Gregmal

Yea fuck you money ain’t a few million. Even if you’re independent financially, you’re one lawsuit or bad break away from reconsidering that stance. Best example of fuck you money is Musk willingly overpaying for Twitter to troll a bunch of nutjobs.

Anyone who’s ever had a job in finance can tell you it’s not hard to ride where your incentives are. Guys who get paid to do nothing more than the minimum ride the path of least resistance for as long as they can, in this case 4 decades…you wouldn’t need a lot of genius to produce average or better results and be worth 8/9 figures. I certainly wouldn’t call them friends, but I know plenty of people who made retirement money working 15 months during the SPAC bubble. Bonds had a free ride 30x as long.

I asked awhile ago. They insist on being near a major distribution route, which out there would be I10. I did however get a nod and a smirk when asking about the Costco of gas stations, which is Buc-ees. Think that would fit in nicely on 79 somewhere.

People always talk like stocks where the product of a 40 year decline in rates, but I mean was there anything easier than buying bonds with constant inflows of capital into US markets and a similarly constant put option of refinancing? I agree worst is behind on bonds right now. They’re interesting for sure especially with dropping Fed funds rate which is where margin rates tie in. Soon if not already you can buy some stuff for free and probably scrape out a net positive carry along with some free optionality on a recession induced decline.

Yea Sazerac/BTs late November releases.

Get well for the holidays. Then all of 2025. Expecting to see you and Angela at the AGM next year!

Took the yuge news about quarter point rates cuts and dot plots as an opportunity to pick up some bourbon. ‘Tis the season

One thing I do genuinely find annoying is that after every election theres this huge rush to "price things in", exacerbated almost entirely by the ideas everyone has, displayed in threads like this...when the truth is, its almost NEVER actually priced in to any sort of reasonable degree. In other words, the market rushes to wrongly price in things that arent as important as they think. End of the day I tend to think robust trends continue regardless, and shitty businesses will continue to be shitty businesses. In light of the talks with Blake the other day, I will say, highlighted in everything, maybe not apparent to everyone, but I found it funny...Blake stated a few times "what he expects the market to do under Trump"...and being around here long enough, I noticed it was pretty much EXACTLY what he felt about the market, under Biden. In other words, Blake and I obviously have different approaches and outlooks, but can probably agree...shit really shouldn't change all that much just cuz some new talking head strolls into town with something to say.

Bond buyers are basically just a circle jerking group of leaches that manage pensions, insurance portfolios, endowments, etc. They want nothing to do with real alpha, they just don’t want to print a negative number so in exchange they seek assurance of their own prosperity by seeking out safe mid single digit guarantees. Retail investors are basically just a blip on the radar and consist of senior citizens and folks who want to be in the stock market but are scared.

lol I thought the same thing. Outside of pension managers and people who leach off a pool of money they rip off who actually gives a shit about a bond index?

Well yea, but also this lazy analysis concludes most of Fairfax is in bonds…a little deeper a dive would indicate the “bonds” are short duration investment grade lol. This is why the macro obsessions are cancerous to one’s returns.

Waiting for a fat pitch is different than just standing up there looking for excuses not to swing.

The problem with a lot of value investing rhetoric and bible book literature is that for a bad investor it really sets the hooks into the ego and give one all the ammo they need to just continue failing and doing things that don’t work. How many times have we seen folks chase a low PE into a BK because “price is what you pay and value is what you get”? Or sit out the entire run in cash because “be fearful when others are greedy” which is totally subjective bs and if your gut reads are shit so will be you fear and greed detectors. Bottom line is you actually have to work for your returns. And work for them means finding them. Not finding excuses to keep sitting out while feeling smart but remaining in the crap returns category with some plastic toy carrot hanging over your head promising some massive future payoff for being so obstinate.

Well, then there’s also the “I sat on cash when I could’ve just been invested the past (x) months/years and earned ….” It’s called opportunity cost. Further boggling of the mind, is that there’s actually been, and continue to be, TONS of rather obvious and textbook value investments out there. For instance, the name of this darn board, is corner of Berkshire and Fairfax. And Fairfax has been widely covered, and at most maybe trading for 5-10x the past few years….yet people are lazy and hold cash instead. Which is more or less than same behavior as “irrational exuberance”, just on the other side of the spectrum. I’ll trademark it as “irrational pantspissing syndrome”.

Haha all good my man. If only they were all as easy as Ebay!

I agree. Dying for standalone Topgolf. Meh on Calloway. Outside of EBay, didn’t really have a top idea for 2024. 2025, think it’s finally time for MSGE. Buybacks, valuation and balance sheet will allow it to finally do what everyone’s been hoping for since the Sphere separation.

Yea there’s plenty of cheap stocks right now except all everyone wants to do is pontificate about macro bs and be the next Mike Burry to call a bubble lol.

All that matters is what they did to people and the country during Covid to seize power and the excuse was that Trump wasn’t the answer. What they provided us with the last 4 years is unequivocally unacceptable. So what they have to say now just doesn’t matter. Who cares?

NKE

The flip side of this is regulation and unions are disasters for these industries. I know dozens of people who can do household plumbing. I know 5% of them are licensed. Why? Because youre forced to more or less do indentured servitude before getting the green light to start a plumbing company. Same with electricians. My brother spent almost a decade forced into academia in order to become a dermatologist. Its even worse there. Where are the incentives?

The Trump trades have played out. I think people are naive and not really understanding how the market prices stuff in if they’re still looking for them. Like with FNMA, you’ve already had your run. If you wanna get in here? That’s fine, but the Trump trade already happened.

At this point, who cares what the complainers and losers have to say? During term 1, they claimed he was mentally unfit for office. They then put in a guy with dementia. They called his kids pieces of shit, and then wanted us to ignore Hunter Biden. They gaslit us as criminals destroyed property, businesses and endlessly rioted. Only to then make a huge deal of the same thing happening a little too close for comfort for the shitbags in DC. They said he was a threat to democracy, and then gave us a candidate who was never elected democratically. They told us about wars that were supposedly going to happen because of Trump, and then gave us a new one every year under the Big Guy. So really, who TF cares what these people have to say or what they think now?

I started off wanting to do law school. The GFC occurred and I thought finance(being totally wrecked post 2008) was more appealing than another 3-4 years of school and tens of thousands in wasted money. I ran into a friend who was doing a job interview for a stockbroker job while at Webster Hall one night. The rest is history. As they all say, I was just “lucky” on the timing….maybe, but everyone who gets somewhere catches a break and then runs with it.

Yea good point. I kinda think the tax aspect is underrated in terms of a point of discussion. My style, largely manifested from being a technically unsound schmuck with nothing whom tried to fund his IRA like “you’re supposed to” and after a couple years out of college getting disqualified for income purposes just giving up. I couldn’t put a measly $5500, less than 2% of my income, into an IRA…for, I don’t know why, purposes. So I gave up on that $11k in the IRA and just did everything after tax. And as the balances grew, so did the tax burdens. And at that point I had to make choices. Short term investing is so hard on many levels but also mentally taxing bc it’s not a cruise control thing, you have to consistently keep generating new ideas. I’ve shifted now to focus more on quality of life. And I don’t focus on short term trading bs or fluctuations. Quality of life is higher. Compounding is easier although not better, but I would not trade it for the other side of things.

Private placement