Saluki

Great work @spartansaver In addition to the one's I mentioned above I would guess there's one that I posted about in the Investing forum that is probably for sale soon: PETS. It's a $100mm company competing against companies that are worth single digit billions, so they can't get the same volume discounts and are subscale, but have recognizable brands (1 800 Petmeds). It seems they recognize they are cheap and an attractive target with no debt so they issued a poison pill recently to prevent hostile takeovers. The new CEO cut costs and returned the company to profitability so it's no longer a melting ice cube, just a profitable subscale operator trading at an attractive price.

Statue of Liberty is definitely worth the trip. It's a half day though, with getting there and back. If you want to see a Broadway play, but not any particular one, you can go to one of the TKTS locations and get some for shows that extra tickets, sometimes half off, for the same day. I think the hop-on hop-off tourbus is overpriced, but the route will take you to all the major spots in Manhattan and the tour guides are pretty knowledgeable about the history. Your wife probably isn't interested in the financial district, so I wouldn't make a trip just for that, but if you go to the World Trade Center, it's close by and you can see the Bull statue and rub the horns (or balls) for good luck. And the bar where George Washington had his farewell dinner with his troops is still there and nearby also if I recall.

I don't think this is the same Seaspan that eventually became Atlas and was bought by Fairfax. There was another Seaspan that was private and owned by the Washington family, which also owned a lot of the publicly traded Seaspan/Atco. I think this is the private Seaspan that is owned and controlled by the Washington family.

I just looked at the 10K for a $50mm company the the audit fees were almost $500k, so out of their $4mm projected profit, it is a big % and that's only part of their fixed their costs, like legal and HR etc. Management is essential in companies like this. Check out SOWG and you will see that the company has $6mm shares outstanding and management awarded themselves options that will entitle them to another $3mm of shares, and there are related party transactions that I'm not comfortable with. It's hard to make money like that. By contrast, Taylor Devices was less than $100mm when I started looking at them and they don't issue crazy compensation to insiders. And I agree, a lot of these companies will stay cheap forever unless you can identify something, besides price, that will make things better. PETS cut costs and returned to profitability after years of losses. Taylor's aerospace business increased after people started shooting down predator and reaper drones, and they needed to replace them. Another company I'm looking at converted all their preferred shares to common, which eliminated the cash drain that was soaking up all their profits.

I trimmed a little GOOG to keep it at the weighting I am comfortable with and sprinkled the proceeds to a few positions that aren't dirt cheap, but could be a little bigger in my portfolio (AOS, CROX, CPNG and ATEX). The first three I've discussed on here before, and earlier I sold half my position in ATEX for a loss to offset some gains, but I noticed a couple of insider purchases on Forms 4. I figured I would buy back some shares before the next quarter with the new CEO and see if they were sandbagging the prior Q to make him look better when he takes over. The options are illiquid and only go out six months, so common shares or nothing.

https://www.navalnews.com/naval-news/2024/12/andurils-dive-xl-setting-new-standards-for-maritime-autonomy/ This Anduril ship uses batteries from Kraken, one of my small holdings, which hit a 52 week high today. Anduril, which isn't publicly traded unfortunately, also announced a new partnership with Palantir to use their AI for Anduril's sea and air drones, Possible applications for deployment on the Mexico boarder. Palantir is already a $100 Billion dollar company though, so I don't know if this will move the needle for them.

