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tooskinneejs

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Everything posted by tooskinneejs

  1. I agree with most of these points too. With regard to income taxes, I believe people in lower income brackets should pay some tax, even if it is a small percentage. This makes them have some skin in the game and de-motivates them from voting for politicians promising 'free stuff' because they think it will cost them nothing.
  2. This Charlie quote is pretty important these days... "Another thing I think should be avoided is extremely intense ideology because it cabbages up one’s mind. ... When you’re young it’s easy to drift into loyalties and when you announce that you’re a loyal member and you start shouting the orthodox ideology out, what you’re doing is pounding it in, pounding it in, and you’re gradually ruining your mind." – Charlie Munger, USC Law Commencement Speech, May 2007
  3. "Cryptocurrency-trading giant Binance said the accounting firm it used to verify its reserves has paused all work for crypto clients, hampering efforts to reassure customers that their money is safe." "Binance also said outflows from its platform swelled to $6 billion, a reflection of turmoil among crypto traders shocked by the implosion last month of rival exchange FTX." "Mazars on Friday withdrew from its website a report on reserves at Binance and other cryptocurrency-trading companies. The report for Binance, which wasn’t an audit, was published last week. A spokesman for the accounting firm said it had made the move “due to concerns regarding the way these reports are understood by the public.” https://www.wsj.com/articles/binance-says-accounting-firm-pauses-work-for-its-crypto-clients-11671200654?st=v9qz5aolgzaljov&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink So much for virtual currencies being a "store of value."
  4. Weird case "against Trump." As I understand it, the ex-CFO received compensation and didn't declare it on his taxes. The ex-CFO gets a slap on the wrist and the company is found guilty. Seems to me like the CFO should be the one being punished.
  5. We just finished this limited series and it was great. It has to be great writing when you are hoping for someone to get killed.
  6. I think there are tons of very informed individuals who rightly think cryptocurrencies will be looked back as a "how could anyone have believed in that" moment in financial history. I'm still waiting to hear why cryptocurrencies shouldn't be viewed as anything other than tulip bulb mania without actual tangible tulip bulbs.
  7. I just watched a documentary on Netflix titled "Trust No One - The Hunt for the Crypto King." It was a well done story on Gerry Cotten, the fraudster behind crypto exchange Quadriga. Did he really die in India? Will we ever know?
  8. The company has earned 70% of its market capitalization in the last five years. Sales were down 26% quarter over quarter due primarily to a decline in sales in their Hawthorne segment (cannabis) due to oversupply. We'll have to wait and see if that is a temporary factor or not. The consumer segment, which is by far the largest, saw sales decline 13% in the quarter. Many businesses saw spikes in sales during the pandemic as people focused on home. This could be just a cooling off. I still think people will take care of their yards. As to the balance sheet. They have a strong current ratio of about 2.5. Debt to equity is high, but that is because the company has paid dividends of $1.3 billion and retired shares (net of issuances) of $892 million over the last 10 years (a total of $2.2 billion, which approximates today's market cap).
  9. The Scotts Miracle-Gro Company. It's at a price not seen since 2013. VF Corp is also looking cheap.
  10. There was a big shout out to Warren on the series finale of Better Call Saul last night.
  11. I just went to South Africa. Spent several days in Cape Town and then several days on safari in Kruger Park. In Cape Town we hiked to the top of Table Mountain, kids did paragliding, we did a sunset cruise, saw penguins, and learned about Apartheid and visited Robben Island (where Mandela was imprisoned). The city is really nice and modern overall, but there are townships outside of the city where thousands of people live in small metal shacks. Pretty crazy how much wealth disparity exists there. In Kruger, we drove through the park to see many wild animals and stayed in small cabins in fenced-in areas of the park. We then spent a couple of days in a private game reserve where we could go off-road and see even more animals. The people in South Africa were very friendly and happy to see tourism return to the country. An added benefit for value investors - the US dollar is very strong against the Rand. You can get a nice meal at a sit-down restaurant for the equivalent of $7 and a really nice meal for $20. I felt like a king!
  12. Wouldn't the most obvious example be a retailer or a restaurant? You know, something relatable? Target maybe?
  13. I enjoyed HBR Guide to Better Business Writing. (kept that short in the spirit of good writing)
  14. A decade ago I would have strongly recommended BusinessWeek. I liked it because it provided straight reporting on businesses, both in short and long form articles, and without an investment spin. That meant I could learn about what was happenig to businesses without an angle and decide for myself whether something looked interesting. Unfortunately, I found that politics started infecting their reporting to the point where a substantial portion of their magazine was no longer straight business reporting. After subscribing for 20 years I dropped it. Their current issue is the "Equity Issue" and has an article about fat people supposedly being fired for their weight. Not exactly helpful in providing me with meaningful business information. Fortune would be my recommendation right now, with the caveat that many articles approach a story from an investing angle.
  15. An article in today's WSJ supports Gregmal's point of view. https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-housing-market-is-nearly-4-million-homes-short-of-buyer-demand-11618484400?mod=hp_featst_pos3 "The U.S. housing market is 3.8 million single-family homes short of what is needed to meet the country’s demand, according to a new analysis by mortgage-finance company Freddie Mac." "“We should have almost four million more housing units if we had kept up with demand the last few years,” Mr. Khater said. “This is what you get when you underbuild for 10 years.”
