revitalized the downtown area and helps it flourish year round. Also love that they were able to re-purpose the waste heat from the power plant. While mostly unintentional, here's what my local power plant's thermal waste has accomplished. https://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2011-12/nuclear-plants-cooling-canals-help-save-endangered-florida-crocodiles

Being from South Florida, snow on the streets is a bit of a foreign concept to me. However, from an engineering standpoint, reading about your city's snowmelt system is fascinating. I wonder what the cost advantages (if any) are in terms of developing/maintaining the system vs. traditional plowing and salting.

While I'm inclined to go with the investors want to cash out while the market is hot, the S-1 does sort of answer this, they need money to grow and don't have many other options. Page 41 I enjoyed reading pages 25-74 where they discuss risk factors as its a good look at the industry and the challenges they face. They were surprisingly forthright including stating that they may not achieve profitability, are highly dependent on high growth rates to scale the business, and will continue to compete for market share using rider/driver incentives to match their competitors in certain markets, even if said incentives lose money for the company. When we look at businesses benefiting from network effects we try to determine what it's costing them to acquire additional customers relative to the lifetime value of that customer. However in Uber/Lyft's case I think a more telling metric might be what it's costing them to acquire drivers relative to the value of that driver. In my mind their pool of drivers in cities across the world is their most valuable asset. Customers are fickle, I switch between Uber and Lyft for a few pennies and will almost always comparison shop my ride between the two. Having some indication of the costs involved in maintaining sufficient driver supply and how long a driver can be expected to last relative to what they bring in, would be useful.

Here's a piece from Bloomberg on Aramco's financials. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-04-01/saudi-aramco-profit-dwarfed-the-biggest-global-companies-in-2018 I'm curious how you'd even go about valuing Aramco. Yes we could model production, revenue, and ebitda but how do we value what a common shareholder is actually going to be receiving. As a common shareholder you're dead last in a long list of parties that have claim to Aramco's earnings, the most important of which being the state itself. What stops Saudi Arabia from levying a higher tax rate on Aramco if it needs more money to meet budget shortfalls? And equally important to our earnings as shareholders, what prevents Saudi Arabia from using Aramco as a public works organization hiring Saudi's to provide employment and salaries that aren't commensurate with their contributions to the company. I think Venezuela's state oil company is illustrative of the perils investors face investing in national oil companies. While I don't think Aramco has the potential to fail quite that spectacularly, the risks of diverting profits and swelling the company's ranks with a layer of party loyalists are real. Common shareholders have almost no recourse in such a situation so I think a hefty discount is warranted, regardless of what top line earnings are.

I don't disagree with the point that older systems are likely to be less efficient and that there tends to be a lot of promotional cherry picking by founders/early adopters of these technologies. However, I think the debate on the specific efficiency in terms of power in vs. power returned to the grid somewhat misses the point. These systems, by design, work when the grid is producing excess electricity. Any electricity they're able to capture, store, and return to the grid in a manner that makes economic sense for the investors in the project is a positive. Whether they're 50% efficient, 95% efficient, or 20% efficient is less important than if they can reliably work and return capital to those who invested in them since the energy they're capturing is excess. For utility scale solar in particular, the recurring maintenance costs are negligible so any storage designed to capture excess energy it produces is a positive. This is the company (perhaps there are others) working on developing rail based systems where a heavy concrete/aggregate load is carried uphill and stored there then brought downhill when electricity is needed. They claim around 80% efficiency. https://www.aresnorthamerica.com/grid-scale-energy-storage

From looking at other similar energy storage solutions like pumped hydro the efficiency usually runs in the 70-80% range. So in essence they're taking surplus power generated by solar/wind when it is "free" from the grid and are able to return somewhere in the range of 75% of that back to the grid. I'd expect this to have a similar efficiency, maybe somewhat higher say 85%. The $.03/kWh figure I believe is their all in break even price for the crane/blocks. Assuming their costs are accounted for accurately, it's what they expect to be able to sell electricity back to the grid at and not lose money. So to the .03/kWh they add $.02/kWh which is what they're claiming the all in price of solar is and the total system, solar panels and the crane/block contraption, can reliably sell power to the grid at $.05/kWh at any time.

