alpha

Buffett resigns as a trustee from Gates Foundation: https://www.reuters.com/article/gates-foundation-buffett/update-3-warren-buffett-resigns-from-gates-foundation-has-donated-half-his-fortune-idUSL3N2O52OA

Large fire at Chemtool Plant in Illinois today.... Berkshire not having good luck with fires recently https://ph.news.yahoo.com/explosion-fire-chemtool-facility-forces-181714372.html

One of the last free sources of unbiased business news is now moving to paywall/subscription sales model: https://www.reuters.com/business/reuters-website-goes-behind-paywall-new-strategy-2021-04-15/

Followed the crowd and started a small position in BABA

I have really soured on this company after building a large position over the last couple years. It started off with a basket of traditional value investments that were easy to predict future earnings based on publicly available data and could simply be held for long the long term for modest gains. Now it seems to becoming a deal making machine for the sake of making deals, trying to predict future earnings and valuation is becoming too complex.

Should be an interesting week, sounds like there are still large blocks of stock Achegos has to liquidate.

Vancouver and Toronto are 2 very different cities on opposite ends of the country. Have you ever tried living in either? It's basically like Chicago/NYC vs Seattle. I purchased a home outside of Vancouver in December. I had to put in a bully offer 4 hours after the property was listed, after getting outbid on a number of other properties. Since then the market has apparently gotten even crazier with fewer listings on the market. The vacancy rate in the city I purchased is currently under 1%. Logically one would think it is a good time to pick up a condo in downtown Toronto with the mass exodus caused by the pandemic, but all of the government bailouts seem to have prevented a significant correction in prices at least for now. There was an article in the G&M a few weeks ago about bidding wars returning at some condo buildings. As others have mentioned the government policy to prop up Canada's lagging productivity is to increase immigration rates to some of the highest in the world. As long as this policy continues it will create pressure on the real estate market. There is tons of red tape and regulatory issues with building new housing units in Canada right now.

Sounds like they have called in salvage experts from SMIT who aren't expected to arrive until Thursday morning now. I am surprised they weren't called within 5 minutes of the grounding given the importance of the waterway, amazing!

Suez Canal has been blocked all day and could take up to 2 days to clear based on latest reports. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/suez-canal-traffic-blocked-container-233007774.html

Right now Texans are burning their furniture to keep warm and demanding heads roll at ERCOT and related Government positions. I wonder if there will be opportunity for a utility company with a solid reputation operational track record when the dust settles from this :D

I had some old BTC laying around in a wallet so yesterday with the recent news I played around a bit. I tried to top up a cloud storage account with 10$ USD of BTC. By the time the intermediary processor (bitpay) and network transaction fees were added, the total charge was $19 USD ! So the transaction fees basically doubled the cost of my $10 transaction...

Now that it is 'mainstream' for a manufacturer to be holding &/or accepting payment in BTC, there will be a lot more of this, and by the bigger players. Simply because if your factory is operating behind a exchange control 'wall', this is one of the few things that you can do to keep your export sales going. Ability to pay foreign suppliers, and accept foreign revenue independent of the local authority is a valuable thing. It also reduces the need to smuggle. BTC at USD 43K this am. Have to think it will not be long before it crosses 50K ;) SD I don't see how simply changing the method of payment would circumvent any regulatory oversight from "local authority" ? Also there used to be bigger retailers accepting bitcoin. At one point Starbucks did I believe, and they all seemed to back out after experimenting with brief roll outs a few years ago.

Wow that's insane! I didn't believe you until I read the article, hehe

This is basically how I feel, a good company but hard to buy in with the overall markets so high. Garmin seems to do very well in the niche markets it operates in with quality products and high customer satisfaction. Their recent acquisition of IERCC seems to put them in a really good position in the outdoor sports/rec safety market, a market that I would expect to have good margins going forward and potential moat characteristics. The certification of their autopilot systems in the aviation sector also seem like another good revenue stream with room to run.

Head of BMO Investorline sent out this note the other day:

IBKR chairman on CNBC today: https://www.cnbc.com/2021/01/28/interactive-brokers-restricted-gamestop-trading-to-protect-the-market-says-chairman-peterffy.html He is very worried about a broker or clearinghouse failure. He doesn't mention which counter-party he is worried about, but RH says they are restricting long stock purchases due to CAPITAL requirements. This suggests RH is thinly capitalized. I know RH investors aren't sophisticated enough to understand this, but if I was sitting on $20M paper gains at RH, I'd be very worried about the viability of my broker. Disclosure: long IBKR Edit to add: When you say that IBKR should permit bear call spreads, you are saying that IBKR should accept the counter-party risk on both legs of that trade. The trade might be low-risk for you, but very high risk for IBKR. Robinhood is not a trade executor, how are their paper gains in any danger? Unless you mean the service itself goes dark preventing them from selling their shares before the bubble pops....

3 years ago I walked into my barbershop and there were 3 customers with their smartphones out discussing their day trading strategies and weed stocks along with one of the barbers, I thought for sure that was the top of the cycle... 3 years later here we are ... ???

They are all still charging trading fees too (among other fees), unreal... recently I wanted to add one of my holdings to a drip, I spent over 8 hours on hold across multiple calls over few weeks and finally just gave up without ever getting through to a person...

Sold out my BAC position

According to the CNBC article it sounds like most of the recommendations from Haven were implemented individually by the 3 companies rather than cooperatively. Strange that they weren't able to leverage the economics of scale by pooling the 3 companies purchasing power...

My own take is that instead of focusing on who should get it first too much is concentrate on getting ad many people vaccinated as possible quickly. The “who” is less important than the “how many”. Frontline workers don’t like to get the vaccine - “Next one please”. I think this is one thing that Israel gets right : https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/01/world/middleeast/israel-coronavirus-vaccines.html Agreed, it's insane some places are only vaccinating during business hours when they have doses on hand to administer. In Canada some of the vaccination centers in the most populated province closed for the holidays even though they had vaccine available.

Many people are moving from the East/Toronto. I just purchased a home near Vancouver over the internet and moved back from the USA. Most of the people I was in bidding wars with were not locals. Right now there is no vacancy on Van Island from all the snowbirds from other provinces who didn't want to risk leaving the country. There are also millions of people with Canadian citizenship living overseas who can shift their cash back into Canadian real estate during the border lock downs. There is a housing shortage, it is extremely expensive and complicated because of bad regulation to build anything new here. Tenants living in home owners basement suites is a common theme. It seems like a significant number of single family homes have been subdivided into multi units. It's pretty sad... but reading the local newspapers the #1 issue on peoples minds is reducing carbon output etc... this combined with guaranteed low rates and record immigration levels over the next 2 years means I don't see things changing anytime soon...

House - I purchased a house on Canada's West Coast. The price was ridiculous but I got a 5y fixed mortgage for under 2%. Going to ride out the pandemic lock down there and maybe use it as a rental afterwards.

Buffett asks for support for small business https://www.cnbc.com/2020/12/15/its-an-economic-war-warren-buffett-urges-congress-to-extend-relief-for-small-businesses.html

Thanks!