rb

You're welcome.

Gary, honestly I didn't learn much about valuation in school that I didn't already know. It was fun though. Anyway, there's no real answer to your question. As long as ROIC>WACC growth creates value. So you have Company A with a lower ROIC and high growth and Company B with high ROIC and low growth. If you assume ceteris paribus that both A and B have their ROIC>WACC then both crate value. Which one creates more value would depend on the relative differences between their ROICs and their growth rates.

If you want a simple DCF type stuff you can build a basic one in like 7 minutes. I'm of the firm belief that models should be flexible because the world is complicated and models should reflect that. Something where u plug some numbers in and spits out an answer won't be that great. Anyway, here's one that I've built when I was in grad school and I've used it on and off since then. It's a Bruce Greenwald type model. Would work better on asset heavy type companies. Have fun with it. CSCO_-_Q3_2011_temp.xlsx

This is the problem with US single payer solutions. They don't really understand what makes single payer work. Rationing is key. Without this the costs of single payer will spiral out of control. All good single payer systems include lots of rationing or they use deductibles (a much much much better method) to control costs. Interestingly Singapore avoids this problem completely. It has much much lower costs that even the NHS and it has much much much much much MUCH MUCH lower wait times. Singapore wait times are measured in hours...British wait times are measure in weeks. This means that Singapore's wait times are more than 100 times shorter than Britains. Its costs are half of Britains. Singaporeans also live longer. The interesting question is given the incredible wait times in Britain...why aren't their healthcare outcomes much much much worse?! My explanation is simple...its because healthcare mostly does nothing. It doesn't really improve health. Thus single payer works because it rations something that was a useless expenditure to begin with. A rational system would focus much much more on determining what actually is useful in healthcare and focusing all subsidies on that. Its also important to avoid killing people...something the US healthcare system does very often: https://hub.jhu.edu/2016/05/03/medical-errors-third-leading-cause-of-death/ Its also really shocking to me how little connection there is in the healthcare system between scientific evidence and actual healthcare practice...or even how little concern there appears to about this issue. Given the way healthcare is practiced and the complete lack of incentives for evidence based care I don't see how healthcare could possibly be very effective. The proper way to view modern healthcare is mostly as witchdoctors, voodoo and shamans. That is what healthcare mostly is. https://retractionwatch.com/2016/03/16/evidence-based-medicine-has-been-hijacked-a-confession-from-john-ioannidis/ Honestly this whole debate is mostly arguing about how to do insane and stupid things in a slightly less ridiculous way but no one questions the fundamental ways the whole system is setup. Single payer is just lipstick on a pig. The U.K. health service is absolutely fantastic if you have something serious and you literally would not have to pay a pound for it. This is its main purpose. If, on the other hand, you have a sore throat then you'd do better to just research it on the internet and resolve it yourself. Of course, it has a lot of crap built into the system but it is still far better than what the US got. The fact is that the pig with the lipstick which you mentioned is us. The single payer system is the best we can come up with, just like how capitalism is the best system we can come up with considering all of our faults and biases and whatnot. It's stinky, it has a lot of issues but damn do we look good with that lipstick on. I actually lived in the UK for a while and I can attest that the NHS is actually pretty damn good. And no, you don't have to worry about your sore throat. I once walked into an NHS clinic with sore throat (and lungs) and walked out 30 minutes later with a diagnosis for bronchitis and a prescription. While I disagree with Rukawa's conclusion that a single payer system is lipstick on a pig - it's not - he does make a very good point about rationing and outcomes. He's pretty much figured it out. The rationing is due to cutting capacity for non-essential items. Basically dishing out discomfort for cost savings. While anecdotal, I've seen this in my family. My dad had some back pain and had to wait 2 months to see a specialist. My mom once had a hypertensive emergency and got a cardiologist appointment for the next day. For the record, after my dad was done swearing he admitted it was the right thing for the system to do. Over here in Canada where we have a single payer system. The issue around wait times revolves around these non-critical items. If you have cancer you'll get some pretty quick care. Doctors (looking for more money) run ads about how horrible it is for grandma to wait some for a hip replacement and people don't like it. In Canada it is illegal to pay in order to jump the line. But I often wonder, since our healthcare costs roughly half as the US, how many of the complainers would be willing to pay double just for the procedure (let alone double for everything) just to shorten the wait time. My guess is that once they see the price tag, not many - complaining is free. 3 Another source is what Canadians consider a national embarrassment is that we ship a good number of people to the US to have procedures like hip replacement. The interpretation is that we can't fix our own people. But the reality is that due to the way the US system is set up they have a lot of excess capacity around things like hip replacements. Due to our size we can negotiate prices and get really good cut rates similar from the US - similar to a hotel that's trying to fill rooms. So really what's perceived as an embarrassment it's actually the government doing its job, saving money for the people.

