Casey

recent buys: AMZN, FB, MSFT, V, ETSY, RBLX Nothing special just tech and ad businesses!

V

sold some FB leaps, bought MSFT/FB

That's a nice big chunk of VZ

my guess is Google

More Dropbox

Fascinating. For me personally, very worried about how Trump is a wannabe autocrat who is moving (successfully) towards making the U.S. more like regimes in North Korea, Russia, Turkey. You don't think its a big deal? And then you've got Biden who is basically a moderate republican/centrist and won't run the country like a failed casino with his kids in charge. I don't get it lol Not sure I have your unfettered trust of the pharmaceutical industry, but yes, I'm also very grateful we have a lot of really smart scientists and companies working on vaccines and treatments. It's amazing. Biden is a moderat republican? :o Did you see his promises to raise trillions of tax and all other things? That seems like a radical left. BTW, Biden's son took a 2bn dollar loan from Bank of China in 2015. Nobody knew what happened later. It could be "forgiven" and pocketed. He needs to explain that because that is wayyyy bigger than his son's Ukraine dealings. Feel free to ignore my "moderate republican" language if it helps get the main gist. IMO Biden's more of a centrist than plenty of Democrats (take Bernie or Warren), and will basically act like a sane person as President. Don't think he'd be functionally that different over 4 years than someone like Romney, Bush, Obama. re: taxes. Biden's proposed tax changes are $4 Trillion Over 10 Years, ~400 billion a year. Maybe high if he does the whole thing. Trump tax cut is like 1.8 trillion over 10 years from google. So Biden proposal fills that back in and adds an increase of similar size. Not really seeing what is radical about these levels up or down, but okay yeah taxes would go up. Any comment on this part? You don't think its a big deal?

bought some Spotify

To me, your comment seems to imply that: A) you view the Fed much more influenced by COVID case numbers than employment numbers. Or perhaps, B) you believe that the COVID case numbers are so strongly correlated to the employment numbers so that they're basically the same thing (i.e. if COVID cases decline to zero, employment will quickly return to high levels). Or, C) the Fed cares a lot about asset bubbles and sees this one, so they'll reduce stimulus even if employment hasn't recovered. Is one of these views basically your position? Because the evidence I've seen seems to suggest that the Fed is likely to be reluctant to reduce stimulus until employment numbers return to levels that cause significant inflation. So, I'm curious if you think A, B, or C above is true, or if there's something else that I don't understand about your reasoning that will help bridge that gap for me. Thanks! B. But my bearish view is based on a large amount of data points I track, not just based on COVID alone. Those data points led me to sell out in mid Feburary and I was feeling like a fool for two more weeks back then. Right now those data points look even more exaggerated than in Feb. However, I've been weighing the two scenarios since last night. Sector rotation vs everything crash. I start to lean against the case of a sector rotation right now. When AAPL, TSLA, SHOP etc go bust, traditional value stocks could have their day. People who bought AAPL and TSLA have never bothered to look at what happened in 2000. Cisco was the equivalent of AAPL and TSLA today. When Cisco went into bust, it went down 90% while traditional value stocks like BRK went up 100% Not a bad call here!!

Fascinating. For me personally, very worried about how Trump is a wannabe autocrat who is moving (successfully) towards making the U.S. more like regimes in North Korea, Russia, Turkey. You don't think its a big deal? And then you've got Biden who is basically a moderate republican/centrist and won't run the country like a failed casino with his kids in charge. I don't get it lol Not sure I have your unfettered trust of the pharmaceutical industry, but yes, I'm also very grateful we have a lot of really smart scientists and companies working on vaccines and treatments. It's amazing.

It’s summer. From what I’ve read it’s like 10-20x more likely that you get the virus indoors versus outdoors How much do we think the numbers are the season vs getting to “herd immunity” ? I’m inclined to think mostly the former. The south is ultra hot and people are inside at restaurants and bars and parties. Dumb, but they are. So cases will continue. Personally what I’ve been expecting is a lull in cases in summer and then a rebound as we open schools, people spend time more indoors because of the cold in October and later. OTOH there’s a lot of vaccine candidates on horizon and will only be more as time moves on, and you have govt + fed backstop in trillions as necessary. Hard to have too much of a opinionated view, so unless you think you’re some kind of market timing genius just stay long good businesses.

New Fed policy is that it will be 1999 again for the next 5 years.

Good topic. Tencent comes to mind. I think Netflix is a bit of a different animal than FAAMG. Next Netflix? Spotify. As far as smaller (like 1-10 billion market cap) companies that could get as big as US "big tech" I have no idea. From the names you mentioned, it seems you're thinking more along these lines than 150b companies going to 1 trillion. I guess the smaller ones make you more money. Uber, Adyen, Shopify could get a lot larger. Walmart market cap is 372 billion. McDonalds is 157 billion. Maybe some executive wants to do an Amazon and start productizing internal components of their non-tech companies as software or infrastructure. Probably a bunch of chinese/indian tech cos that I'm ignorant of and would be worth mentioning.

Cases in Sweden plummeted at the end of June. The most likely explanation is school closures and summer vacation. Yep. Everyone in Sweden does lengthy vacations in summer often with lots of time in the outdoors / at a cabin somewhere. It's not exactly the conditions for spreading a virus. https://www.thelocal.se/20180605/so-why-do-the-swedes-take-such-long-summer-holidays

Curious where you've seen 'severity falling?' Awesome news if so. I'd read that it was unlikely for this virus to mutate/change too quickly (https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-01315-7) I meant "severity is falling" in regards to Portugal, as corroborated by this post: https://www.cornerofberkshireandfairfax.ca/forum/general-discussion/coronavirus/msg425878/#msg425878 No comment on the virus's severity, I am certainly not qualified to opine on that. Ahh, gotcha. Thanks. I have been following things less closely recently. I do expect "severity" goes down in some sense - as we continue to figure out what works for treatments and hopefully get some vaccines going at some point