Barely mentioned in that discussion is the almost negligible environmental impact this form of energy storage has relative to batteries/pumped hydro. This alone should be appealing since it's important to factor in the lifetime cost of an energy source not simply the price per kWh. Interesting technology, will be cool if they can achieve the costs they claim. I think there are a few other companies out there exploring energy storage solutions that involve gravity storage using rail cars. Use electricity to take them uphill then lower them to generate electricity, creating a sort of loop of rail cars at various elevations depending on energy demand. Simpler technology but it too likely utilizes a lot more land area than this crane system would.

Are you looking for ideas to start or potentially fund startups to execute or are you looking for existing startups with an idea and product that need funding to grow? For the latter Angel List is a good place to start, as is Gust.com, Crunchbase - most companies regardless of their stage will create a profile there and you can search through their database by various category. Even Reddit's startup subreddit can be informative. The former is likely best accomplished through local meetups and events where you can better get to know potential startup founders.

The article linked above regarding their internal "hedge fund" gives some numbers. If their internal fund is accounting for up to $60M of that, is that sustainable given the option to now pay only half the deposit at the time of booking? $30B seems like a lot to pay for $100M of EBITDA, probably higher now since the article is almost a year old. https://venturebeat.com/2018/02/07/airbnb-reportedly-built-an-internal-hedge-fund-that-makes-5-million-per-month/

It could be a present for those sitting on cash. Merry Christmas! Let's just say I did a bit of Christmas shopping today ;) Merry Christmas! Added to BAC and MU positions.

I actually just dealt with the sale of a similar specialty food/nutrition supplements store which had very similar numbers to those you posted. I'm guessing since you include rents, the property itself is not owned? Also 30k seems particularly low since not only is it less than 1x earnings but the compensation of officers in the expense column would presumably go toward the owner? The issue I see, and experienced firsthand, is separating out the business owner's income (salary) with the business' earnings. If the owner is employed by the business (as is common) and taking $100k+ a year in salary plus whatever excess cash the business itself provides it looks significantly more attractive to an owner/operator purchaser than simply valuing the business at a multiple of its earnings. I'd look at some of the business buying and selling marketplaces sites like bizbuysell.com to see valuations sellers are attaching to similar businesses in your area. I will say this as a word of caution, don't expect a lot (although 30K still seems quite low) unless there are clear factors that would indicate higher earnings for a new owner. 2-4x combined earnings (salary + business income) might be in the ballpark and is in the range of some of the offers we received on a very similar store. Although in our case the real estate ended up being sold with the business so the package as a whole sold for a lot more than the offers we received for just the operating business which is what it seems like is being sold here. Happy to offer some more help, ironically one of the individuals who made an offer on the business I was selling taught me a lot about the valuation process as they saw it as a purchaser. But like I mentioned, familiarize yourself with some of the business selling marketplaces and narrow down the criteria to as similar in type and region as you can.

Sounds like a 10 foot hurdle to me ;) I've been trying some of the wines at Aldi's and Trader Joes lately based on recommendations from friends and have found them to be decent and cheap. Not that I'm discerning enough to tell the difference.

One can only imagine what the fund spent on their lawyers to prolong the case(s) against him. Wonder how profitable those strategies look once you factor in 10s of millions in lawyers fees to defend them. And yes it does look like the strategies themselves had a shelf life, the fund's goal seems to be to keep him behind bars or in a UK immigration detention center until they expire. A bit frightening from a civil liberties perspective to see how a well funded private entity can use public resources (courts, immigration, etc.) to keep someone detained for an extended period of time past their original sentence - not sure how a similar case would play out in the US.

