rb

Well the shotgun clause would be great. But honestly unless their lawyers are utter idiots that would be insane to grant you a shotgun clause. Generally in law you don't give anything if you don't get anything in return. Shotgun clauses are usually part of shareholder agreements. You should see if there is a shareholder agreement and if there is a shotgun clause in it. Honestly, this forum could be a lot of help, but maybe you should have reached out more than 24 hours before a court battle. In regards to valuation on the surface it looks like people are getting paid fairly, maybe even more than so. So then like others said, the company should really be worth at least 2-4x PE. But the company itself is not that valuable. So you have to weigh that against legal costs to extract that value. This is why most parties settle. The legal costs could be higher than the whole value.

A few questions. 1. Why is COGS declining so much from 2014 to 2016? 2. Why did compensation of officers go down from 120k to 69k? 3. Does anyone work in the business that gets paid below market rate? For example an owner that looks after the business that draws below market rate salary and this doesn't reflect in the P&L?

You can build one in Excel pretty easily. I'd recommend you lean how to do it. Once you do it'll be easy to make do anything you want. It'll be powerful knowledge. Just because you're an American from Virginia doesn't mean you should abandon hope. People overcame bigger obstacles than that. ;). If you're really looking for software, one of the best I've seen is the Decision Tools suite from Palisade Software. No idea how much it costs though.

There it is BG. It's great for making soup.

I'm not sure if this is true with wine too, but in Canada the European beer is taxed much lower than in the US. A Belgian beer in Canada at the Ontario Liquor Store is 1/2 or less compared to the US. At one point I purchased a 1L of Chimay for about $4, whereas the exact same bottle in the US was $13. My guess is imports, tariffs etc. In PA French wine seems more expensive. You can find bottles of Australian, Chilean, or Spanish under $10 with ease, but it's rare for French stuff to be under $10. American wine is consistently under $10, but that's expected. Like everyone else said, find your taste. But if you're looking for a value play... We aren't huge wine drinkers, but enjoy it with certain meals. You can get a Bota Box for $17, which is $5.6/liter, or about $4.20 per bottle. It's table wine that is decent. It's not bad like the cheap box wine, not awesome either, just average, and cheap. We'll buy a box and have a glass with a meal. For my wife and I a box will last a few weeks. I have relatives that crush a box in a day or two, but if you were at that level I'm guessing you wouldn't be asking here. Last thought. In my experience it's really difficult to taste differences in similar tiers of wine. But you can definitely taste a difference between tiers. For example, most $7 bottles are about the same. And a $7 bottle is tough to differentiate from a $11 bottle. But a $7 bottle tastes different than a $19 bottle. And a $19 from $50 and $100 etc. I've had some really expensive bottles and they were spectacular. I'm not sure they were worth the price, but the taste was much more complex and rich vs average bottles. Yea, it's weird how it all breaks down. I think in the the US there's a lot of latitude on how the states tax the stuff. In Canada we're supposed to be the high tax and all that, but alcohol at least in Ontario I find is cheaper than a lot of the states. Here's how it works. Over here we have excise taxes on alcohol. But it's a tax on volume, not on value. So the higher you go on value the lower the tax is percentage wise. In addition we have a monopoly/monopsony. Most of out alcohol (except some beer) is bought and sold by one government owned company - the LCBO (or Liquor Control Board of Ontario). The LCBO is one of the largest purchasers of alcohol in the world. So they negotiate huge volume discounts and have a lot of variety. In the states from my experience offer and value vary from place to place. I can't speak of PA because I didn't buy alcohol when I was there. But I can say that Illinois and Iowa are quite cheap. But verity in Iowa sucks. I was expecting wine to be cheap in California since they make it and all that. But I was shocked by how expensive it was. I recently came back from Arizona - republican and low taxes, etc. Alcohol was at least as expensive as in Ontario and selection was generally way worse.

Chess and go have strict, defined rules that you must follow. That's easy to do. I'd like to see that computer that comes up with the theory or relativity that because it's thinking about riding a beam of light from the back of a bus.