  16. A recent article in the WSJ described a large home builder selling an entire community of new homes to a public company and generating twice the profit that they would have made selling them to individuals. That seems a bit like an investment mania in a world starved for yield. Maybe everything will stay ok as long as rates stay artificially low for another 10 years and current nominal prices stay put while inflation adjusts them in real terms. But if rates return to normal levels, all bets are off. Price to rent ratios don't make any sense compared to historical norms.
  17. I'm thinking about taking screen caps of posts on this board and selling them as NFTs with very reasonable prices starting in the low thousands. I'll even give Sanjeev 50% of the profits since it's his board. Anyone want to buy a NFT of one of their own posts from me?
  18. In a sign of the crypto-times, a piece of digital art just sold at auction for $60,000,000. It is a collage of a bunch of graphic images. https://www.cnbc.com/2021/03/11/most-expensive-nft-ever-sold-auctions-for-over-60-million.html If you'd like to view it without shelling out the $60,000,000, you can see it here for free: https://onlineonly.christies.com/s/beeple-first-5000-days/beeple-b-1981-1/112924
  19. Thanks for the responses. "If the US is serious about releasing a digital dollar..." Doesn't that already exist in substance? I get paid electronically in US dollars. I pay my bills electronically using US dollars. I pay merchants the same way. I'd guess that 99 percent of my inflows and outflows are electronic and in US dollars. So why do I need a different electronic currency? "If you are going to wait until you can spend crypto everywhere you shop the opportunity to get in early will be gone." What opportunity? Buying bitcoin doesn't give you partial ownership of the system any more than having US dollars in a bank gives you partial ownership of the bank or paying for things using a Visa gives you ownership of Visa.
  20. If the point of cryptos is DeFi, do you really have DeFi if you use CeFi to add funds to your wallet and use CeFi to reconvert your crypto to cash to pay for things? The dude in this video literally transfers funds from his bank account to his crypto wallet, then pays for things at a store by reconverting his crypto to cash on a debit card.
  21. Interwoven in these posts about energy use are suggestions that the real value is the system that bitcoin is creating: "Bitcoin and a handful of other smart-contract based tokens have the ability to replace the entire global infrastructure for finance" "it had the potential to eat the entire payment/processing/settlement industry at the very least." The only problem with this is that buying bitcoin doesn't give you ownership of the system where the real value purportedly is.
  22. The point? The two investors in Google at least agree on what it is - a business. With bitcoin, most advocates can't agree on what they've sunk their money into. A payment network? Software? A bank in cyberspace? An egalitarian progressive technology? A few posts ago, I asked if someone could provide me another example of a currency whose price was solely stated in other currencies and no one could. It's interesting to me that many advocates don't even refer to it as a currency anymore, despite that being the purported original intent. I'm not arguing that this won't go to $100k or $1 million, what I'm positing is that the very fact that hardly anyone can actually articulate what they have sunk their money into isn't a good sign supporting the substance of their speculation. BTW, I don't mean to insult anyone I just truly don't get what I'm seeing here and I am open to being educated. Can I ask a question of the advocates - My understanding is that tracking bitcoin transactions requires a lot of computing resources. Right now, there is an incentive to compute because new bitcoin is mined as a result. What happens when substantially all bitcoin has been mined? Will there be a continued incentive to do all the computing necessary to track what will then presumably be an exponentially higher number of transactions? If not, will the premise behind the network (distributed ledgers) fall apart?
  23. Reading through this thread, it's interesting to see that even bitcoin advocates can't seem to agree on what bitcoin actually is. Last week when the Microstrategy CEO was on CNBC talking his book after borrowing $1 billion to buy bitcoin, he said the following: "bitcoin is a bank in cyberspace" "it's a store of monetary energy" "the price of bitcoin reflects the monetary energy of the bank in cyberspace" "bitcoin is property not a security" "bitcoin is the most widely held investment asset in the world" "bitcoin is the dominant digital monetary network" "bitcoin is an egalitarian progressive technology" "it's the ideal institutional safe-haven asset" "it will replace stock indexes like the S&P 500 and the Dow, bond indexes, and the like"
  24. Avoiding a slowly depreciating currency by buying something that has and could depreciate 50 percent overnight is a better option?
  25. Thanks for the response. "How do you quote the value of the dollar if not in relative terms of what it can buy? Whether that be in goods, labor, or other currencies, the only value of any currency is relative. Why would crypto be different?" In a store in the UK, they don't state prices in terms of US dollars, they say the price is XX Pounds sterling. Same with other countries. Bitcoin et al. are supposedly their own currency, but nothing is priced in Bitcoins (not even its own currency). How can something be its own currency when it is never stated in its own currency units? "So when it comes to moving USD it's either cheap or fast - but you don't get both." So, illegal transactions and very large transactions that need to happen really fast are the two advantages of virtual currencies? How often do people need to move large amounts of funds really fast and is the price/existence risk of holding Bitcoin instead of cash worth the $15 savings for a wire fee for what is likely to be an infrequent transaction? "in this instance, the coin/token IS the network." Again, it sounds like the reason for buying virtual currency is access to a speedy transaction. What would happen to the price of virtual currencies (as stated in U.S. dollars) if big players in the payment processing industry announced tomorrow a new system using their networks that would allow for exchanges of large amounts of dollars really fast? Thanks again.
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