formthirteen

No spoilers: Candy - crime mini-series about i*******y The English - western mini-series about the E*****h, s******s, and I*****s The Responder - B*****h drama series The Bear - series about a s*******h shop in C******o The Old Man - ******

Designers and typography enthusiast understand the meaning of "if you want to ruin someone's life, teach them to recognize bad kerning.”, but you don't have to be a miserable typography enthusiast to enjoy the following kerning mistakes: More kerning jokes: https://digitalsynopsis.com/design/funny-letter-spacing-kerning-fails/ https://fontbundles.net/blog/top-10-hilarious-kerning-fails https://www.boredpanda.com/funny-importance-of-kerning/

Story time for people interested in checklists. Once upon a time, an airplane ran out of fuel over the Atlantic Ocean: https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/crisis-over-the-atlantic-the-near-crash-of-air-transat-flight-236-671d3a0c4b04 Here's the checklist that could have helped, or not: The mistake Captain Piché made was that he memorized the checklist, but not the warning: Checklists are a good thing. Simplifying the problem space is more important, which is why the following checklists could be useful to most people: Problem: What should I buy today? Buy an index fund Problem: How much time should I spend on macro? 3 minutes per year Problem: Do I need a blockchain? No Surgery and flying airplanes are activities that cannot be simplified much.

Asness' opinion: https://www.aqr.com/Insights/Perspectives/The-Bubble-Has-Not-Popped Ian D'Souza's (ABC Funds) opinion: https://abcfunds.com/media-centre/investment-commentaries/abc-perspective-january-2023/ My opinion: I have no idea and if I had one I wouldn't know what I'm talking about.

I was unfamiliar with the Atlantic Council and did some googling and found this article: https://www.ft.com/content/6ceb6331-07a0-4b1f-b777-3034b288a3be After even more googling I found "The top 23 risks and opportunities for 2023”, including ”Venezuelan oil comes online, relieving pressure on global energy markets”: https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/content-series/atlantic-council-strategy-paper-series/risks-opportunities-2023/ I don't know if the opinions of "foreign policy experts" are as good as "analyst estimates". The complexity of the problem and accuracy are probably about the same. However, it would be quite easy to model Russia's aggression even for a self-appointed ”top foreign policy expert" like myself: - every year, 99% probability of a prominent Russian falling out of a window near the Kremlin - every 10 years, 99% probability of Russia invading and pillaging a neighboring country - every 100 years, 99% probability of Russian land grab attempt The accuracy of this model is about 99% (±1%) according to my own estimates.

Thank you. I will look into these options.

Yes, Vietnam is interesting. I like the Vietnamese Dong compared to other EM currencies. Which funds do you buy to get exposure to Vietnam and Japan?

Congratulations!

As an owner of EC I approve of this implicitly. Small position for me so will not move the needle but might provide some excitement one way or the other (dividend, politics, civil war, etc). PBR-A is a similar position. I don't have any conviction and will dump these if they drop (highly likely).

Not a dumb question at all. It's one of these holding companies trading at a 50-70% NAV discount. The reasons for the discount are probably hiding somewhere in the corp structure: They just completed the sale of Bolloré Africa for 5.7 billion euro so they had some value hiding there. Yes, ELF.TO. I own ONEX too. The discount is irrational.

There is no such thing as a best idea for me but my top four holdings sorted by total value are: - FFH - BRK (or BOL + ODET) - ELF - MKL What a boring portfolio. Maybe time to rethink the whole thing?

All Quiet on the Western Front (2022) was better than I expected: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1016150/ Great anti-war ”propaganda”. Probably not a movie warmongers would enjoy.

Thanks. I needed some good news. But, as an investor in PM and MO I was unhappy to read this, LOL: The World Tobacco Atlas revealed that for the first time the proportion of smokers in the world has fallen. That's a hugely consequential shift that will save millions of lives. Out near the front of the pack? The United States, where cigarette smoking is down sharply, and New Zealand, the first country to implement an annually rising smoking age, ensuring tobacco cannot be sold to anyone born after 1 January 2009. I miss SWMA already, LOL.

Thanks. That was good. By the way, I heard it's not yet too late to buy Christmas gifts: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/08/17/ukraine-russia-bombs-slogans-fundraising/

Merry Christmas to everyone and their holdings! I hope next year will be a better year than 2020, 2021, and 2022 It probably will, because what more could go wrong, oh, maybe the economy?

Who knows, it might become a forever war: The plot summary is interesting and prescient because history rhymes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Forever_War

Elon said in a Spaces chat that he expects the company to be break-even next year. Without the layoffs he said they would have lost $3-4B, with $1B in cash that w0uld have meant bankruptcy, if I remember correctly...

Post of the year. I'm biased as an owner of ICE, ENX, CBOE, LSEG, and OTCM. I should probably buy more of them and hibernate.

Who's FRED?

It looks like birds are no joke. Hope you're alright if that is you.

No worries. I know there are multiple viewpoints and interpretations and enjoy hearing more about them. I try to stay neutral and I try not to offend anyone, but my thinking is probably affected by the historical memes that have been repeated to me (my culture). Here's a photo of me trying to enjoy myself right now:

You are correct. I will buy you a beer after the history books about this conflict have been written. We can discuss historical facts, sorry, I mean we can discuss the best memes from books and thought leaders. I'm interested in everyone's viewpoint.

History is complex and everyone is ”conveniently" ignoring historical memes. Everyone hopefully agrees that it was unnecessary to humiliate Germany after WW1. Russia was humiliated in 1991 when the Soviet Union collapsed, but most of it was because of their own stupidity. This time it seems they are humiliating themselves again. But maybe you're right, we could bow down to Russia and let ”Putin” take Sudetenland Crimea. Wait, don't forget to give him Eastern Ukraine, and what should we do about Southern Ukraine? Okay, let's give him Abkhazia and Transnistria too. It seems Russia's meme writers (Pushkin, Putin, etc) are more powerful than international law.

I understand your viewpoint, but the easiest off-ramp is Russia leaving Ukraine and Crimea. Russia's propaganda machine is able to spin that as a victory to the people of Russia, for example, ”We were right, NATO attacked us but we are still here”. Also, Russia does not respect any contracts or treaties, only power and force. Putin is Russia. Invading and destabilizing neighbors is Russia's culture (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_involving_Russia). Removing Putin will not change that culture. Basically, it's a war of memes and cultures: A war of Borscht (see video): No opinion on the war, other than ”it is what it is”.