Santayana

Those 10% pullbacks are such gifts.

Gloria was $900M in 1985. I wonder what that would be now.

I don't think they're in a position to take LVMH private. I understand your point, but you can't compare the situation of having full control of a company to what's available by just buying stock.

That's multiple years of earnings for CrowdStrike, will be interesting to see who ends up paying.

Meanwhile Fairfax is at a new high. Will we see the usual Q3 pullback as the season really gets underway?

I know this is the earliest, but there have been other years where early storms have gotten people concerned about a bad season that never manifested. But just the worry of a bad season could lead to some better buying opportunities for Fairfax.

I've been trimming my very overweight Fairfax position a bit as we head into Q3. Seems like there's already been a couple of events that could lead to this being a larger Cat year.

That is not true. You can trade long puts/calls, sell covered calls, and sell cash secured puts without having a margin account.

Added to JOE and NTDOY.

Is this your way of answering the how old are you thread? I got to see him play a couple of times in his later NASL days.

Back around 2004-2007 I had two jobs, one was salary and one was hourly. The salary position was a customer facing one where when the customers weren't there, often there really wasn't much to do. The hourly job was consulting for a financial institution providing tier 3 ops support for their data systems (handling problems with things like Bloomberg Data License, Barra, MSCI, etc.). Both employers knew my time was being split but didn't care.

Right, but arguing whether the inflation exists, or whether it's inherently bad are two different things. Maybe no one is *entitled* to eat out, but if they're used to doing it and it's effectively taken away from them, they're going to be disgruntled about it and be looking for someone to blame.

I completely agree, but it *is* inflationary. Plenty of middle class people who used to enjoy a weekly dinner out at a restaurant are being priced out of that small luxury.

Given how I interpret your general worldview, I'm really surprised that you're not someone who sees the wage increases as leading to ongoing inflation. I'll agree that it's good for a lot of people getting the raises, but it's just classical economics, more money chasing the goods and services will always result in price increases. I know a number of restaurant owners who have significantly increased prices over the past few years, and yet they're still not making nearly as much as they were due to all the wage increases and wholesale food price increases. Which means more price hikes still to come. When you mention the grocery store, I do see the prices there have finally stabilized, but just because someone can substitute eating at home vs. going out doesn't mean their cost of living hasn't gone up. Sure I can eat more cheaply if I spend an hour cooking at home vs. having an after work cocktail at the bar, but that's assuming my time is worth 0. I've always thought substitution effects and hedonic adjustments are just BS that lets the government get away with understating the real inflation that so many people feel.

But they were mostly right 2016-2018 when we did have a rising rate environment, and then 2019-2020 may have been the steepest cutting cycle in history, and I don't think it was very easy to see that was coming. Given how much lower the float was in 2016 vs. now, how much do you really think they could have made by taking on duration when the 10yr was trading at ~2%?