WayWardCloud

I watched this interview of Murati and it felt so odd so I looked her up. She's CTO yet has an education in mechanical engineering and has never coded. Meanwhile Ilya Sutkever who built the damn thing is apparently being sidelined and silenced since the failed putsch.

So... they make doors and windows?

Would love to hear more about this!

I just don't see how LLMs overlap much with Search. Maybe we are thinking that way only because Microsoft made the claim a year ago and tried to bundle ChatGPT with Bing, but that alliance has gone nowhere. Now that we've seen the new tool in action and people have had time to look for use cases it seems to me like a different animal altogether, creating its own new market. LLMs, as long as you teach your employees how to properly prompt supervise and double check, are useful to enhance the productivity of many office jobs and can answer/summarize complex questions into neat little essays. Applied to imagery instead of text, they can generate pictures (Dall-E) and now even early videos (OpenAI Sora), which I could see mounting a challenge to someone like Adobe. All the above is absolutely amazing (and probably just the beginning) but it has nothing to do with what I use Google Search for. Or am I the one missing something?

I did just that last year and got my ass handed to me

VC and PE take their pick and they are both extremely well funded so all that's left in small public stocks are left-overs none of the pros wanted. I believe this is why the long overdue mean revert hasn't happened and might never.

What changed your mind?

Thanks for starting this discussion Luca! I have used leverage successfully during covid (the highest I reached was 1.28 margin) and during the slump of late 2022 (mostly through LEAPS this time, maybe 1.15 or so). I find it easy to identify moments when markets are already down quite a bit and people are in fear mode and I'm good at staying calm and adding during those moments without trying to time the bottom or overthinking the crisis du jour. For those who do use leverage, how have the new interest rates changed that? I believe USD at Interactive Brokers went from around 2.5% to around 6%. Given the long term returns of stocks around 7%, I find the 6% hurdle too high and I'm currently at zero margin (but fully invested). Maybe it's just anchoring from the past. looking back we've been spoiled, what an opportunity for leverage the past 15 years have been!

Uh Oh

Wait what ?! Maybe they ran away together.

All great points above. Let me add one. Due to one child policy and the cost of living in big cities + education, a lot of households only have one male heir for four grand parents and they have invested absolutely all they have on him. Losing your only son/grandson means the end of the lineage and that's considered the ultimate failure in a Confucian society. The government can't afford to lose lives on the front, unlike with Russians who also have horrendous demographics but are culturally used to sending their sons to the meat grinder every few decades Chinese families wouldn't accept it for long. All our arguments above assume rationality though, it all goes out of the window if the top dog in a corrupt regime is too far gone inside his yes men bubble. I'm guessing that's not the case here so I voted no.

+18% for me Biggest winners have been Amazon calls Live Nation commons Global-E commons Biggest losers have been Nvidia puts based on nosebleed valuation and a desire to hedge my gains on other stuff Accumulating looooots of GM calls because I was excited by their Cruise autonomous division The Nvidia loss was just stupid, no excuses. The GM one on the other hand I'm actually proud of myself for managing the position well. If I had been right I stood to make a life changing amount of money and by trading around the position and having strong safeguards I managed to only get wounded a lil bit when the whole thing imploded. Very asymmetrical bet and a good training in allocation although it would be an understatement to say it didn't go my way. As far as 2024 is concerned, I'm entering it passively invested with 75% in a whole world ETF and 25% in a US Bonds ETF. Maybe I've finally learned that I have no edge, maybe something will show up to get me out of the index but right now nothing too obvious jumps at me and I'm not a cash person so I'm going to lay down like a sleepy alligator in the vanguard swamp and just let you guys value and price things efficiently for me please and thank you.

It's been a while since this board has felt so optimistic, me included. Curious to see what cataclysm is right around the corner

Great topic, I'll be watching with attention. Thanks for starting it!

Sold out of Liberty Broadband after learning that Rutledge sold his entire stake last week. https://seekingalpha.com/news/4039157-charter-communications-executive-chairman-sells-stock-worth-100m-cuts-stake-to-0 Same guy who refused Verizon's offer at "well over $100B" 6 years ago. Today Charter trades at $60B. Also they somehow messed up buybacks which costed us $25M?? https://seekingalpha.com/news/4036578-charter-communications-to-pay-25m-penalty-for-unauthorized-stock-buybacks And I think it's clear at this point GCI has been a very poor acquisition, especially given that liberty financed it using their own stock at a 40% discount.