This case is disturbing, but not for the usual reasons people cite. There were 386 murders in NYC last year. If you believe that we are all equal under the law and in the eyes of our elected officials, then why in those other murders didn't they also show a photo of the ID to every member of the NYPD, and also have 100 police officers retrace every suspect's footsteps to look for clues, and even enlisted the scuba divers if necessary. I'm sure the family of a bodega worker killed in an armed robbery would be grateful if they received the same importance as the CEO of a large corporation. In 1989 a friend of mine was executed on a busy street just like Brian Thompson. They didn't catch the guy until 2006. There was a detective assigned to his case, but this wasn't his only murder and he didn't have 100 people to look for clues. https://nypost.com/2006/03/30/mole-probe-solves-senseless-89-murder-bklyn-teens-kin-its-justice-at-last/ If you're wondering what he did to get killed by the mafia, he didn't do anything except look a lot like one of the people they were actually after. If Luigi had killed someone in the same manner, but it was another middle aged chubby white guy walking in Manhattan who just happened to look like the CEO, then he'd still be out there. Christopher Hitchens said his parents hated the fact the UK had a ruling class, but they sent him to the best schools they could afford because although they hated that the UK had a ruling class, they wanted their son to be part of it rather than on the outside looking in. When gang members beat up uniformed police officers in times square, they were all released without bail. When gang members attacked the ex-governor and his son, the bail was set at $25,000 cash. Do better New York.

The Canadian exchanges have some lighter regulation for the new small caps, but they tend to be very speculative businesses, so buyer beware. I think Toronto and Vancouver have venture exchange listings. In the US, it's not a great regulatory structure for small companies. For accounting and legal fees it will be several hundred thousand a year, realistically. I remember a while back some horrible woman at the SEC spearheaded an experiment they called the aircraft carrier where you could use a special category and raise less money and allegedly have fewer regulatory requirements. I thought it was a terrible idea because the requirements will still pretty burdensome and it capped the amount of money you could raise. And if you wanted to be a real public company where you could raise a lot more, you would have to start all over and couldn't just use your existing aircraft carrier registration. I never worked with this woman, but I did have to deal with her in my professional capacity across the table for about 6 months and I thought she was an idiot. She brought up the aircraft carrier to us several times even though it had nothing to do with why were talking to her and lamented that she worked so hard on it and nobody was using it. The last time someone mentioned her was to tell me that she left the SEC and wrote a children's book. I bet it sucks

Even without the DNA on the water bottle and the cell phone I think they will find the shooter pretty quickly. I've seen that he's 6'2, which is less than 4% of the population. United Healthcare apparently has 30% of the market share for insureds. And they are reviled for denying a third of claims. So .4 x .33 x .33 and you already have less than half of 1% of the population. If this image is accurate, I would say he's in the top 5% of income too. And he's probably former military since he cleared the weapon so quickly. He probably made the suppressor himself (3d printer?) since it jammed. So maybe he's a tech guy?

GOOG/GOOGL BRK JOE FRFHF OXY META NTDOY Fairfax India CPNG MSCI KRKNF FRPH STNG BTI HHH CROX ATEX AOS PM TAYD RTO In order of concentration from 20% to .5%. There are several smaller positions, but I hope to add to them or delete them next year. I'd like to do less buying/selling and get out of cyclicals and into coffee can compounders more in the coming years.

It looks like a targeted hit. News reports say that the shooter was waiting outside for more than 5 minutes and made his move when he saw the CEO at the entrance to the conference where he scheduled to speak. Scary nonetheless.

I find it odd that people think that the Saudis have flooded the market in the past to wipe out their competitors. They are trying to diversify but last time I checked more than 90% of their income was from oil, and the tourists who come to Mecca for the Haj tend to come from oil countries too, so their fate is tied to oil. Since oil contracts are dollar denominated, when the dollar goes down because we print too much money, they need to pump even more oil to cover their yearly nut, no matter what the price of oil is.

LinkedIn Premium allows you to contact people who are not in your network. While this may have some legitimate uses, 99% of the messages that I get from people that I don't know personally are scammers. Work from home, ponzi schemes, "get listed in Who's Who book for your industry", etc. Here's one that I just got: I don't know why I'm wasting my time on here. No offense to @Parsad and the members of this board, but if I can get a 10x in 5 years from some rando on LinkedIn, then why am I doing things the hard way? What a stroke of luck for me that instead of keeping the 10x from himself, or giving it to people like Sequoia, that he decided to offer it to a person that he's never even met before. I'm sure Tom's friends and family won't be happy that he didn't offer them a slice, but instead decided to let a random person on LinkedIn get rich instead. Maybe he comes from a dysfunctional family so he'd rather give away the opportunity to total strangers out of spite. Or maybe they are good people and he is the bad one, who alienated his family by his single minded pursuit of wealth at any cost. In any event, their loss is my gain, right? I have to admit, at first I thought it might be a scam, but he literally says in the email "trust me"!

