Saluki

The 2 bull cases for BTC going up are 1) the greater fool theory, and 2) some use case for BTC that is better than what we have now. For the greater fool theory, an ETF could help with that. I lose/forget/misplace passwords all the time. I was forced to make a new one for one of my accounts just last week. If I had a personal wallet with a lot of money in it and it would be worthless if I forgot the password, that money is as good as gone. If some fund company is doing the safekeeping of the asset, and they have people to take care of the custody aspect, and I could sue them if they lose my BTC, then this is an option that would make it more attractive to me. But it's still a pass. People use Bitcoin, blockchain and cryptocurrency interchangeably, but they are not the same thing. For the past 15 years the true believers have told us about bitcoin will change everything someday. Here's a reality check. Pull out your smart phone right now and go your apps. After 15 years of thinking up killer use cases for bitcoin, find one app on your phone that relies on bitcoin to operate. Can't find it? So what is the killer use case? Pay for things in a store without fees? Credit cards are free to the consumer (less than free if you include cashback etc) and they are quick. It takes a while to transfer small payments in bitcoin and the merchants don't want it. So why use it? Send money to a friend at no cost? Venmo and Paypal already do that for me. Sure, if I was sending money overseas using Western Union, there might be costs involved, but for most of what people in the developing world do, it's not needed. Anonymity? There is a record of every person who ever sent you money and everyone who you ever sent it to, so if they arrest someone who gives up the names of everyone they did business with, it's the opposite of anonymous. It's worse than cash.

Small adds to Anterix and Coupang.

I listened to the audiobook and this was really interesting. The author grew up in a very politically left household. Her mother is the author of the best selling book "Nickel and Dimed" and Rosa has childhood memories of being on labor union picket lines with her mother instead of picnics in the park. She ended up becoming a law professor at Georgetown and writes legal articles on police reform and the military, despite never having worn a uniform. So she decided to see it from the other side and volunteered to become a reserve office in Washington DC. Many smaller cities have volunteer firefighters, but not many have volunteer police. In NYC, there are auxiliary police, who don't carry guns, and are used for crowd control during marathons or parades etc. But they are expected to radio for police if they see something, not make arrests themselves. Being an unpaid person interacting with criminals is probably not a great idea if you are a military age male in peak physical shape, but if you are a female law professor in her 30s, who is short and wouldn't be able to take a middle schooler in a fair fight, it's kind of ridiculous. DC, which is statistically a high crime city has volunteer "reserve" officers who go through the same police academy training as regular officers, and when they graduate are given a gun and a police cruiser and expected to respond to calls just like paid officers She starts out very skeptical of police and pro-criminal but softens her stance when she sees what they have to go through and the people that they interact with. Besides the voyeuristic aspect of watching a fish out of a water, it had some interesting takes on policing that she wouldn't have if she had stayed in her ivory tower. For instance, since cities have cut budgets for drug treatment, mental health, and homeless services, whenever there is a problem involving one of these issues, the only thing they have left to respond is a police officer who has no training in that area. There are always comments in cop shows about not wanting to arrest someone because of all the paperwork, but some of her descriptions of the bureaucracy are very eye opening.

I don't have a cite, and I hope I'm not misremembering. But I think it was either in the Snowball or the partnership letters where someone that he knew personally was going to sell BRK to get the money for the deposit on a house or something. And he thought that they would miss out on a lot of compounding and suggested that. Weirdly, there's a guy in Palo Alto who would probably be worth like $200bln or something by now if he hadn't sold his 10% of Apple. Ronald Wayne - Wikipedia So missing out on early Berkshire doesn't seem so extraordinary.

Well, there is a strategy that Buffett used to recommend in the early days, to borrow against the stock. He assumed correctly that the stock would compound at a faster rate than the interest on the borrowing, Apparently that strategy is being used again by the ultra wealthy to spend their wealth and not be taxed on the sale. You just borrow against the assets and when you die, the estate is based on the net value, including the debt, which reduces the inheritance as much as selling, but there is no tax to the decedent on sale.

Very interesting video on Pinduoduo by the Financial Times.

There doesn't seem to be a post on Investment Ideas for Ross Stores, I don't want to make one because I hate retail. But this place seems like a good place for this piece of news. Ross Stores Reports Results for Fourth Quarter and Fiscal 2023 (yahoo.com) The Company’s Board of Directors recently approved a new two-year $2.1 billion stock repurchase authorization for fiscal 2024 and 2025. This new program represents an 11% increase over the recently completed repurchase of $1.9 billion of common stock during 2022 and 2023 combined. The stock is up about 50% in the past year so I don't know at what the previous buyback was finished, but even at today's prices, a $4bln buyback would be about 8% of the shares.

Trimmed a few shares of META. I still have a good mid size position in it, but other than sitting on my hands and doing nothing, I don't I have any advantage over the hordes of analysts looking at a trillion dollar stock, so I think I'm better off looking at things that are overlooked and unloved.

Small adds to BTI and ATEX. Nothing to write home about. I've got a couple of positions that I'm on the fence about and may do nothing or sell and redeploy after earnings come out in the next couple of weeks.