Huge swaths of China tech are down hard overnight. Lenovo is the standout, down 20%. Big moves. Despite all of the denials. It somehow doesn't feel like an article where the writer was producing a work of fiction. Feels more like it was more or less known (or felt) that something like this was going on and the article points that they were caught with the hand in the cookie jar.

Yep, as noted in the article, Amazon is denying everything. In fact every company is quoted as denying this. So is Bloomberg just making this stuff up? The market doesn't seem to think so - Super Market is down 40%.

Bizaro, what I've meant is that it doesn't specifically help the US. I'm actually optimistic about Canada's benefit from that. At first read you'd think that $16 an hour content is too big for the Mexico, and production will shift to the US which is a higher wage jurisdiction. That is until you realize that huge swaths of auto parts production in the US pays labor below $16 an hour. Ooops! But virtually the whole Canadian auto parts production pays workers $16 an hour. So you may have to import more parts from Canada to meet your content rules. Now this doesn't hurt production in the US. If you make a Hyundai in Alabama to sell in Texas and you don't meet content rules, that is ok because it's made in the US. But then try to export that vehicle to Canada (and they do) then they'll get a tariff. So the Canadian bound vehicles will need to have more Canadian parts.

I did read the full text and that's about the gist of it. A couple of things about your list thought. There's nothing in there about increased production of automobiles in the US. Another major thing is the elimination of NAFTA chapter 11 - Investor dispute resolution system. Reasonable minds may disagree here but I think that it was boneheaded to begin with and personally I'm glad it's gone. I'm quite surprised that the Trump Administration wanted that one gone. I can't imagine it was hard for us to agree.

If you have to pay something like 10 cents per liter more up here without subsidizing the hell out of producers with taxpayers money and the producers are doing well as well I don't see that as a major problem. Where do you think the money for the massive subsidies in the US is coming from? Furthermore where milk is expensive - like Quebec - because the government there wants people to pay a lot for milk, the price of milk doesn't have anything to do with supply management. It's more to do with the people and their local government. If they're ok with it then so be it.

I chose suburban location of major city compared to suburban location of major city. Location matters in retail. You can't compare Toronto to East Asscrack, Somewhere where you pay employees $7.25 and the price of real estate is "don't worry about it". I also used Wal-Mart for consistency of retailer despite the fact (to my surprise) that apparently Wal-Mart at $4.47 charges more for milk. The US product was also store brand (great value) as opposed to Neilsen which is a name brand. As Augustabound pointed out the usual price is $4. Costco is a bit cheaper at $3.90. Doc, I don't know why milk is so expensive in Atlantic Canada. I know that milk is really expensive in Quebec because the government there imposed minimum retail prices for milk. It may be something similar in the Atlantic provinces. But the fact is that Ontario, Quebec, and the Atlantic provinces are under the same supply management system. So if milk can be sold at a decent price in a high priced area like Toronto then I would suggest that maybe there something other than supply management is the cause of high prices as is the case in Quebec. Cardboard, I did play around and what I've found is that the price for a gallon in Chicago is $2.53 not $1.78 as you claim. I also looked up prices in other major US cities: Seattle $2.68, Houston $2.66, Miami $3.16, Boston $2.91. The CAD equivalent for 4L for these respective cities is: $3.43, $3.64, $3.61, $4.29, $3.95. It averages out to slightly cheaper than what you would get in Toronto but you're nowhere anywhere near to half price as you claim. Edit: then there's this report which claims that milk isn't actually that expensive compared to US rBST free milk. https://www.exportactionglobal.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Dairy-Systems-Around-The-World_Export-Action-Global_April-2018.pdf Summary here: https://www.realagriculture.com/2018/04/dairy-price-study-finds-canadians-dont-pay-more-for-milk/

