Gregmal

The manipulation of the energy and especially oil market is hilarious to me. In the $80-90s range they do everything to tank the price and it stuck way higher for longer than it probably should’ve. Now every effort to prop it up gets smoked and lower we go. Kinda interesting to wonder what things would look like if they just left it alone.

Yup. What was the most obvious lesson everyone shoulda learned the past year? Sitting around wallowing about “the market” and its perceived “valuation”, is a waste of time. So….what do we start off doing in 2024? Just find shit that works for what you’re trying to do. It’s not hard. Stop finding excuses to pay attention to pointless crap.

Or put differently, 90% of the time the market is in what Id called a “steady state” mode. During this time period everyone is fixated on crashes and bubbles and risks. And the market just does what it unremarkably does. So for the super majority of the time, the market rewards risk takers and asset owners. For a very minimal period of time, the market penalizes dumb asses. And for a statistically irrelevant and non long lasting period of time(IE a few days/weeks/at most months) it hurts everyone. Folks just need to learn to cope with this. And own assets. Cash is not an asset. It’s a liability.

Sure, but dry and wet powder is relative. I compounded random non meaningful initially but full margin positions like visa, Google, Alexandria and waste management for like 7-8 years and got many baggers out of all because I felt confident I didn’t need cash laying around and if I needed it I could find it. It’s all subjective and relative but people under the age of 55-60 hoarding cash waiting for the “all in” buying opp has been the suckers bet of the century. Cash has one of the longest running historical track records of being garbage and especially in the last 5-10 years the evidence of that has only grown. If you don’t need the money you need to be on the hunt for places to put it. Volatility is really just an excuse for pansies. If your fundamental work is accurate it’s irrelevant/ net-net a positive. I was 2.2x levered in mid March 2020 and still just buying shit that seemed to make sense. Turns out I was buying from suckers and I’m way wealthier because of it.

Cash has embedded volatility and value fluctuations, many people just aren’t smart enough to realize it. It’s really just about being aware of the opportunity set. The purpose for most, of having cash is to have a liquidity lifeline. If you have an abundance of liquidity, cash is worthless.

There’s tons of reasons. eBay is way cheaper, has a bigger and better moat, is still holding assets that it will monetize into significant sources of cash, has a clear capital allocation policy, and is small enough to be acquired. I’ve always thought PayPal was overrated and additionally always viewed eBay as under-appreciated. The issue over the years for me with eBay was timing, but here I really like the setup.

I like what I have still but outside of Nintendo nothing screams catalyst upcoming. I did also recently buy a lot of EBay which I’d probably say would be my candidate for having a crazy good 2024. The amount of stock they’re buying back, the sale proceeds plus remaining 20% stake in Adevinta, plus the FCF from existing biz….something gives at some point.

I have not tallied everything and don’t plan too since I really don’t do much of anything but handle my own money anymore(plus as someone else mentioned, it’s a constant compounding journey and it doesn’t mean anything really that the calendar changed) but probably somewhere between 60-70%. Helped indeed by being 1.3-1.5x margined through the cash euphoria faze. Sticking to quality helped, and didn’t have any stinkers. Sized things well. Traded well when I needed to. Was pleased with my overall discipline as last year I made a point to shift to more quality buy and hold and this year transaction volume was probably 1/10 of what it woulda been for me 5-10 years ago. The journey and evolution are always ongoing though. Overall I spent significantly less time focused on investing and significantly more time enjoying life and that was the biggest win and basically the point of owning the type of quality in such concentrated fashion.

If it aint in an SEC filing or a basic newsfeed like TIKR or even Google search for last 24 hours its probably just nonsense. Like analyst opinions LOL Otherwise, I just source things from the real world. Everyone uses certain products. Insurance is a mighty good business. We all need a roof and food. Kids love YouTube and video games, high margins are better than low margins, low maintenance is better than capital intensive, etc....we dont need some chump with a subscription service telling us this stuff do we? On valuations, Ive seen enough people who think theyre mighty smart make total asshats out of themselves making valuation calls....theres one methodology and it aint Damadorians...its Buffett's "is he fat" test. If the business is "fat" IE clearly great, and not obscenely expensive, I could give two shits less whether folks wanna debate whether 18x or 26x is the appropriate multiple...Ill just own it through the cycle, no biggie.

100%. It’s entirely academic. No one is forced to use it. On a similar note, the longer my journey through the investment universe goes on, the more and more I realize how much time and effort people TOTALLY waste, worrying about all sorts of shit that they’ve been conditioned to think matters, but doesn’t. Personally, I haven’t watch financial news related TV in probably 8 years. No cnbc, no Bloomberg, nada. My dad asks for Bloomberg radio on the way to golf? Nah, z100 old man. Barrons? IBD? Those guys I realized are chumps maybe a decade ago. Pretty much everyone on X, which if you weren’t aware, was formerly known as Twitter, IS TRYING TO SELL you something! Textbooks? They teach one to memorize, not to think…garbage. So yea, pretty much everything people are told is a fallacy predicated on a system that needs you to be gullible. All one really needs in order to be a decent investor is some common sense and a reasonable ability to live in the real world.

Yea you also had a drawdown in 2018 it seems. Unacceptable

Yea it was tough. JOE +5% Nintendo +5% MSG +5% FRPH +5% Fairfax +5% UBS +5% Uber +5% AIV +5% Margin (-)6.5% Shoulda been in CDs and Billz cuz recession

So…how’d everyone do?

eBay

The worst Cramer has done to anyone is cost them their time. Half hour or whatever those episodes run. There’s significantly worse actors out there, who charge monthly and yearly fees for their nonsense. Didnt “Wall Street Legend” Whitney Tilson sell his newsletter to a SPAC lol?

Yea this decade's(actually now well into 2 decades LOL) biggest bums have been the "money printing bubble" conspiracy theorists.

Yea swung about 1/3 of my UBER into Tencent today..

What Im loving looking and laughing at lately is all these fruitcake permabears who are trying to claim rates going down is now bearish because thats signaling a recession LOL. It. Never. Ends.

I don’t think you need it to because if it does, at 5x you get rich really quick.

Recession prep

Yo LOL. One of those two I’ve been buying a lot of lately and totally agree.

Yea for some reason this one was just too immediately obvious and easy. I took some off at $26 and am debating holding the rest til the long term gains rate kicks in. Figured $30-40 per share inside 3 years was reasonable from $16-17 on day of the announced gift. Maybe too cautious on those projections

No problemo. Glad to see so many people making money! One of the elements of owning both that I became more and more fond of over the year was that these two investments in a way complement and counter balance each other in the portfolio. Either way rates go I win with these the only question is how turbo charged that gets. As long as there’s no major hurricanes it’s hard to lose with them!

Merry Christmas friends. This year was another rolling Christmas present. Here’s to many more!

Puts and treasuries obviously.