I was actually having similar thoughts yesterday as I was writing the above. That would be a really interesting turn of events. And like you say, it’s kind of plausible too once you think about the economics... I highly doubt any of that. The thing is that humans are very special beings. They can do low level stuff really well and they can do very high level stuff really well. Humans have things like inclings, hunches, instincts, and sparks of genius and can be invaluable. You're not gonna replace that with a robot. You can't program genius. I remember a line from a show I watched where a guy (Mandy Patinkin) says that when a computer decides to commit suicide because it got too fat that's when I'll believe that computers are gonna replace us - or something to that end. That's a brilliant line and wholeheartedly agree. The source of our greatest flaws is also the source of our greatest achievements. Another thing I read somewhere that I agree with is this: "We'll know that we've created Artificial Intelligence when we make a self driving car and that car decides to take up painting instead". Intelligence means that it must have the ability to think. If something thinks, its thoughts most likely won't go the way that you want. Anyone that ever had a girlfriend knows that.

The instant pot is a miracle to those that don't know how to cook, don't know about food, don't care about food, cook unhealthy things. For certain Asians with soupy cousine such as Viet and Thai I figure should be great. But then they also fall into the unhealthy part. Can't speak about the Peloton since I'm not a workout geek nor am I about to drop thousands of dollars on an exercise bike.

How do u feel about british household debt?

A true value investor would just learn to make wine out of grapes he buys. Much better value in that.

This is an area that I know quite a bit about. In my opinion the best wine for the buck is French wine. I should say wine is tricky. First you must find your taste. Some people like reds, some people like whites. Some people like light bodied wines, some people like full bodied wines, and everything in between. Personally I like full bodied reds. There nothing beats côtes du rhône. What also helps is that the French are really anal about their designations (appellation d'origine contrôlée or AOC). Quality is very consistent in a French AOC as opposed to other places. The caveat is that I say this as a Canadian. In the US prices are different that Canada. Furthermore, prices and availability of wines differs a lot from region to region in the US. So it's harder to say what is best in your location. But from a neutral location like Ontario I'll confidently say that the best price/quality, value for money is the French stuff.

Cigarbutt, I'd say that generally we is us as a society. But more specifically the ones that we as the society put in charge to ensure our well being. When you get into the weeds, things get more complicated and confusing. The regular person may thing that the Bank of Canada (due to its imposing name) should be on top of this. But BoC's job is mainly inflation. It's not to look after debt/asset bubbles, even though it takes an interest in such things. Eventually the ones that took charge to reign in the madness was OSFI. Btw, I think that the new regulations that OSFI brought in are very much commonsense and the right way to go about it. But the average Joe has no idea what an OSFI is. To the average person OSFI is one of those agencies that you only learn exists when the aliens attack. In regards to the comments about BoC raising rates back in 2011. I disagree. In 2011 it was clear that the economy needed low rates. It would have been stupid to raise them at that point. The hike rates argument back then was this: Let's have an economic crisis now so we don't potentially have an economic crisis in the future. That's madness. A better solution would have been this: keep rates low, implement the OSFI rules we put in place now along with a significantly bigger deficit. That would have been smart. This brings us to the other point you've raised. The deficit. Yes we're running a deficit at the federal level. Yes, it'll be a round for a while. Given the situation that's ok. The reality is that Canada in a strong fiscal position. The debt to GDP ratio is around 30% (the US by comparison is over 100%). The deficit while not small, at 1.9% is fairly benign. Running deficits at this level will shrink debt to GDP. If you're attempting to delever households you don't do fiscal tightening. In fact, if households start to delever the right thing to do will be run up the deficit. No tax cuts either, full spending ahead. In retrospect this is really a much better time to stop the debt party than back in 2011. The economy is somewhere in the neighborhood of full employment so there's forward momentum. More importantly the US economy is doing well. That means that we can partly export out way out of this mess. The ideal way this happens is that households start to delver, reducing household consumption. That gets offset by higher net exports and government consumption (read higher deficits). By the end we have a debt to gdp ratio in the 40-50% range and no economic crisis. In practice that requires a pretty difficult balancing act. To implement you have to keep your eyes on the ball and spend huge amounts of political capital. I just pray that our leaders are up to the task. Especially when it comes to spending political capital and take the body blows that come with that.