At Wal-Mart in New Jersey: Great Value 2% milk 1 gal: $3.62. CAD equivalent price for 4L $4.91 At Toronto Area Wal-Mart: Neilsen 2% milk 4L: $4.47 Again in at Wal-Mart in NJ: Laughing Cow Cheese 8 wedges: $2.87. CAD equivalent $3.68 At Toronto Area Wal-Mart: Laughing Cow Cheese 8 wedges: $3.47

Those loans are not entirely not government backed. You can't discharge them in bankruptcy. That's a pretty big thing.

Name one technology CEO from Gates era that got it perfectly right. Also, he essentially stepped down in 2000, before the internet even really took off and essentially handed everything over to Ballmer to focus on extracurricular activities and his private wealth. Gates remains in the top five wealthiest people in the world by any measure, and pretty much in all calculations stands second to Bezos. How badly did he really drop the ball! Cheers! Well maybe a lot of others didn't get it perfectly right. But someone seriously dropped the ball at Microsoft. I don't know I can't really tell if it's Gates, Balmer, or organizational inertia/incompetence. Now, don't get me wrong, I like Microsoft, it's incredibly successful, I own a lot of it and made a lot of money owning it. But if you go back and read their ARs like way back, it is freakishly weird how well they called the future. About most things. Search, mobile, etc - not so much online shopping. So they had the insight. They had the vision. But they failed to execute - i.e. dropped the ball. If they did follow through and executed on their vision Microsoft would be worth at least 4 times what they are now. That's in excess of a trillion bucks. These are mind bending numbers to leave on the table. For a Microsoft shareholder that is tragic. I'm not talking about Microsoft. I'm talking about Gates. Charlie Munger sits on the board of Costco, knew Gates and Buffett, and still Costco will have a hard time in the future with Amazon. Does that mean someone dropped the ball at Costco, or simply a better CEO came along with a better model? Great CEO's are often discarded because their companies failed to prosper relative to history, but even if they continued to prosper relative to industry, they are still relegated as mediocre leaders. Do people really think that a Berkshire run by Greg Abel, where insurance is run by Ajit Jain and the board by Bill Gates, isn't going to work? Cheers! I'm not sure we're talking about the same thing. Sure, Gates is Gates, and Microsoft is Microsoft. They're both really successful. But when I'm talking about these insights Gates was maybe even CEO of Microsoft. Probably around the borderline. And I'm not talking here about someone else coming with a better model. They had the model! Almost to a tee! Then someone else did it. That's pretty infuriating from a shareholder's point of view. Now one may say that Gates doesn't care about that, that he's made enough money and he's now focused on curing malaria and AIDS. Btw, I admire a lot what the Gates foundation has achieved and what it aims to achieve. But wouldn't they be in a stronger position to achieve goals if Gates had 150 billion instead of 50 billion? That's the Buffett philanthropic principle.

Name one technology CEO from Gates era that got it perfectly right. Also, he essentially stepped down in 2000, before the internet even really took off and essentially handed everything over to Ballmer to focus on extracurricular activities and his private wealth. Gates remains in the top five wealthiest people in the world by any measure, and pretty much in all calculations stands second to Bezos. How badly did he really drop the ball! Cheers! Well maybe a lot of others didn't get it perfectly right. But someone seriously dropped the ball at Microsoft. I don't know I can't really tell if it's Gates, Balmer, or organizational inertia/incompetence. Now, don't get me wrong, I like Microsoft, it's incredibly successful, I own a lot of it and made a lot of money owning it. But if you go back and read their ARs like way back, it is freakishly weird how well they called the future. About most things. Search, mobile, etc - not so much online shopping. So they had the insight. They had the vision. But they failed to execute - i.e. dropped the ball. If they did follow through and executed on their vision Microsoft would be worth at least 4 times what they are now. That's in excess of a trillion bucks. These are mind bending numbers to leave on the table. For a Microsoft shareholder that is tragic.

