ValueArb

Nope because Gold has actual utility in industry, in jewelry, etc. I have no ability to predict whether BTC will impact it at all.

If you want to put your time into estimating the production capacity for a specific commodity at various price levels, and the demand curve for it at various price levels, once in a blue moon you can get pretty confident about where long term prices have to end up at. That's basically what Buffett did with Silver in 1997. But value investors almost always avoid this type of estimation because its fraught with errors and dynamic market changes (new discoveries, new replacements like Shale, new regulations influencing both supply and demand such as CO2 limits). That's why when they speak of IV, its almost always future cash flows. I don't know how that method can be applied to crypto-currencies at all. Even with (relatively) fixed supply demand curves can only be guessed at.

Hertz revenues are down about 10% over the last decade while Avis is up 50%, combined their revenues are up about 20%. That's raw numbers, no idea how much acquisitions and selling off subsidiaries alter it. I'd bet Enterprise has grown significantly more. That said there is no doubt its a slow growth industry, but I doubt it will shrink much. Last summer on my annual family drive to Oregon my alternator on old unfaithful (2010 Cayenne) went out in a little arizona town so far from a porsche dealer that my only choice was to send it to a scrap yard or pay $1,200 to tow it back to Phoenix. I ended up towing it, and then rented an Audi Q5 from Enterprise for three weeks to cover the trip. Uber wasn't an option. People will still need to rent for longer periods. Even business travelers will prefer a rental if they in a city long enough and have a few stops. The part of the business that ride-sharing takes away is probably the smallest part of their business, short trips over a short period. If self-driving cars ever become a thing, it might take more of their market, but then you have some questions. Who will own the cars, who will maintain the cars, who will clean the cars, check for damage and repair the cars? The answer is almost certainly, rental car companies.

Won't it also make it much easier to short Bitcoin;)?

Why would BTC decline based on that news? I would think it would have gone up if the listing approval was true.

Only assuming that most of the Tor nodes aren't government run.

14 years in this business is an impressive accomplishment. As Charlie said the metrics you choose will drive the type of decisions you make, and it looks like they chose some decent ones.

I'm not a scuba diver but I'm pretty sure the amount of equipment needed to safely work at the depths the pipelines were at wouldn't fit on that little boat. I've been told they would need trimix, dry suits, and a lot of extra tanks mixed with the correct breathing mixes for the lowest depths as well as on way up and down. And it would be a crazy bad decision by Ukraine to do this, given how the pipeline had already been shut down and how desperately they needed western aid at the time (and now). I might be a little nuts about the maintenance theory (check my post history, I might be a lot nuts about it) but my frustration is it's never been addressed, let alone debunked. Every article I read the assumption is that it could only have been intentional sabotage. My theory is that Putin and Gazprom thought Europe's unity would crack during the winter when gas prices skyrocketed and they come crawling back begging for Russian gas, so Gazprom attempted to clear the methane hydrates from the pipelines to prep them for use and thats hella difficult to do from a single end for even the most skilled operators.

Someone keeps pushing the narrative that explosives for the Nordstream blasts were planted nearly 300 feet deep in the frigid baltic by a Ukrainian dive team using amateur scuba equipment from a "yacht" that could fit in a backyard pool. https://www.wsj.com/world/europe/nord-stream-probe-faces-resistance-from-poland-962aa5f9?mod=hp_lead_pos6 No one ever investigates the idea that pipelines frequently explode from poor maintenance, that the Russians are terrible at pipeline maintenance without western expert help, and that the pressure/temperature conditions that trigger dissolution of one methane hydrate block can frequently trigger others in nearby pipelines. https://thelawdogfiles.com/2022/10/nordstream-ii-electric-instapundit.html

I'd word it "the haslams likely settled". They've got to deal with a legal storm of unintended consequences as their suit unveiled their attempts to manipulate earnings, might as well take what BRK is willing to give them while trying to avoid criminal court.

