Sharad

I wish I had listened to myself. :-\

Why not bail them out with government help at pennis on the dollar, and then give secured bondholders and the company the option to buy said bailout shares from the government for 3x (or some exorbitant multiple of) the cost to the government one year from now to remove all conditions? That might make the company think twice about leaving less than a quarter's worth of operating cashflow on the books at any given time.

Purchased: Copart, Disney, Pizza Pizza Royalty Corp, and Texas Pacific Land Trust.

Any chance he told you what timeframe constitutes an extended up market stretch? 11 years 10 months and 13 days.

I don't know why it went up, but I bought VIX put options (one week expiration at 3:50pm), seeing that Biden likely wins South Carolina, the White House/Federal Reserve/ECB/CDC/EU will announce some form of action (whether it actually can do anything is an entirely different thing), and the VIX was nearly 50 today, and though I see more downside for the next little while, even in October 2008, the market had massive gyrations up and down, and moments where things settled for a few days. In any event, I suspect if you had a lot of short positions, then you couldn't go all-short into the weekend. People likely waited until the last minute to cover some positions or hedge out some short positions.

Back to the market action: the market has basically completed the circle back to the S&P levels in September when Powell indicated asset purchases would continue until the spring, which basically opened the rush into equities. This appeared to be a classic blow-off top, and so we were bound to give that back. We just gave it back in bigger chunks as a result of novel coronavirus. So, now that we gave back what was never really ours, we can address how the market gets impacted by coronavirus. Given earnings expectations weren't exactly stellar before, does China's upcoming stimulus drive us back up? One thing to pay attention to: Chinese activity is now rising day over day...it's a small green shoot for them, but might take a little while to be recognized here. And the virus is likely already spreading in North America: Canada and US simply aren't testing as many people as other areas of the world. Does Powell indicate that asset purchases continue after his Q2 end date? Would that even matter? Those are the questions I currently ponder, while I expect China to announce some sort of first round of massive stimulus in the coming weeks.

I think many people are looking at rates of infection and morbidity rates, which won't give us the true picture of the impact to the global economy and to the stock market, which is (crudely) for which many of us are looking for answers. My take: The virus likely has a much lower morbidity rate than the 2% in Wuhan, but the cases were never identified and reported correctly, and they sent people home or people avoided leaving home to deal with it themselves (h/t muscleman for some insight as well). Anyone at the beginning of the crisis that died of pneumonia like symptoms probably was ruled as a death from other sources. Regardless the morbidity rate at the beginning was skewed by the hospital cases, similar to the morbidity rates for people hospitalized for the flu in the US (8-12%, per CDC). This spiked up morbidity rate clearly spooked the world, and the unknown nature of this virus is enough to scare everyone, so everyone freaked..but the market remained sanguine for two reasons...one, the Fed is in the midst of a massive asset buying spree, the repo markets are wide open, and liquidity has pushed markets into a blow-off top since Powell declared, for all intents and purposes, that the Fed has the markets' back during his Fed press conference in September. China also clamped down hard on the virus, trying to contain it, and, through surprising transparency, shared a lot of data with counterparts in the US, Canada, Europe and Australia, where the first full mapping of the virus' RNA was completed within a few days of receiving the virus sample itself. While the markets drank the Fed Kool Aid, the tanker and dry bulk markets showed a different story. Rates plummeted, even in the face of IMO 2020 standards for tankers, which basically docked a large percentage of "dirty" tankers, to be upgraded with scrubbers that would reduce sulfur (?) emissions during their travels with petroleum products in a bid for global trade. This should have been the perfect recipe for a massive breakout from a 12 year bear market for rates, and the stocks soared from September to January in anticipation of it. Coronavirus clamped that down. China wasn't receiving their deliveries. The country shut down, stockpiles have built up, and demand for petroleum products declined 25% plus. The market factored all these things in, and banked on a huge stimulus in China to keep the party going. South Korea dented those prospects, but Iran, and especially Italy, broke the whole thesis down. The moment a bunch of villages near Milan became a prime cluster outside China, all bets of containment were off. In the meantime, we have seen the market reach the apex of a massive blow-off top after a nearly 11 year bull market from the March 6, 2009 bottom. The last 4-5 years have resulted in P/E valuations doubling (or more) for the biggest companies in the S&P 500 (https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/AAPL/apple/pe-ratio), the massive move to index investing (https://www.cnbc.com/2019/03/19/passive-investing-now-controls-nearly-half-the-us-stock-market.html), and the retail investor returning to the market over the last couple of years (see the increased interest in Bitcoin, Tesla, r/wsb, etc.). We were likely due for a large market decline when Powell pulled the plug on asset purchses (he declared mid Q2 2020, so let's say April), and that would have likely pushed us down 20%, like the Fed pivot of 2018. Once you factor in the coronavirus, how much further could we fall? Not only should we see the "p" of the p/e ratio fall, but we will also see the "e" fall too (see MSFT today). Bottom line: IMHO, this is only the beginning. I was holding out hope, but that Italian outbreak changed it all. The Greek fashion designer who contracted it during her time at Milan Fashion Week means that cases will likely pop up everywhere, especially larger markets. Anyways, I think people shouldn't be evaluating this from the morbidity rates, etc (I am guilty of doing this when we were transfixed by what was happening in China, and far from everywhere else). They should evaluate the destruction of capital flows and trade, and how much wealth that destroys. The destruction of wealth could mean a steeper decline. But the banks are better capitalized, so the upswing should be equally dramatic, whenever that will be. This is going to get much more ugly (consider if the Olympics are cancelled), and I think S&P 2,500 could be in the cards...but I could also see a massive upswing in the summer, when coordinated global stimulus pushes things higher, faster. We shouldn't be comparing this crisis to SARS or any other modern pandemic threat. This should be compared to the 1918 influenza outbreak and the subsequent 1919-1921 market crash and depression. If you are looking for investments, consider NYSE:NVO (their products are probably the least sensitive to the virus) and Nasdaq:GRVY (Gravity Co Ltd, as South Korean gaming company: SK gaming culture is amongst the most profitable in the world and what the hell else are they going to do there now?). Sorry for the long response. I was hoping it would help people see the broader picture of the market's moves ahead of the coronavirus, and the moves within the "guts" of the economy at the same time.