There's a broader underlying point here about the financial illiteracy of even apparently intelligent people in this country, whether teenagers or adults. As you note, this person made the initial decision to go to NYU and major in journalism when he was 17 or 18 years old. He appears to be an intelligent person. So, why did he (and many others like him) not make wiser decisions? I understand the point about personal responsibility, but most people absorb the lessons they see around them. I've been asking myself this for a long time because I see people make stupid financial decisions all the time. And I don't think it's just about financial literacy because I saw lots of people that actually work in finance make tons of bad financial decisions for themselves. The conclusion I've came to is that actually making good financial decisions for the most part is actually very hard. If you "get it" it may seem very simple. But it's a hard thing to do in general.

Give me a break with this full accountability/personal responsibility stuff. Who on the finance side took full accountability for driving the financial system into the ditch? And these were supposed to be people who should really have known what they were doing. But the line became that nobody could have seen this coming. Sure, because it was out of the realm of possibility that if you write shitbag mortgages with your eyes closed something really bad may happen. So until the big guys step up and take full accountability I'm willing to give the little guys a break on the accountability and what they should have known.

I'd say that first thing is to check whether your foreign assets are over 100k and you were indeed required to file a T1135. Form T1135 is required if the assets had a cost in excess of 100k, not a market value in excess of 100k. I mention it because a lot of people get that wrong. If you were indeed required to file the form you are indeed in a bit of a pickle. Your only way of avoiding the penalty is to beg forgiveness of the CRA. Which is to apply for relief. Usually with the CRA you generally are allowed one screw up, so the first one's free. Unfortunately in your case the CRA is dead serious about form T1135. So I'd say your chances of getting relief are around 50/50. But it's worth the shot. It should go without saying that you should be professional and courteous in asking for relief.

Yea, as a Canadian I feel that we should compensate the US for that.

What evidence? You didn't provide any. All you did is provide 2 links to blog posts that say that Pakistani emigrants don't do very well in Canada. Maybe so, but so what? In a race someone will always be last. Again you say that you get "the tickle" because on quora people are saying that Canada is a version of the us but when you check the data it's not the case. Then I'm assuming that you've checked the data. So where is it. Please share the comparative data for Pakistani immigrants to the US to see if they're doing better there than Canada. Show me the evidence. Because so far I have nothing to ignore.

Yea, you keep saying that. The problem is that Windsor is basically our version of Flint. Do you think that if I were to collect anecdotes from a few young people in Flint those would be representative of the United States?

Is this a new episode of the weekly "I have a tickle about Canada and I want to scratch it!" series for threads by Shalab?

it's 102B pesos

Canadian housing market has turned. It just doesn't really sell copy.

Thanks fro your input bizaro. Regarding water, and maybe i'm showing my ignorance here, a lot of the oil sands are along the Athabasca river. So you've got water. Also regarding transportation of steam, you can get away from that in traditional way. Nuclear power to steam to electricity, transport electricity, turn electricity back into steam. Transmission lines instead of pipelines. I get what you're saying. It really was a matter of cost. These days nuclear power is more expensive than burning nat gas. Plus as you say if an oil and gas company tried to build a nuclear power plant there's gonna be a lot of skepticism out there. Those are very good points and I agree. From a technical perspective that's all true. But, at a certain point, I think the O&G and infrastructure companies will have to realize that the world around them has changed. They can't just assume that they can just steam roll a project into existence. The mistakes that pipeline companies made due to hubris were immense and cost shareholders a lot of money. I'm not saying that they should start building nuclear plants. But they should run their companies well. They environment where they operate has changes and to continue to be successful they need to adapt. Here's one of the questions that won't be addressed in an assessment: How much is it going to cost you if you don't have access to tide water for a decade or two?

Just curious here. I imagine that what you say would be true in say British Columbia. But power generation is a provincial matter. So the BC folks wouldn't have much to say about that. Is there such a big contingent of green crazies in Alberta that they would be able to derail a power project? Albertans certainly don't seem to have much of an issue with burning huge amounts of nat gas.