Broeb22

Trimmed CELH. 25x forward revenues is very rich when other "high growth" beverage names like MNST are trading at 8x. I always worry about selling something like this that has been successful (and I happen to really like their products). When I extrapolate 40% growth out for 5 years and assume 30% margins (in line with MNST but 50% higher than 18-20% for FIZZ), CELH would be an $800 million brand with $240 million of operating profit and $170 million of NOPAT. Keeping in mind S/O have expanded at >10% per year the last few years, 5 years from now S/O is very possibly 80 million. So EPS per share would be about $2. In other words, CELH is trading at 28x a VERY optimistic growth and margin profile 5 years from now. Another way to think about it is CELH has a similar EV to FIZZ with 1/6 the sales.

I'm currently at 33% in the accounts I actively invest. I do have sizable cash balances elsewhere that are about equal to the cash inside the accounts I actively invest. Part of that is because I have been investing in real estate in my local area and want cash on hand if I find something, part of it is I'm a chickenshit investor, and part of it is when I moved my accounts to IBKR, the process was so bad that I didn't want to put any more into it. I would guess that cash as % of all investable assets is about 25%, due to some land investments that have appreciated significantly in recent years. Of course, if the market corrects, the land will be very illiquid, but I like where its located and I have the cash available to maintain them.

+1

This is kind of besides the point, but I believe that quote you always see from CNBC about "you gotta be in the market because the 10 best days account for all of the return in any given year". It's such a cherry-picked fact. When did those trading days occur? Probably during periods of heightened volatility where the market was swinging up and down wildly. So in order to get the best trading days you had to stomach the worst trading days too. I've never actually looked at this before, but it confirms my suspicion about the "best trading days" garbage CNBC feeds retail investors. The attachment shows the 2020 trading days ranked in order (by absolute value of returns) and shows you that the best and worst days were clustered around March and April with a few exceptions outside that time. SP_500_Historical_Data.csv

Any chance you can post your returns? Just curious. Would post mine but since I'm young, I was able to take the concentration risk. Also, my investment track record is only 6 years - so I don't think it matters. However, it is above 50% - still have a long way to go. Hopefully it will provide cushion for the losses to come. I had nearly 29% returns, so very happy with that but also looking at my portfolio and not seeing a lot of value. Large detractor was CVET which I sold close to the bottom due to leverage concerns which CD&R made irrelevant weeks later. Large contributors: TRRSF PINS STNE FB JD GDYN FSV EPAM CARR

GDYN closed 2020 strong but I think by year-end 2021 that people will really start to see the business’ underlying growth and that it is very similar to publicly traded peers EPAM and DAVA. Other than that, emerging market stocks are an area of some interest. There are a number I own or have owned or know well which are very cheap (DESP, ARCO, KOF, etc.)

Whoa setting up that poll like John Hjorth did was tedious on the iPad. Anyways, what were everyone’s 2020 returns? No judgment given to those who would rather turn the page on 2020 without looking back. If you also want to share some big winners and losers in the comments that might be interesting...

RP

Followed Gregmal's advice and sold my cost basis in Pinterest and am holding the gains (for now).

You can really twist yourself into knots with the counterfactuals of that statement. If COVID didn’t happen, Trump would have been significantly more likely to win as an incumbent with a strong economy, and would the prospect of his second term have been good or bad? I generally would agree that if we continued to muddle through that stocks probably wouldn’t be up nearly 20% and the Nasdaq wouldn’t be up whatever it’s up.

It's kind of odd that the inverted yield curve in mid-2019 was followed by a recession, which technically makes the indicator correct again. When the recession is caused by a virus and not general economic conditions, that feels more flukey too me. Or does the yield curve predict recessions driven by famine and war too?

Trimmed U and FUBO as both have appreciated more than I could have anticipated in a short period of time. I really don't like market environments like this where stock prices are moving so rapidly. It makes it difficult to do the work of understanding a company before price "gets away" from you.

I have a small amount of money with Merrill Edge (they are my primary bank and I worked there after college so left some IRAs there) and I also manage accounts at Schwab and Fidelity. I'm not the most sophisticated person ever, but their service is decent, the access to BofA research is nice, and their performance reporting is decent (and better than Fidelity or Schwab) for the average investor. I consider them on par with Schwab or Fidelity. Interactive Brokers where I have most of my money, offers a whole lot more securities/markets, Forex, detailed and configurable portfolio reporting, and plenty of benefits to the small money manager, but it has numerous headaches too. I would steer clear of IB for the average investor who intends to invest in their home market.

GDYN...large-ish position now

Can you describe how Fiverr's network effect works in your opinion? I have had others recommend it to me, but it is hard for me to separate this from other gig economy-type competitors like Upwork, PPH, Elance, and others, where I see it being hard to prevent two parties who want to continue to work together from disintermediating the platform.

GDYN

+1 I think your best values exist somewhere in between. Where is that place that's been low-priced for a while but maybe new infrastructure or new investment is driving green shoots of development? Maybe you'll be able to buy at a price where there is little to no upside built into the price but there is a reasonable argument that additional redevelopment hits your neighborhood in the next 5 years. I would also make another comparison to the stock market in that its not a housing market as much as it is a market of houses. Everyone has different motivations for selling their home/property so if you can identify a seller who prizes liquidity over the best price, you can get a deal. Maybe not at this exact moment in time with the way the market is, but in general things don't move so fast that you can't find people who need liquidity. I recently advised my friends to buy a house in a certain part of Charlotte where 2,000+ sq ft homes were selling for less than $250,000. The area recently had some new infrastructure (a transit rail) put in, there has been some early momentum in prices in the area, and you can see some evidence of people renovating or flipping homes. It also is an area that has historically been considered a bad part of town, and I wouldn't be surprised if you see suspicious characters walking the main roads sometimes and maybe the shopping in that immediate area isn't that great but you're 15 minutes from downtown Charlotte. My buddy instead chose to buy a $400,000 home that had been renovated somewhat in a part of town that is not that great in my opinion, is farther from downtown, but is closer to other areas that have recently developed. It's too early to tell who is "right" but I think many people are uncomfortable being uncomfortable. In real estate, your friends might joke around and call you a slumlord, and no one is going to look at the homes you buy and say "Wow" but these areas that are on the fringe of development have been very successful for me.