If calling the CFO/CEO directly doesn't work I'd troll linkedin to find employees who will talk to you. Then I'd try to find customers to talk to, again linkedin might work if you can figure out the right titles for whoever at the customer would have bought the algorithm (presumably CTO, etc). Just say I'm trying to do research on how useful/valuable it is.

Returns are temporary, the fees last forever.

Nate's oddball stocks newsletter is only $600/year, which isn't too bad if you want to work this space full time. Its unclear to me if he's still publishing though, I didn't see any 2023 newsletters on his site. I don't think Walker manuals has been published since 2006 that I can find, but the good news is otcmarkets.com is free and it does a pretty good job of linking to latest financials from dark companies if they are available.

You can't skimp on the research with microcaps. If they are still listed, they still have to provide almost as much financial data as large caps, but you would be wise to go beyond it whenever possible and verify what you can (store locations, property values, etc). Outright frauds are more common than in large caps, but still relatively rare and most are extremely obvious. The problem is believing corporate spin, too many investors think they found a micro cap set to double or more because its "just about' to release/announce a major new product/expansion/investment/transaction. My feeling is microcap management are often more promotional than larger cap managers. I just put them on my ignore list if they make too many optimistic statements about future results. And lastly, where microcaps shine is in the large number of net-nets. There are basically two options for investing in them, the Walter Schloss method of owning 100 at a time so diversification reduces risk, or the focused method I pursue of picking the best five at any one time and selling them as their discount disappears to buy the new best net-nets. But both require research, Schloss wasn't buying blindly, he was clearly filtering out the worst by some method (what, I'm not specifically sure of). And in my case, my horrible results last quarter illustrate that even with net-nets you need to go beyond the raw financials. It caused me to switch from using discount to cash value as my most important metric to co-equal with board and shareholder composition. Net-nets can be torturously cheap for years on end (or decades for GYRO investors) if they don't have a clearly identifiable near term catalyst and its the board and large shareholders who get to decide whether to enable that catalyst. Lastly, i believe academic research has established a good deal of reason to believe that overall small/micro cap returns beat large caps over long periods. It's not just observation, there is also a reasonable hypothesis that the market demands they have higher returns due to their much lower liquidity. The reasoning is that investors should always demand higher returns for more uncertainty and less liquidity. For active investors there is another reason to fish here. Almost all of professionally managed money is in funds too large to buy small or micro caps, and many are forced sellers when a company drops below their minimum cap size requirements. It should mean that they are much less efficiently priced with far fewer analysts and far more stocks. This of course means some should end up way overvalued, but unless you are a short seller you can just ignore those and filter to find the ones where that lack of efficency leads them to be well undervalued. Lastly, returns should also be higher because of uncertainty. When you find a growth microcap with a decade of great results, its really unlikely you can be as confident in its competitive moat and long term future as a midcap or large cap that's been doing it for 20 or 40 years. The microcaps always have a greater threat of geographic competition (someone doing the exact same thing in other territories moving into theirs) or competition from someone with greater resources (a much larger company with interest in the market and much deeper resources to put into play). Its really hard to earn some of these extra returns passively. My belief in the superior returns of lower liquidity stocks is why I always recommend to friends they choose a total stock market index over a SP 500 index, but in truth the SP 500 stocks are still a huge portion of the total stock market index. Over the last decade the Vanguard Admiral Total Stock market index (VTSAX) has trailed their Admiral SP 500 index (VFIAX) by half percent a year, VTSAX only wins over last 23 years by 0.3% a year. Trying to carve out a single index like their small cap index (VSMAX) is risky because its far more volatile. For example, it is trailing SP 500 by over 1.5% a year the last decade, though its winning by 14% a year since 2000. On the surface I could argue passive should own the VSMAX as a form of mean reversal, overall it generates higher returns than the SP500, so the last decade must be an aberration that will soon correct and restore the king to his throne. But this is all built on theorizing mixed with research based on long ago historical data. If some secular change in our economy has made it tougher for smaller businesses to be public companies it could easily obviate any historical trends. For example the number of micro and small caps seems to have declined over time according to some recent research I've read but can't recall at the moment, so I'll use this study instead. https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2017/05/18/looking-behind-the-declining-number-of-public-companies/ So the reason why the small cap index has had such a poopy decade is structural changes driving some of the better businesses to go private. What those could be I as yet have no idea, which means they might not be done yet.