I bought a bit of CPNG too. I hate crypto and the people who invest in it, BUT...If you truly want to understand more than 99% of crypto bros about bitcoin, go to the MIT open courseware site and you can take a couple of free classes on it by Gary Gensler which he taught before he became SEC Chairman. Watch the videos, and read all the course materials which are provided and you will be miles ahead of most people. I know GG professionally and although the anarcho capitalist crypto bros hate him, he knows his stuff and is scary smart.

Does anyone know how this works? I've seen reports that it can be revoked by a majority vote of Parliament. If the opposition party, that the President if feuding with, controls the 2/3 of the Congress, then how exactly does he expect to pull this off?

Yes, with rail companies and airplane leasing and even shipping it seems like a way to keep stuff off your balance sheet but this stuff is different. For instance the oil and gas people probably just want to focus on drilling and managing the crew living quarters and food is either a distraction for the company or a dead end for an up and coming manager , so I can see why they would hire a company like Black Diamond or whatever that company that Fairfax owns. With the modular stuff like McGrath and Willscot, it seems more like a quarry business where there are regional oligopolies and you won't have any competition from companies beyond a certain radius. I'll probably do a separate post for each one the investors board, but my 10,000 foot view seems like McGrath is the lesser of the two companies and they got $180mm breakup fee when the merger fell through but if you look at the earnings without that it's not a bargain. willscot is buying back shares and checks a lot of boxes for other positive things, but the price is higher than I'd like to pay, so it's a difficult thing, but id like to get knowledgeable about a few of them so that if they become cheap I can make a decision quickly.

I'm going to look at some companies over the weekend that provide structures to construction sites. There is a company in Canada, Black Diamond that leases modular temporary housing for people in the oil and gas or mining industries, and there are some in the US, Willscot and McGrath that rent those offices and storage buildings on construction sites. Does anyone know of other company names besides the ones I just mentioned that might be worth looking at? Also, I noticed in a power point presentation for one of the companies that the terminal value of the assets is about 50% of the initial cost. Does anyone know who buys these assets when they are too old to refurbished and re-rented to a new customer? Is it like an office printer or a car lease, where you get to buy it after X number of years of renting, or do they sell them to another company that rents the same product put at a lower price point?

You have to be careful of "resulting." Like winning the Lottery, just because someone had a good outcome, that doesn't mean it's a good idea to buy something and forget about it. If he had bought another popular tech stock, Netscape which went to zero and never paid a dividend, then it would be a different lesson.

https://www.strongtie.com/about/locations I notice they have some manufacturing in China. Is that a concern with possible tarrifs coming?

I noticed this the last time I scanned companies hitting 52 week highs or lows. Porsche has gotten beaten up this year, what's the bull thesis?

Picked up a few shares of KRKNF on the pullback. Very small adds to a few of the shipping cos in my basket. They tend to move together so I plan to add a little more to the basket and then sell TEN before the end of the year to take the tax loss but keep the same exposure to the sector. Might rethink the whole thesis in 2025 when the new administration and Congress take office, but for now I don't want to make any big moves.