Don't see it as a meltdown at all. Yes he was a bit harsh but from my understanding of the situation the GS analyst who he called out specifically used an incorrect share count in his earnings target which created the "miss". CLF based their earnings figure on 310M fully diluted shares outstanding whereas GS used 303M non-diluted. The CEO was understandably frustrated with the analyst's inability to check his own work and the market's response to CLF's "miss" which would have actually been a beat by a penny ($.67 vs $.66) if CLF had reported using the same share count. That's my understanding of the situation at least. Listening to the call again, the suicide comment was directed at short sellers in general not the specific analyst from GS. Gonclaves and Musk should do lunch sometime, they can share notes on how to inflict maximum pain on shortsellers.

The call that he was talking about is so deep in the money that it wasn't selling at a premium. Ah. Thanks. I'm still lost on this one. Even if there is no premium and the call's price is exactly equal to the price of the stock minus the call's strike price why bother exercising the call. Commission fees alone would make this a worse strategy than just buying stock, correct? Even still, it seems most extremely deep ITM calls will usually have a slight premium to them.

It's a cool robot but I don't think it has a chance of making a difference. I spend a lot of time spearfishing here in South Florida and lionfish are here to stay. The issue most efforts at controlling them fail to address, whether it's this robot or eradication efforts by divers, is that lionfish can inhabit a range of depth from very shallow water to 600+ feet. Meaning there will likely always be (large) reservoir populations of lionfish in depths that divers (or submersibles) can't effectively target that continue to reproduce in the area which includes the entire Caribbean and as far north as North Carolina. Their geographic range also compounds the problem since eradication efforts that might be locally successful on a reef in say Key Largo do little to curb the population since ocean currents can bring a new crop of larval lionfish from as far away as Belize or Honduras which would then be able to reestablish the population in the area. It's a difficult issue since lionfish do do a lot of harm to juvenile reef species however, I personally feel most efforts at control fall into the "feel good" category rather than having a meaningful impact on the population. Lionfish are native to an enormous range in the Indo-Pacific and well adapted to the reef there, which in turn is adapted to their presence as well. Our reefs and the species that inhabit them aren't that different, and the predators of lionfish that exist in the Indo-Pacific exist here too, they'll start to figure out lionfish are edible and manage them here as well. This is an interesting read on controlling invasive fish stocks using biological methods, something that scales far better than a hunter robot. Whether it would be possible with lionfish I don't know and since the open ocean has a lot more variables than a closed lake there's the possibility of "supermale" fish making it to their native range and breeding there which could cause problems of its own. https://fishbio.com/field-notes/the-fish-report/reproduction-self-destruction-trojan-males-invasive-species-control

An anecdotal, yet reasonably large, sample is the Quora topic Value Investing https://www.quora.com/topic/Value-Investing. 267.5k followers of the topic yet I'm hard pressed to find an answer by a female where female answers are fairly common on Quora in other topics. While I don't think it's possible to see the full followers list, I'm sure Quora itself can, it would be interesting to see what % of followers are female as the topic has a large enough following to draw some conclusions on female interest in value investing.

There are a number of sites that have compiled various startup pitch decks that you can look through. Some things to think about, the content and depth of the deck is dependent on what you're looking to raise and the stage the business is at. A later series raise is going to have a much more in depth deck than a seed funding round for instance. Here's one link with a few to look through, AirBnB's deck is usually referred to as one of the best for early round funding but there's no reason you can't pick and choose aspects of several and incorporate them into the deck your friend is creating. Realize that many investors you'll likely pitch to see dozens if not hundreds of these decks a year so keeping it concise is key and if it piques their interest then you can send them more. A one page executive summary of the business might also be useful. https://slidebean.com/blog/startups/pitch-deck-examples

I think this also has to do with people discovering smaller streamers as a game grows. A person just getting into a new game may subscribe first to a big name streamer like Ninja but then decide to sub to a different streamer after a month or two. I'd be curious to see the figures for total streamers/viewers for a game like Fortnite as I think that has likely grown significantly while individual streamers who had a large following are losing some of those to other up and coming streamers.

The other end of the spectrum is a site like Quora where users are required to use their real name and there are millions of users asking and answering questions with their own name. All you'd have to do is Google the person's name and if they've written answers on Quora you would have a wealth of information about them. Personally I don't mind, I enjoy reading, participating, and occasionally answering questions on Quora more than I care about what someone can find when they Google me.

