Gregmal

^thats why we're getting 2 caps in a neighborhood near you soon! j/k maybe, maybe not. wouldnt be shocked though.

Prem Watsa.

Pure gold.

There are a ton and many of high quality. Originally I thought of shit like ATUS but there is real solid stuff like PYPL, DIS, MSGE, and more. I actually like the idea @ERICOPOLY posted a while ago in another thread. Short puts on these and the use it to buy calls elsewhere. I've been doing some of that lately.

Yea so I was able to confirm if you bought a machine you get a full refund and get to keep it. Pretty sick deal. Only reason I can think of for this development is that perhaps the machine is massively defective and a warranty or repairs will cost more than just giving it to folks. The good news is if you still see one at the store, you can buy it and then get your money back.

There may be a value proposition here. Not positive but I believe they will be refunding the machine cost while allowing you to keep it. I’d totally dig that. Then just buy a few dozen sets of pods and be set. The big question is why? The machines sold like wildfire. Perhaps the pods were duds? They are pretty expensive. I personally thought it insane they sold beer and cider pods at $4-5 each when you could go buy a 6 pack for a few bucks more. Or perhaps some potential liability issues? Quite bizarre.

^very good and valid points. I would chip in that the difference is that those arrogant "value" managers KNOW that theyre right and that Cathy is wrong! LOL. Despite the fact that she's probably both made more money than they have, grown from the ground up a bigger business than they have, and also probably still, produced better returns. The finance world is full of arrogance little clipboard and excel warriors. Which goes back to your final point...being on the right side of the trade is all that matters.

https://nypost.com/2021/12/16/nyc-lockdown-in-question-amid-rising-covid-19-cases/ Sink or swim NY….your choice. Do you want to continue experiencing the robust recovery the lower part of the US has already experienced or you wanna be like those idiots up North who are now back to banning fans from hockey games? Make your bed, lay in it.

I don’t like being short anything more than 6 months out. Not even puts on shit I want to own at strikes I like. Respect the fact that short term the future is somewhat easy to predict but the long you agree to be on the hook for something the greater the odds are a black swan can bite you in the ass.

Yea I think you can be careless shorting the junk here. Top is in. Ive been putting on ITM puts with 12-24 months duration on some. Like $25 PLTR puts with 24 expiration, stuff like that. You have a skew where finally it seems it makes sense to be short because the momentum has shifted. I think simply maintaining current share price on stuff like ZM or TDOC is wishful thinking. Seems somewhat asymmetric in a non asymmetric way if that contradiction makes sense. One of the greatest fallacies in the market is that "its down 50%" means its a bargain. Could easily see some of those go down 90% from the top. Or completely bust. I'm also exploring triple A tranche type shorts more so as big crash hedges. Like higher quality Nasdaq 100 stuff. But the problem I see is that the FANGS are just really good companies and dont rely on debt at all. So the "inflation" argument doesnt really apply nearly as much as it does to these cash burning debt/capital market reliant turds. If AMZN or AAPL aint worth 40x then why is COST or WM? Thats an interesting question Im grappling with. I DO think 30-40x is OK for best of breed businesses because the world is going to be looking for places to put worthless cash and with the X-ing out of many crapcos, there will be even fewer legitimate options.

Totally. I love the lack of sales at Costco currently. Virtually none of the normal discounted items. Regular grocery stores are interesting too. The normally $4.99 La Croix are now “on sale” 2/$11. thanks Brandon.

And today markets the first day of buyback blackouts for anyone not running a 105 plan. Long month til earnings +2.

Right now kind of feels like that period of denial where folks are slowly realizing they need to get the rifle and bring Old Yeller out back. The sooner you put him down the better. Or you can wait and hang around til he bites you. Tech is done.

No idea lol. I just think Warren probably might have 99 problems with cash certainly not being one. And if he views AAPL as a big part of the BRK universe I would be shocked to see him sell anything material

I think part of Buffetts' evolution of the years has been with respect to valuation. If you paid too close attention to valuation you've basically missed most of this bull market. The metrics the market is moving to largely evade folks until they are obvious in hind site, AKA Amazon, Google, etc. I would imagine AAPL aint going nowhere in the BRK portfolio anytime soon. Nor should it. He trimmed last year and said it was a mistake, and exited Costco in the mid/high 300s which now looks dumb. You've got all the cash you need for buybacks elsewhere. Ive sold some of my BRK to buy DIS but still have it as one of my bigger positions. Top 5 for sure. If I was holding any cash I'd just throw it all in Berkshire without losing an ounce of sleep at night. The key is to just let it be and let them play the long game.