OMG, does this mean she's not qualified to be president of Harvard University? Academic fraud is a serious issue and apparently a rampant problem (resignation of Stanford President last summer as one example). If Oxman is still serving in academia they should investigate her. But it seems like her situation is bit different than Gay's. Oxman appears to be out of academia, Gay was tasked in setting the example for thousands of professors at Harvard. Oxman is accused of not crediting others one time, in her dissertation, Gay was accused of doing same in virtually every paper she published. And every time Harvard attempted to squash Gay's fraud controversy by announcing they had reviewed the flagged papers and found the mistakes to be minor, then another batch of papers were surfaced where she made further "mistakes". It sure looked like Ms Gay wasn't very forthcoming with the internal investigation and that it was run subservient to the task of keeping her in office. Another issue with Gay is that she didn't publish much. I certainly don't understand what specifically qualifies someone to be president of a university, but it seems weird she got promoted so high when her academic credentials were so thin. If she's been promoted for managerial over academic skills I could understand that (but those skills sure deserted her during her congressional testimony). Whether she was promoted over more qualified academics because of the color of her skin or not I don't think anyone can say with certainty. But all the facts together create enough suspicion turned her into the perfect example for right wing sh*t stirrers.

There are many different ways to squeeze alpha out of a cat. I don't think I've ever held anything for 5 years except for BRK.B when I was investing passively. Today my average holding period is maybe 4-6 months and I would bet its not much different than Warren Buffett's approach his first decade when he had his highest returns.

Leverage makes heroes and zeros. From Bloomberg

My first guess is NRP.

Munger's great stock was Tenneco. He only had to wait about 20 years to find it. Otherwise forcing yourself to pick a single "great stock" at any moment is a fools errand. Better to find 5 very good stocks and hope the best two overcome the worst one so you beat the market.

If inflation rate is still 3%, how can they be planning for the Fed to cut rates? I thought their target was inflation + 2% or am I oversimplifying it?

Thanks, I'll start stalking you and eric's posts;)

If they remade "The Graduate" in 2020 Mr. McGuire's one word of advice to Benjamin Braddock should have been "Shipping"?

Nestle closed at $80.78 December 21, 2018. Anyone who paid $5.60 for $68 calls on March 13, 2014, turned it into $12.78, which my math says is an 18.8% annualized return. According to Yahoo there were quite a few opportunities to close out at above $85 in the year that would have generated annualized returns of over 30%. Yahoo claims Nestle closed at $73.85 on March 13, 2014, and lists an adjusted price of $57.24 which I assume is net of dividends. Neither matches the $65.60? Using the $65.60 number since its the only one we can trust and adding back $11.84 in dividends in those 4 years gives the stock buyer an 7.5% annualized return, which doesn't account for taxes, or time value of getting the dividends before end of period, and clearly I can't trust Yahoo's December 2018 prices. But obviously the stock return was a lot lower risk, the options could have been a zero had Nestle not grown, or run into a significant business issue or maybe even if it had increased its payout ratios, etc. LEAPs have been very interesting to me ever since I read the Cornwall Capital chapters in the Big Short, but I've never been able make them work for me. I've almost always found their cost to be too high, they decay too quickly and when they seem cheap my track record is mixed (we'll see how my Jan 18 $20 SAVE calls work out). My knee jerk reaction is always there is no free lunch, clearly Nestle's call options are cheaper because of its high dividend payout ratio reduces long term NAV and earnings growth. But the market should already know this and maybe the extra uncertainty on how much effect future dividends will have means Nestle's calls are still cheaper than they should be. IE maybe the calls are being over-discounted for the uncertain amount of future dividends?

I did full time investing between 2001 and 2008, then went back to software development (mostly mobile). I was working for a tech unicorn in the wearables space the last few years while working to pick up a few clients and jump back in full time in June.