Having been to a few of the WeWork locations in my area my impression was that they are almost exclusively catering to startup tech companies - most of which have received some funding in an angel or seed round. Unfunded tech companies probably can't afford them or if they can are wise enough to weigh their options and find somewhere cheaper that suits their needs. With that said, whether or not WeWork succeeds is heavily dependent on new funds flowing into tech, especially into early stage companies. If funding dries up, paying $300 a month for a "hot desk" isn't in the budget but if you're looking for a leveraged real estate play leveraged to startup tech companies then WeWork is worth a look. The networking opportunities at a WeWork location and their events can be great for early stage tech companies but I just don't see any of these tenants being particularly sticky in terms of lease duration. A company either quickly outgrows WeWork or it burns through funding and WeWork's expensive monthly lease is one of the first expenses to get trimmed with a more economical office rental being able to suit their needs. I didn't see anything regarding the average lease duration for WeWork's users in the FT article but I would be curious to know what it is.

This is evidence in favor of rb's theory. But much of what you said I have no answer for. If they actually saw what they describe, it sounds like tech that is far beyond what is available to humans currently (never mind a decade ago). Yes, I forgot to mention that ALL of this is predicated on these reports being reported TRUTHFULLY. In this day & age, there is a lot of false information out there...and this certainly could be the case here. It isn't necessarily false information or pilots lying. There is always the possibility that they didn't see what they thought they saw. Light and reflections can play tricks on you and your brain can fill in details in your visual field that aren't really there. Google optical illusions and you can spend hours looking at weird visual mind tricks. That combined with unknown/undiscovered/rare natural phenomena can trick even honest people into thinking they saw something that they didn't actually see. Ball lightning used to be mistaken for UFOs. Fair enough, and IMO this probably explains the vast majority of UFO "sightings". However, this specific incident was captured on IR camera as well as being witnessed by 4 separate individuals (a pilot and RIO in each F-18). It's also worth pointing out that the individuals who witnessed it were all naval officers with extensive pilot training and a degree of familiarity with most existing forms of aircraft developed by humans. I think most would give their claims more weight than the average individual who claims to have seen a UFO. Not that they couldn't have been tricked but the fact there were multiple observers, it was captured on IR, and there was some evidence of disruption on the surface of the water, certainly raises questions in this specific instance.

Guess if you don't have jeans, or an arm, you could buy one of these leather strops. https://www.theartofshaving.com/razors/straight/small-hanging-strop/00670535680109.html?gclid=Cj0KCQjwxtPYBRD6ARIsAKs1XJ5Tj1QbYc3nxs88e-KmfWxAEmpx7bLBlXbFq6qYZ3Mz8IgDdgA1yHUaApgbEALw_wcB&cm_mmc=PPC-IP-GL-_-Non%20Brand%20-%20Shopping%20Categories-_-Categories-_-1918975c-c170-4100-9334-5f10c59c27b9 I'd imagine an old leather belt would work just as effectively though. I don't think any of these methods are actually sharpening the blade, just realigning the edge much like using a honing steel on a knife.

Doesn't ease of participation play a role as well? If someone can participate in BTC when all their friends are already in by just downloading an app on their phone and transferring some money into their account and clicking buy, all done within 10 minutes, the participation as a percentage of the population is significantly higher than even in the late 90s. Think of the various barriers to entry that have existed when it comes to participating in various financial markets, I can imagine in the 1920s a lot of people wanted to get in to the stock market but filling out the requisite paperwork and transferring the money to your broker whittled down the number of people who actually followed through significantly. The 90s internet bubble saw the birth of online trading accounts, making participation easier than it had ever been. And now participation has almost no barriers to entry when done through a phone app, and perhaps more importantly can be done immediately when social pressure is at its highest - not, oh I'll go home and talk to the wife about it and setup an account. So yeah, social "FOMO" plays a role but the fact that there are almost no barriers to entry into participating in the latest bubble, coupled with FOMO, means everyone can easily participate. Add in things like social sharing and gamification and participation becomes not only easy but a competition amongst friends.