In an alternative universe I wish there were exit interviews for people selling stock. I dont know anyone who is selling MSGE here, but if I did I'd ask which category they fall into: I sold a potential multi bagger with virtually no long term downside because: a) Im scared of covid b) I'm scared of a temporary ~20% paper loss c) I wanted a pureplay with worse economics instead d) I didnt know what I was doing to begin with There's really no other category or reason for selling into the current situation. Mr Market is great though. Even in a rich market, always an opportunity somewhere.

This is a pretty crazy rabbit hole to go down, especially if the primer is a course on psychology and how it drives markets and cycles. I recall in 2013 how basically anything growthy had rather big short interest and shorts for the year got absolutely wrecked. I recall stuff, like TDOC was a popular short at $14 in the mid decade part on the basis that it incinerated cash and would never earn a real penny. Then you literally had a one in a hundred year event even take that and blow it up 20 fold or something. Every short has been wrecked and scarred; thoroughly washed out. Even people who thought about going short, but didnt, and probably branded psychologically by the bull market. If the book closed today a student of history could definitely say, "yup, cycle complete". Now imagine the destruction if rates gradually go to 5 or 10%?You could make a case that a huge portion of the market, even many darlings over the past half decade, would be wiped out, probably even several times over, O&G company style. I disagree with the statement that we are in unchartered waters and theres no precedent so therefor nothing you can do. Contrarily, theres predictable psychology behind what reactions will likely face certain events....and a LOT of dominos to fall thereafter. Theres almost too much you can do. Should be fun being part of it. Or maybe not.

That is kind of my suspicion. Money flows around. You've laid the foundation for certain types of assets to do well going forward over the past decade or so by wringing out those markets. Go through 13fs and stuff like that. RE and hard assets in general are horribly under owned. Everyone is basically closeting to the Nasdaq 100. Cash is worthless and over time more and more people will come to realize this. But its hard parting with a security blanket like cash the same way an infant cant part with their pacifier. But eventually you are 5 or 10 years old and realize you look like an idiot with a pacifier. Cash holders will have their moment too.

Rebought some PSTH. Free money.

Because it’s the lazy academic shit they put in the textbooks. I think once those 25% annual paper returns in tech stocks vaporize the 10% or so in real returns you can get via value stocks will appeal to people. Much more so than the 0% returns on cash and the negative ones on bonds.

A decade from now there will be much more cash out there but less Berkshire shares, the same amount of land in South Beach, and only one team named the NY Knicks. It really isn’t all that much more complicated than that. Much on the macro side can be simplified and reduced to such a way where things aren’t terribly hard to predict.

Yea no I can joke/poke fun at @LearningMachine because he has been somewhat bombastic in his deliverance of the 10% rate thesis, and pursuit of the ultimate investments that work if it happens overnight, but the major underlying concerns he shares have really resonated with me and made me think hard about how I want to be setup with my long term investments. And I keep landing back at rentals, especially well located ones. By and large stocks are hard to project more than a couple years out. With housing, its so integral to the system and so many safety nets, plus on top of that, so much cash out there which will only be furthered if bonds implode.....it looks mighty good to me.

It is in no ones interests for housing to fall off. Even those who say it is, it isnt. Even if they raise rates or shit gets whacky in one place, there will be mitigating factors in others. We haven't even really seen much accommodation in terms of loosening lending standards. Juts closed on another cash out refi Friday. Its a total bitch and I have 800 credit and good income. They'll call it making homes more "accessible" or something. Any way you cut it, theres a huge and long runway ahead. And the risk/reward to me is vastly more appealing than buying AAPL at 40x or BRK at 20x, although I can dig the later, just not as much as what you get when you buy the housing freight train. @LearningMachine has been talking about 10% interest rates for a while now. Maybe that happens, maybe not. All I know is that would be a metaphorical destination down the line. Call it Z. Maybe at the moment we're at A or G or M. But if we get to Z the cocktail of factors along the way are going to make housing plays look like Gamestop stock in Q1.

You’re focusing on the wrong end of the equation. If rates go 5% it’ll be because you have way more people with $1M to spend on houses.

Rates don’t go up in a vacuum, just cuz. If they go up, based on the factors currently in play, those variables will more than compensate for the higher rates. As I’ve mentioned previously, the GFC occurred because of a housing bubble when mortgages were 5-6%. The notion that 5% mortgage rates will kill housing is largely academic.