rb

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-usa/new-york-state-coronavirus-cases-double-senate-passes-8-3-billion-spending-bill-idUSKBN20S1W0 Does anyone know who's the asshole who voted against it??

Yeah, but even Republicans think that that guy is a moron. So I wouldn't put that much weight on what he says.

He's just doing this for fun.

Greg, i think it was a ‘cover your ass’ cut. On a daily basis Trump has been hammering away at the Fed to do a 50 point cut. The ball is now back in the President’s court. The big news to me is the 10 year treasury. It is in freefall and went below 1%. The 10-year treasury scares the shit outta me. And it was scaring the hell outta me before I ever heard the words corona virus. Now the alert level got upgraded.

Questrade will let you do options in TFSA. Same rules as for RRSP. Not sure about IB.

Anyone remember when Powell used to be a hawk? Now he's just a pussy.

One place where you're making an error is confusing real with nominal numbers. World "real GDP" was expected to grow by 3% which is probably around 6% nominal (I think). The revenue guidance at Mastercard is nominal. Mastercard numbers also reflect consumer spending. While that is a big part of GDP, we should keep in mind it's not all. Other sectors of the economy that don't make it into the Mastercard numbers - like say healthcare - are growing. While a 2-3% pullback in consumer spending is not good, it's also not the nightmare scenario either. Generally what pushes economies into recession and what pulls them out is business investment in inventory. In this case that is very difficult to predict. In a normal scenario businesses would react to the slowdown in consumer spending by cutting orders in so they draw down inventory. That leads to even lower economic activity and TA-DA! you have a recession. The question is will businesses react in this manner this time? For one you have very sharp declines in services businesses (travel, hospitality) that carry no inventory. So the impact to goods businesses may not be very large and they will not react. Also disruptions or fear of disruption to supply chains can alter the inventory decisions. Say a company normally may draw down inventory in a situation like this. But in this case they won't because they don't know whether they can stock back up again when they want to. So they choose to carry more inventory than they normally would given the conditions.

If America finds a cure faster than other countries then perhaps the fattening of the pharmaceutical companies has been worthwhile. Do you think another country (socialized medicine or otherwise) has a better chance? Well during the last Ebola outbreak it was a lab in Winnipeg that developed the vaccine. And a lab in Saskatoon that was created to deal with exactly these types of viruses and has tons of experience with corona viruses (including developing vaccines for them) has a already been working on this for a while. So we'll see...

I've been wresting with the idea for a while. But I'm not so sure travel related small (and even larger) businesses will be affected. My thinking goes that if people are cancelling their European and other overseas vacations because there are cases at their destinations or because they're afraid to share a tube with 400 other people they may instead stay stateside and go on a vacation here. Instead of not going on vacation at all, they may get in their car, do a day of driving and spend time at a destination that never saw a Chinese person. It's a lot safer that way. If it actually turns out this way, there may be a bumper year for domestic travel related businesses.

Sure, if the underlying fundamentals are ok then it's a temporary issue. Things suck for you for a couple of quarters then things get back to normal. Maybe there's even a great quarter as pent up demand gets released. But, if the underlying economic fundamentals aren't as great as it's suggested by the bond market then this can become a more permanent issue. Say that things didn't look so rosy before. Now you get the shock and decide that maybe this is a good time to cut some capacity. You were thinking about it before and now you got the shove. Then it becomes permanent and a bigger economic issue that has nothing to do with the outbreak anymore.

The comparison to influenza is total bull. It's not about how many people the virus end killing. It's the economic impact. Simply put, the flu does not shut down supply chains. Unless you get a season of something resembling the 1918 Spanish Flu, the systems we have in place work very well in dealing with the flu and the economic disruption is basically non-existent despite a human cost that is surprisingly high in this day and age. The coronavirus, despite having killed not that many people seems to have had a much, much greater economic impact. The profit warning from BUD yesterday was HUGE. A lot of companies are still mum of the effects. But if BUD is not an outlier then Q1 and Q2 earnings are gonna be a shitshow. I also agree with what others are saying that things were pretty expensive and the economy not very robust so the virus may have just been the spark for a selloff. Look at what treasuries were doing for a while now while the stock market was whistling its way ever higher. You couldn't square the two. The bond market was flashing red and the stock market didn't have a care in the world. One of them had to be wrong. I'm just sorry that I didn't buy S&P puts when I was thinking about it a couple of weeks ago. Additionally, from trading patterns it looks like we have indexing working in reverse now, taking things down indiscriminately. There's a line in Ford v Ferrari were the car starts going really fast and a guy goes like "This is where the uninitiated tend to soil themselves.". If you've never seen a 1000 point drop in your life it's really scary stuff when it happens. If you've never seen a 1000 point drop in your like and you see 3 in a week well... it's soiling time. This is stock market education.