I've been guilty of sitting on losers too long while waiting for them to come back. I think Buffett had a great quip about the stock not knowing that you own it. I was listening to a podcast yesterday from an investor, who has a concentrated book and he had a great line about not cutting the flowers and watering the weeds, but doing the opposite. Rather than throwing good money at a bad business and hoping it will turn around he said "It's much easier to give birth than it is to resurrect the dead."

Small adds to ATEX. Taking it up to a 1% position.

Started watching Vice Principals on Max. If you like Eastbound and Down, and Righteous Gemstones, it's got a lot of the same cast and type of humor.

Sold out of a small position in KNOP for a small loss after earnings came out and bought some NTDOY, FF India, and sprinkled the rest around in a few small positions.

There's a lot of sharp traders on here. We gotta find a way to arbitrage this.

I don't know. If I went to Wendy's and the sign said a burger was $5 when I got in line and when I got to the front of the line they told me it was $8, I didn't think I would go back.

He's obviously a bright guy, but sometimes his actions contradict his supposed operating manual, as with Valeant. More recently, HHH, which has been disappointing, paid $50 million for a minority interest in a celebrity chef's company. In this interview he says that he likes restaurant brands like Chipotle and Burger King because they have a system, and the system is very efficient and not prone to human error. That's the exact opposite of how a high end/ celebrity chef restaurant operates. The workers at a place like that need a LOT more training, and the menu changes constantly, which is why Chipotle with a limited menu that stays the same and where you can train a high school to make the dishes in a few hours is so good. He says he likes companies that generate a lot of cash, since when have minor league sports teams been known for their cash generation? Even Ryan Reynolds is losing money on his soccer team. And the anti-woke college stuff and buying into Twitter seems like he is setting himself up to run for office.

I'm just finishing up this book which piqued my interest due to my deep dive into the gun industry before I invested in Smith and Wesson. Sam Colt was an interesting figure. He was like Elon Musk, in that he was a really smart guy and also something of a showman. A less flattering description would be that he was scammy. This book is extremely well researched and clears up a lot of the misconceptions which are so often repeated as part of Colt's marketing that they have become accepted as truth. He did not invent revolvers. He probably saw one on a sea voyage he made to India when he was 16 (a Collier flint lock rifle) which had multiple chambers that you advance by turning it with your hand. He thought up the advancements that made it advance one way by pulling the hammer back (like a ratchet or a bike gear that only goes one way) and came up with a few modifications to prevent "chain firing" where the spark ignites every round at once. His life was crazy. His company failed a couple of times before he managed to get rich on the back of an order (and the marketing) from the Texas Rangers. When he needed money he used the knowledge of chemistry that he learned from making dyes at a textile mill to make laughing gas and would go from city to city as "Dr Coult" and get people high on it in auditoriums as entertainment. He came up with the idea for the revolver pistol with the innovations but they were just drawings and a guy named John Pearson, who is never credited, figured out how to turn those sketches into a working gun. Colt was genuinely a smart guy. He worked with Morse to develop the telegraph and also had another failed company that used wires and underwater mines to blow up enemy ships. The world was smaller then and everyone knew each other so the amount of famous people you run into seems implausible in today's world. Two of his investors were brothers in law. One of them, named Whistler, had a son who painted...Whistler's Mother. In a demo of one of his pistols, it spooked a horse which was pulling John Adams carriage and killed the driver. He was so upset by this that he asked for a postponement in the closing argument he was giving. The case was about the Amistad. He didn't have a factory when a big order came in, so he partnered with Eli Whitney's son. This book did a great job of separating fact from fiction because Colt was such a braggart and salesperson that his facts would change in retelling to fit whatever would help him sell more guns. He claimed he read about a slave uprising and imagined a pistol with many bullets to help the slave owners defend their family (the story he referred to happened a year after he came up with the gun). He claims he came up with the idea for the revolver by watching the ratchet wheel that picks up the anchor on a ship (he probably, like many people had seen the early Collier revolver rifles, or "pepperbox" pistols which had several complete barrels which rotated.) Not something that will help your investing, but an interesting read.

We are on Season 3 now of The Righteous Gemstones on MAX. One of the funniest shows I've seen in a long time.

Recent update on the business side of the Red Sea attacks.

small add to NTDOY

I wasn't a shareholder back then, but short shrift - The Globe and Mail

I read this as "I didn't cover my shorts in the 24 hours that my hit and run was in the money and I'll try to sling some mud in the conference call to let me walk home with some money for all my work."

Tiger Cub Stephen Mandel and Burry both have good sized positions in Square. DATAROMA Superinvestor Ownership It's trading at less than 2x sales and the restaurant checkout appears to be everywhere now, but it's down a lot from the high $200 price after the news articles came out about their Cashapp and lax anti-money laundering making it the preferred app for drug dealers, hookers and other con artists.

I noticed that also. Big position for both Burry and Tepper. It's strange that Burry has bought (and sold) BABA before at these prices and not held on. So much churn in Burry's portfolio, that it's hard to decipher what the thinking is.

Protesting Indian farmers clash with police for a second day as they march toward the capital (msn.com) If I recall, FFH had an investment in Indian Ag (pulse crops?). I wonder if this will have an effect on that business? I did notice that FF India was down yesterday (so was everything), and I still like both companies, but would add to FF India before FFH. Although protests are obviously bad if you own an airport and make money from tourism.