ratiman

I stopped giving chocolate at Christmas because everybody on my list is either a) fat or b) desperately trying to keep off the weight. Nobody looks at a box of chocolates and says "Oh thank you for adding an inch to my waistline."

I've read that if you show up at a Godiva just before closing you can get the chocolate covered strawberries for free, right before they're thrown out. Just a heads up for the true value investors out there.

Thanks, that's very helpful. But i'm not sure it totally answers the question. The same concerns about freshness would apply to Lindt or Godiva. I had no idea that chocolate could be fresh or not fresh.

I didn't plan this but this is a good story about the growth of Sees. https://thehustle.co/how-a-small-candy-company-became-warren-buffetts-dream-investment/

Buffett has said that it's hard to grow Sees sales but chocolatiers like Godiva and Lindt sell in supermarkets and also maintain independent shops. I've heard that Buffett wanted to maintain the Sees brand and didn't want Sees sold next to Hershey's or something but it works for Godiva and Lindt, it should work for Sees too.

"A police department in Florida once held a "Day devoted to public safety" . . . "

The first words of the first chapter are "A school in Connecticut once held a "Day devoted to the arts" . . . " WHO CARES? I can't imagine an introduction less likely to get the reader hooked.

CB on WSB https://www.listennotes.com/podcasts/we-study/tip438-berkshire-hathaway-0VEjovYZl9c/

I want sites like Koyfin to succeed but my bookmarks are filled with dead links to sites that have tried to replace Yahoo finance (remember Zignals?) It's amazing how many things YF got right and how difficult it is to replace even for billionaires. I think the basic problem is that everybody has very unique preferences and ultimately most people default to a mix and match of different sites. I also wonder how large the audience is. We've all heard the anecdotes that like 57 people actually click on the link to the SBUX 10-K.

GE under Immelt sounds a lot like IBM. Predix is basically Watson, a vaporware AI layer on top of all its industrial machinery. The fact that it took years for GE & IBM to admit that it was all nonsense, after spending hundreds of millions on advertizing, is kind of amazing. Immelt was a P&G product manager in his first job, and that's the mentality he brought to running GE, with lots of consumer advertizing and rapid buying & selling of brands. Unfortunately industrial machinery is nothing like soup or detergent and GE spent billions chasing after fads. It's amazing that Immelt lasted 16 years when he clearly wasn't suited to the job. The biggest difference between Immelt and Welch appears to be be that Welch was willing to hear bad news.

2020 defense budget was $738 billion, according to my Binging. 2023 defense budget will be less than $800 billion. That's a cut in inflation adjusted terms. I don't know how much but it's not a small cut. With Republicans turning against the military, and Democrats never that big on defense spending, I don't see how the defense budget keeps pace with inflation. Even if Russia were to invade Ukraine, I'm not sure it would affect the budget. These things go in cycles.

#nofilter I hope he doesn't shut up because the entertainment potential here is spectacular

Not wrong I have no idea why he's coming up in my Twitter feed but it should be amusing

Yeah I saw that. It's pretty nuts if he can't get funded, or maybe the problem is with institutions? None of my business but he should be a source of entertaining COBF content for years to come. Some of his conference call rants are

The latest 13F doesn't show any new positions except Playboy, which has already had a big move. PAR is an interesting one because I've seen some shorts circling it but I haven't looked at it. https://finviz.com/screener.ashx?v=211&t=PAR,APG,RICK,GFL,PLBY,FAT,&ta=0&p=w

The photos are something else https://www.forbes.com/sites/antoinegara/2021/05/25/how-this-democratic-senators-son-made-100-million-in-stocks-and-why-he-fled-to-low-tax-florida/?sh=3e1a88973cbc

Isn't the problem with "asset lite" businesses today that they're all valued on 2050 earnings? OK so your business was insulated from inflation but the multiple was sliced in half, that seems like a loss. If the business is priced like a bond, it will be hurt by inflation no matter what.

Gotham filed 13gs in 1999 at Sbarro, Old Guard, Commonwealth and Key3Media. It probably wasn't Sbarro, Key3 went under, and it might've been Old Guard, which was bought out at $12.

Social security and Medicare or another fleet of bombers, what is it going to be?

Yet Another Value podcast, Investing City, Acquisitions Anonymous are good ones.

I did give the podcast a listen and the light tone and chemistry between the two is appealing but I think it might be in the general interest death zone where it's competing with a lot of bigger and better known outlets. The discussion of the Klarman 13F was interesting but I wanted more of a deep dive that would go through his portfolio and try to piece out what he's thinking and why he would pick those stocks, especially some of the smaller holdings. The only people who are going to find a small investing podcast are investing junkies and they are interested in info they can't find elsewhere.

A Chicago-based truck-trailer manufacturer is increasingly hosting drive-through job fairs and raising wages by up to 7% as hiring picks up across its nine production plants. "Rising trucker wages" is such a joke at this point. WSJ, Bloomberg and Washington Post have run "trucker shortage" stories literally every two weeks for the last twenty five years.

These are two that I've found useful recently about small businesses. https://www.alexbridgeman.com/podcasts/ben-rudman-investing-in-consumer-businesses-ep-28/ https://anchor.fm/dealtalk/episodes/Dumpster-Roll-off-Business-in-SE-USA--e13-eoba40

I don't know much about this but I found this article, analyzing Amazon's R&D back in 2012, interesting. https://seekingalpha.com/article/603331-making-sense-of-amazons-market-value

If the phrase "naked shorting" were replaced by "single stock futures" then all of the dumb conspiracy theories around it would disappear and nobody would pay any attention.