I think overpaying as a passive investor is much different than overpaying as a company acquiring an asset. Why would you overpay for something unless you thought someone would pay more for it, even though it's not worth it. That's psychology, not value investing, in my book. As a company, it's different because overpaying for something, like being the exclusive search provider for iPhones, is worth different amounts to Google than MSFT. Apple gets 1/3 of Google's ad revenue from iphones, and MSFT offered them 100%, but Apple turned them down because the ads were so profitable on Google that they would need 150% of MSFT's ad revenue to match the income. So was MSFT overpaying at 100% or underpaying? You make more money from a tall building in NYC than a short building, so why aren't all the buildings tall? Because the cost of capital is different for different owners, and during different periods of time when interest rates are higher/lower, so someone might overbid for the same parcel you are bidding on because they can make more from it than you can. The marginal buyer/seller always determines the price in an auction, not the average buyer/seller. If you have a business with big net operating loss tax carryforward, you may pay more for a business than someone else because that stream of income (from a mediocre business) is worth more to you than the other guy.

I've always said that the short time horizon trades are hard to make money in because the algorithmic traders have supercomputers and strategies that involve nano seconds and the professional money managers have stuff that they think will outperform in the next few quarters. So that short term time horizon is very crowded. Since they can't keep their job if they outperform for 2 years, then the stuff that takes longer to season is probably where the least amount of research, and the biggest gains should be. Ted's 10x in 10 years in Dillards happened at the end of the time period. This is a weird thought, but humor me for a moment. When the printing press was invented, cities that had one were more likely to kill you for being a witch than cities that didn't. Why? Because false information spreads much faster than the truth. So a short term strategy suffers from the amount of false information (noise) that dominates things like Twitter and TikTok. So the stuff with longer seasoning is probably also less likely to be the subject of eyeball grabbing fake news, and less likely to suffer from the reflexivity, as Soros puts it, of the negative news become believed and hurting your investment. FRPH has limestone quarries that are near valuable areas for residential development. But they won't get them back until 2026, that's why the stock is cheap. Tobacco is shrinking, but vapes and Zyn are growing. It's not enough to offset the loss in cigarette sales yet, but in a few years it might be, that's why they trade so cheap. Individual investors can wait that long, not many fund managers can. BABA and PDD react wildly to news from China or announcements from US politicians, because people are thinking 1 year out. If you think of them as something that will let you participate in the future growth of Chinese consumer spending, then the short term shouldn't matter. Universal is using its own money to build theme parks for Nintendo. They won't be finished until 2026, but how many years has Disney made money from a theme park after it's opened? If this is a permanent flow of future funds, why aren't people looking at it? Because it's more than 6-9 months out, so it may as well not exist for must fund managers.

We are watching the Detroiters and it's very funny. It's the same people who made "I Think You Should Leave." It's the same oddball humor, but it's a sitcom instead of a skit show.

JOE, CPNG and NTDOY are some of my bigger positions, and they haven't done much this year, but I like the setup for 2025 and beyond. JOE is extensively talked about, so I won't go into it, but CPNG is still growing a lot and the operating leverage is allowing their margin to get bigger as they grow and the market doesn't see it yet, so I feel like it's a coiled spring. The only thing I worry about NTDOY is the tariffs under a new administration, which was not something I saw coming. However, the price is what it was a couple of years ago, but the new Switch is only a few months from being released, there are new games coming out, new movies (Mario Bros and Zelda) and Universal is building Nintendo World theme parks, for which NTDOY doesn't have to put up any money, but they get a percentage of the gate sales, and obviously the Nintendo merchandise sold inside. It looks like it's trading at a trailing P/E of 29, which doesn't seem terrible when you consider all those lottery tickets, but when you realize that they have no debt and about 20% of their market cap in cash, it starts to look really interesting. I have some smaller positions in things that look good in 2025 like CROX, RTO and KRKNF, but if it's only a 1% or 2% position, I don't want to make a prediction about it, other than it looks interesting enough for a small position, but there are too many risks and unknowables to make it a big position. Nintendo has been around over a hundred years and no debt and as Peter Lynch said, it's hard to bankrupt if you don't owe anyone any money. And CPNG has a model that operates like float in insurance, so up to a certain point there cost of capital is less than zero. So I'm more comfortable sticking my neck out on those.