15%/year for 10 years is about two doubles, or 4x current investment. I think Premium Brands Holdings Corporation (TSX: PBH) and Savaria (TSX: SIS) can reach those levels in the next 10 years. Both are roll-up companies, and should be able to continue to acquire businesses in fragmented industries over the next 10 years to achieve returns at about that rate. I also think companies that have a history of hitting those numbers will continue to do so into the future. I like Novo Nordisk and Fastenal. Both have minimal long term debt, massive ROA, and good capital allocation histories. Timely share buybacks and sustainable dividend policies should continue into the future.

As algorithms start taking in all the information and interpreting the data, will COBF add an algorithm section so we can discuss which algo's we are investing in?

I think you would enjoy the book, "Astroball", based on everything you discussed about Theo Epstein's m.o. with the Cubs.

James P Carse, "Finite and Infinite Games"; Tom Wright, Bradley Hope, "Billion Dollar Whale"; Ichiro Kishimi, Fumitake Koga, "The Courage to be Disliked" (basically a primer on Adler); Ben MacIntyre , "The Spy and The Traitor"; Laurence Gonzales, "Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why". I enjoyed these books immensely in the last 6 months (among the books I read). While none really added anything to my investment process, per se, I feel they all added another ring to my tree of knowledge, and I highly recommend reading any of them to think differently or learn more about things that have happened in moderately recent history.

You should take a look at "Pirate Hunters", too. I enjoyed it more than "Rocket Men" for some reason (seeing as Rocket Men has higher ratings on almost every website), but it may simply be timing on my part.

They're filing for Ch. 11 at 12:01am Pacific Time. https://sanfrancisco-cbslocal-com.cdn.ampproject.org/v/s/sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2019/01/28/pge-votes-to-file-for-chapter-11-bankruptcy/amp/?amp_js_v=a2&amp_gsa=1&usqp=mq331AQCCAE%3D#referrer=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com&amp_tf=From%20%251%24s&ampshare=https%3A%2F%2Fsanfrancisco.cbslocal.com%2F2019%2F01%2F28%2Fpge-votes-to-file-for-chapter-11-bankruptcy%2F

I see this more like a Fannie/Freddie situation. The state takes over the entity, prevents bondholders from securing their debts through any renegotiation, sets up a claim for future wildfires via inverse condemnation, and just milks any operating cash flows to pay for corrective action on fixing the infrastructure problems plaguing the entity (also due to terrible zoning by the state). Bondholders would likely see a fraction of face in such a situation (they're unsecured, after all). In any event, I'm lost as to how equity is still sitting at $6...

As long as you're picking up pennies in front of the steam roller, why not just sell $190 strike puts against RHT (2020 expiration)? Surely the deal won't fall apart. Seems like less work. Does China have to approve the deal? If so, then I suspect there is a lot of risk...