Investor Day is upon us Super bearish Malone : Greg Maffei: Gosh I love David Faber!

Amazon

Added to Interactive Brokers (IBKR). I liked the Q results but stock went down and hit my reinvesting target price. I had lightened up a couple months ago and now back at a full position.

No clue. Great reads about the situation on Yetanothervalueblog, VIC (especially in the comments) and COBF but I haven't found a single bear case which is a bit concerning. We're either collectively missing something huge or we're going to double our money within a few months. Scratching my head a bit over how to size this one.

Spirit Airlines (SAVE)

No opinion on valuation but I noticed that Align Tech who makes the famous invisalign aligners everyone around me uses, has used or is considering using is down quite a bit. They seem to have a moat with first mover advantage, brand recognition and an existing relationship with most US dentist offices. The stock experienced a big bump up during COVID because people seeing themselves a lot on a webcam got self conscious about their teeth.

Defenses contractors do seem like today's no-brainer and I've been toying with the idea of a defense/aero ETF. Revenues should go up meaningfully because of Ukraine as well as the escalation of tensions in the Pacific and it would also add an anti-fragile element to the portfolio. However I came to the conclusion I couldn't look at myself in the mirror if I got rich from people being killed. Same reason I have never owned tobacco companies. To each their own, though. I actually support the necessary evil of us building those weapons I just don't want to profit. The cable industry is historically cheap (Charter, Comcast, Altice) due to increase competition with telcos and fear of a europeanisation. The traditional auto industry is super cheap too (GM, Ford, Stellantis) due to EV transition, Chinese competition fear, Tesla fear, and a long history of no returns. Japan and Korea have been cheap forever.

Can you run for president please?

This highlights the double standard autonomous companies are going to face as they attempt deployment. In both those crashes the Cruise was T-boned from the side by a human-driven vehicle that did not stop at the intersection, yet the DMV punishes them and the media prints misleading titles. The sad part is that ~45.000 Americans die in car accidents every year and many more get severely injured. We just got used to this death toll while any little AV misstep gets reported. For example: https://www.businessinsider.com/driverless-cruise-car-stuck-wet-concrete-san-francisco-av-robotaxi-2023-8 I actually agree Cruise was pushing the number of rides/day a bit too fast because their product is not as refined as Waymo's yet, not in life-threatening ways by any means but still lots of small quirks that need ironing before deployment so as not to lose early public approval. I believe the restriction in the number of cars only affects SF but they have 2 other locations operating at small scale and 7 more announced so it should not slow them down too much. Glad Waymo isn't being bundled with this mess and hopefully it acts as a good wake up call from the DMV so Cruise gets better at managing edge cases scenarios, especially those when emergency vehicles involved.

Agreed, I would definitely not send my car carrying random people around town either! From a hygiene perspective but more importantly for liability reasons. The good thing about those concerns is it's not an option anyway. Not now and not anytime soon, probably ever. I'm aware Tesla has been promising it for years but that's not where the AV industry is going. True autonomous vehicle companies do not have this business model and we really need to differentiate them from whatever Elon Musk's and Cathie Wood's latest hallucinations are. AVs require remote operators monitoring, regular censor checks and cabin cleaning. You can think of a fleet of AVs as a fleet of Boeings. You can only use them if you also have qualified air controllers, qualified quality control technicians and a team of cleaners babying your planes 24/7 and taking legal responsibility. Feasible as a company but not as an individual. Actually Cruise recently hired Gil West who is an ex Delta exec to be COO. That was the technological and legal aspect. Now for the cleanliness part, it's just like any taxi service. Yes some people will trash it but most won't and the ones who do will be on video and their credit card already on file so it's easy to charge them the cleaning fee and/or ban them from the service. The next generation purpose built AVs (Origin and Zeeker) are also being build with interior ease of cleaning and longevity in mind, unlike Ubers and Lyfts who use normal cars that are definitely not designed with heavy duty in mind for their back seats and still make it work just fine. I don't foresee this being an issue at all.