At least pence seems to have put in charge someone competent. So fingers crossed.

I just don't understand why midstream is getting hit so hard.

PSX, BAC, PGR. Stuff I wanted for a while. Figured today was a fine day to pull the trigger.

Lock and load!

My guess is that the gates foundation already had the phone number.

This would be a foolproof argument if they *could* easily buy oodles of stock over the market. But they can't. I'm not saying that he thinks it's at 50% of IV, but probably - at most - something like 80%. There is room to be somewhat more aggressive with bids over the market, but likely not as much as people seem to believe. If suddenly buyback volumes in a quarter were ratcheted up 100% from these levels, the stock would take off, making further buybacks that much harder. There is both a volume problem and a serious front-running issue. Also, as Munger expresed recently, other opportunities are dwindling while cash is growing. He has every incentive to undersell the fact that they were doing buybacks all the way up until Dec 31 and that's what the overall effect of the letter was, while still, oh-so-galantly, offering to relieve people of large blocks of stock. Just like he last did in the 1999 letter, mind you: I'm sorry, but I'm with Viking on this one. I don't buy the it's hard to buy stock argument. You have to keep in mind that this is Buffett we're talking about. He may be a geezer but he's probably one of the savviest stock traders that ever walked the face of the Earth. He didn't have a problem buying huge amounts of stock in ANY company if it meant making money. And we're not talking here just large companies like Coke and Apple. We're talking obscure shit like Sanford Map and other stuff. The man know how to buy stock if he wants to. But all of a sudden it's hard for him to buy stock in the 5th largest corporation in America? Nah man. If he's not buying huge amounts of stock is because he doesn't want to, not because he can't or doesn't know how.

I don't think it's comfortably below. If it was comfortably below then they would be buying ooodles of stock but they're not. They weren't buying ooodles around the 200 level either. So I'd say that they're probably not overly excited the discount.

Wrote some more puts, 215-strike, Feb 28-expiration. Every time I read about Mike [CoBF member boilermaker] doing this stuff, I get hit - in a mild way - by a brain hemorrhage [because I can't do stuff like this, for Danish tax and other regulatory reasons for Danish investors]. Today, two times! *sigh* There are ways around that.

Instead of just "+1!", I'll here post "Worth repeating!" [somehow, it's "head shaking times" right now - with a lot of stuff ... [-but not all stuff].] HEHE! I own WFC. At this rate I'll own it in about 10 years. LOL! If i get Wells, I don't mind becoming a bank holding company either... so the Fed can kiss my :-X

Unfortunately that's not the one. The one I'm thinking of is from a large institutional investor and is about 100 pages long. But thanks anyway. :)

Hi Fellow Members, I know that there is a real estate investment fund (I don't think from the US) that puts out every year a report of real estate globally that is highly comprehensive and highly regarded and looks at a lot of markets. A few years ago it found that Pittsburgh was the most undervalued market in the world. Unfortunately I have forgotten the name of the firm. I know it's not a lot to go on, but if some of you know what I'm talking about or of other highly regarded real estate reports please chime in. Thanks a lot.

My guess is that because you don't need the land for the reservoirs.

It's a beautiful idea in how simple it is. My guess is that the key to the efficiency of the system is that the blocks have to be as heavy as possible in order to minimize the number of cycles and thus friction loss. That means that you would need some really kick ass cranes. I also don't really see what you can patent in all of this. You'd obviously have to use high end cranes made by some of the most serious manufacturers and they're obviously not gonna let you patent their cranes. Maybe they can patent the blocks since they might be unusual due to their weight. But again unless it's something really special I find it hard that you can patent and enforce IP right to a concrete block. Also this is really just a stack of blocks so I'm wondering how would the whole system behave in a high wind/earthquake situation.

WOW! Those financials look horrible. I mean maybe it's very easy to say that today vs. back then. But Enron was essentially an utility with a trading operation. Yet for those years that Spek posted financials, their income is below what an utility should earn. This means that the trading operation was sucking wind all that time. The cherry on the top of course comes in 2000 when they grow the business by 150% at zero margin. But then those times were different that today. The market was going up like crazy and nobody cared about ROIC, valuation, and income. All that mattered was top line growth and your next big idea. Actually.... wait a second, maybe times were not that different.