I don't know how MLM scams still exist but they do. And I can tell you these people are very good. One of my sisters got really wrapped up into one of these things a few years back. Another sister got just a little wrapped up. But man they did a real job on them. Long story short, the family figured out right away the MLM bullshit and told her about it. We also refused to let her market to family friends/connections/acquaintances. She became convinced that the family has something against her and just want her and her "business" for fail. That did real damage to relationships. My personal view is that if you have a gun with 2 bullets and an MLM, a lawyer, a banker, and a car salesman you shoot the MLM twice. It's still hard for me to wrap my head around the fact that Berkshire owns an MLM. Btw, that was a point that these sleazebags that conned my sister used. MLMs are ok. Even Warren Buffett owns one. >:(

Monte Carlo is useful for a lot of things. In my view value investing is not one of them.

Yea, it's ridiculous and a problem that we've let things get this far in Canada. Thankfully, the powers that be finally decided to put a stop to it. Better late than never. But the people in that article, the problem is not their debt. Their problem is that they're stupid. They make 160k a year and think that their 360k house is their problem? Ridiculous. It's not that they have made a mistake once when they were naive and didn't know better. They're in debt up to their eyeballs and they have 3 kids in private school, 2 pets, and they must have sushi and whatever other ridiculous fancy food. Stupidity! If I go ahead and write those 2 a cheque that clears all of their debt, I GUARANTEE you that in 2 years those 2 are in the same situation they're in now.

Great! they invented a robot that probably costs like 5 million dollars to do the work that some guy that gets paid 17 bucks an hour can do 5 times faster and better - cause I don't see that thing shimming the drywall. That's real progress!

I thought they were always Douche and Goombas. I don't even know who or why they buy their clothes. Not that classy. I always thought that the D&G client is someone with no class that just won the lottery. Needless to say, I think the Chinese won't soon forget this.

The declaration of monetary instruments over $10,000 is a ridiculous policy. In this and other cases, the behaviour of the US Federal and other sub-governments is despicable!

Who the hell bought oracle?

Hey man, don't bet on humorous banter. You teased Florida, I challenged, you accepted. The only reason I didn't already ask for your address is that I'm from Toronto (the warm part of Canada where winter didn't fully set in yet) and in a couple of days I'm going to Scottsdale where I'm gonna defrost for a bit. Give it a few more weeks after that and you may find me in your driveway asking to borrow your Tahoe to go get some beer.

I wouldn't be surprised if Buffett doesn't like Black-Scholes-Merton model (BSM). Buffett is a value guy and BSM does not calculate the value of options. What BSM does is calculate the price of an option through an arbitrage-free framework. What you get is actually the cost of the option, and therefore it's price. To put this another way, if there was no active market for the underlying shares then the price of options would very likely be different from BSM.

If Buffett would have said that, which I have no clue about, he would have been wrong since there is a thing called Put-Call parity. Yea the prices of calls and puts are linked through put-call parity. So if one is correct so is the other, and vice-versa. In fact there is no Black-Scholes formula for puts. Black-Scholes only calculates for the price of calls. The price of puts is determined through put-call parity.

Nah, they'll be ok. This is how it goes. One Monday Todd walks into the office and goes.... Hey Ted, let's go talk to the old man about buying GE. Done. See... it's not that hard.

Yo, if you give me a place to crash I'll follow you around and document the experience. I'll also shoot the shit and buy the beer. You see... it's getting cold in Canada now and you live in Florida. Also, by virtue of freezing my nuts in the north, I don't pay anything for health insurance and mostly have no idea what your acronyms mean. But I'm totally serious about my offer. Maybe you'll teach me about them. :D

Seems like reasonable policy and good risk management of the financial system. But it's gonna hit some people.... hard! These are those people who were taking unreasonable risks.