I would largely agree with this.

Bought some ROP, TIG, CFX, and LESL over the last few days

I’ve been told how people in general are wired to think linearly. We can easily understand how 1+1=2 or 1+1+1+1+1+1=6 but we can’t as easily think exponentially. It’s like the old “trick question” that asks if a pond has lillies growing on it and the lillies are doubling in number every day and the pond is half covered after 29 days, how many more days will it take to fully cover the pond? The vast, vast majority of people will get this or similar questions wrong.

I stumbled on this video and the first that popped into my head was how this video illustrates well the concept of compound interest. While this audience likely gets compound interest, there may be others around you who don't that this would be interesting to. The most relevant piece is below, but the full video is below that. Full video:

WFC and speculative long in FUBO

I get the thesis with sports teams in general...they are trophy assets that keep going up in value because billionaires don't have anything better to do with their fortunes. Most of these teams don't generate much in the way of cash flow (probably except NFL due to non-guaranteed nature of contracts), so it's kind of like owning gold where you hope that there's a bigger fool who wants the team for glamour. There may be a more fundamental angle to this, but I guess I prefer assets that cash flow or have a reasonable expectation of cash flowing. In the case of MLB specifically , you're owning part of a sport that has an aging fan base and while I wouldn't bet anything on this, the long-term bear case would be that some of these sports become way less relevant and are displaced by alternatives (gaming/esports, soccer).

That is a complete misunderstanding of "value". The value is a subjective value the customer places on the service. A multi-millionaire in Beverly Hills will value a haircut more than a poor subsistence farmer somewhere in southeast Asia will. Value is subjective and different for every human being and different even for the same person at different times. You might place very little value on a bottle of water right at this moment sitting in your office, but when hiking on a hot day and you run out of water you might place a value on a bottle at that time many times higher, and if you are ever dying of thirst in the desert you might be willing to give everything you have for one. This is the reason price arbitrage works, you can make money moving goods from where they are valued less to where they are valued more. But in general a machinist who can make precision parts will always be valued by employers (and indirectly their customers for the parts they make) more than a cashier at McDonald's will be. Kinda feels like you agreed with me there at the end... No because, even though one might usually be more, there is nothing guaranteeing that to be true. Maybe there is a Mcdonalds franchise operating in a culture somewhere that values hamburgers far far more than precision machine parts and they are willing to buy burgers off of the $100-Menu. That franchise could offer to pay its employees an astounding amount of money, where in the US we expect our cheeseburgers to cost $1.50 and our precision machine parts to cost more. Back to haircuts, if I go to a national haircutting chain I would expect the employees to make less to cut my hair than the employees at the same chain in a super wealthy area where they can charge a lot more. It is all relative. Your income doesn't just depend on your skills, but how and where you use them. I kind of feel like some are missing the fundamental truth in what I was trying to say, which is, the type of work you choose to do (or advance to doing) matters a great deal to what you theoretically should be paid. If you operate a machine, your production is limited to the capabilities of the machine and how close you can get to those capabilities. However, if I am a manager of several people who run machines and I constantly find ways to keep the people working motivated and I keep finding ways to help them be more efficient or find ways to get 1 person to run 2 machines, I can reasonably expect to share in the benefits of those improvements. Likewise, if that worker participates in the entrepreneurial process and finds ways to make him/herself more efficient rather than coming in and "doing their job" they too should share in the fruits of those improvements (I would argue most frontline workers who initiate or help with these types of improvements often do not get their due financially. I do not think it would be abnormal in today's working environment at all for someone to find a $250,000 improvement, get a pat on the back, maybe some kind of award, and a $50 gift card to Walmart.) Ok I kind of got off track there. And then taking the example further, if I see a widespread need for millions (or billions) of people to have better information, and I develop a software that helps them get that information, that work should probably be more highly valued by orders of magnitude than the manager who oversees a few machines, and by even more than the one worker. I feel like this is a pretty straightforward and hard-to-argue-with definition of value but hey maybe I'm crazy. To be sure, I'm only looking at the labor side of things here. If you want to talk about capital and the reward for risking one's capital, that's a whole different story which nonetheless interplays with how labor is compensated. Either way, this conversation got way too in-depth really quickly, and I really like just analyzing stocks so I'm out.

That is a complete misunderstanding of "value". The value is a subjective value the customer places on the service. A multi-millionaire in Beverly Hills will value a haircut more than a poor subsistence farmer somewhere in southeast Asia will. Value is subjective and different for every human being and different even for the same person at different times. You might place very little value on a bottle of water right at this moment sitting in your office, but when hiking on a hot day and you run out of water you might place a value on a bottle at that time many times higher, and if you are ever dying of thirst in the desert you might be willing to give everything you have for one. This is the reason price arbitrage works, you can make money moving goods from where they are valued less to where they are valued more. But in general a machinist who can make precision parts will always be valued by employers (and indirectly their customers for the parts they make) more than a cashier at McDonald's will be. Kinda feels like you agreed with me there at the end...