ValueArb

Climbing Mount Everest? Bah, child’s play. I just drove half way across Arizona in daytime with no AC.

China has been threatening Taiwan for 70 years, and will never do anything because shutting down the South China Sea would be the CCP committing suicide.

First you are assuming that separation was ever possible. Dictatorships always cling together for mutual self protection. Second, China always had and will have access to Russian resources. Maybe they build more pipelines but again that was inevitable.

lets not forget that Putin earlier said he would have no issues with the Ukraine joining NATO and even considered having Russia join.

You are no true scotsman!

The Ukrainians have ALL of their skin in the game and they want cluster munitions. And we didn't have anything to do with the start of this war. Putin didn't invade because of the expansion of NATO, he did it because he wanted to recreate something like the USSR to increase Russias power. Saying that a organization of mutual self defense is forcing an aggressive dictatorship to start a war is as silly as it is wrong. Finally the war can only end with a peace agreement. But the only peace agreement that has been available is for Ukraine to either surrender its sovereignty and disappear within the Russian maw, or surrender a third of its territory so Russia has time to rebuild its forces to reinvade in five years and finish them off. If Russia quits, the war ends. If Ukraine quits their children are kidnapped, their women are raped, their men are tortured and their lands are taken.

One of the most critical aspects of value investing is avoiding value traps, but I mostly disagree with everything this guy wrote. First, true value investing isn't taking on excess risk. Typically you are fishing where other fishermen are not, lower liquidity stocks aren't more risky but they are certainly less efficiently priced. I do agree with what he said about Behavorial investing explanation, but more broadly value investing is finding opportunities where market participants average expectation for a stock is incorrect. The market is efficient enough that this happens relatively rarely, but occasionally its very obvious. Second is his first five criteria are just standard parts of any value analysis. They don't filter out value traps. And "relative strength" isn't a value investing concept at all, value investing means conceding you can't predict price movements. It makes me wonder if this guy understands value investing at all when he refers to it as a "factor" and never mentions margin of safety or intrinsic value. The key to avoiding value traps is only buying an undervalued opportunity if it has a catalyst. The most obvious and common catalyst is strong earnings growth. Buying a company that is growing earnings at 20% a year at a low PE will work even if the PE never increases. As long as earnings continue to grow 20% a year you will end up making roughly 20% a year. Other catalysts include stock buybacks, dividends, mergers/acquisitions, tender offers, even sometimes liquidations. If you own a business trading at a huge discount to its intrinsic value but management isn't investing its earnings intelligently to benefit shareholders, you probably own a value trap.

modern cluster munitions are much better at self disabling. There will be far more Ukrainians injured/killed post war by mines than cluster munitions. And when Ukrainians find a US origin on the cluster bomblet that hurt them, they will think those are the people who helped us protect our freedoms from rapists and murderers. Its short-sighted to think that the Ukrainians should be handcuffed so the war can last longer and they can shed more blood, to avoid giving them cluster munitions or long range strike weapons.

I do hot yoga nearly every day and the one thing its taught me is to throw in a few minutes of stretching exercises esp. if you sit at a desk all day. Every time I go back to a class after a few days off I can feel my spine popping back into place, it tightens pretty quickly.

ARKK is up 48% this year, so she's clearly feeling her oats again. We should all get out of the way of the dual steamrollers of Tesla and ARKK!

Wagner historically seems similar to pirates. Men join because they are promised high pay and a share of plunder from their raids, but the lower level recruits get fed into meatgrinders like this one trying to capture an Oil Refinery, while the higher level guys hang back and take most of the booty when they succeed.

I think I would model them as dividends because you don't know whether buybacks can be done at prices that are accretive or dilutive in the future. The most important criteria is what you think of managements capital allocation skills, if you think they are really smart and good at it, then buybacks are opportunistic upside. If you don't trust management to buy back stock at reasonable prices, then it can be a negative since some happily overpay to drive the price up so they can unload their options for bigger profits. With Apple I think Tim Cook has done a great job but historically it's stock has been clearly undervalued so he couldn't go wrong. Today at $197 I think it's either overvalued or fairly valued, and last quarter Apple was still buying back shares last quarter within the $135 to $155 range. If this quarter he's buying back shares above that range I'd say he might not get it. He may have just heard "buy back stock" from Buffett not the "when it's undervalued" part.

I am just finding out about Prop C in San Francisco and its loss of corporate headquarters since it was enacted. https://sfstandard.com/business/revenue-from-homelessness-tax-plummeted/ I think she is missing that there is always a tipping point. Block's SF taxes increase from $21M to $36M because of Prop C. So moving out of SF before Prop C would have still saved it close to $20M a year, with Prop C its close to $35M a year. Comparing them to revenues is misleading, if Block was as profitable as Shift4 that $5B would generate $250M in after tax profits. Moving the HQ would increase profits about 8% before Prop C, and 14% after it. Block probably moves either way but it certainly became a much more obvious decision after Prop C. Now if Prop C has reduced homelessness and crime significantly, the benefits of staying in SF might offset those higher tax costs. I'm not aware of what impact it had, does SF still have any significant homeless or crime issues?

The complexities of this reminds me of why Buffett never does DCFs. His quote is something along the lines of if the value doesn't just jump out at you its an easy pass. I guess my approach would be to worry less about the cost of future debt and more about the predictability of the company's future revenue growth. For example if it is a rollup, when does it run out of easy acquisitions and how does that change it's returns on equity? If it's a PE firm focusing on a specific niche, what is it's competitive advantage and how comfortable am I that it can sustain that advantage in producing superior returns on deals?

Yep, I started using OneDrive when I switched back to Excel, and it makes it super easy to organize and store all my research, basically a single spreadsheet per company, and never worry about backups. I use iCloud too for personal stuff.

Finally a democrat I would not have to hold my nose while voting for.

It’s really sad that the myth of Putin playing 4D chess has any legs left. There is zero chance a “surprise” attack can be launched from Belarus, given the level of monitoring by satellites as well as AWACs the Ukrainians have access to, not even counting their human Intel inside of Belarus. And the last guy you want running a sneak attack is Prighozen, he’s not a general he’s a recruiter of the desperate who throws his recruits into terrible meatgrinders with little hope of success. Any elaborate cover that involves weakening your defensive lines significantly by moving 24k troops in a march on Moscow where they shoot down 7 badly needed air assets and crews, while making Putin look like an ineffectual coward would be the worst plan ever. This is basic Russian gangsterism, the mafia running the MoD attempted to kneecap Prighozen by forcing Wagner to get folded under their command, and he revolted before they could arrest him once he was defenseless. He has enough troops to get to Moscow but little hope of holding it, so he was able to leverage a fat bribe to stand cien his troops.

It will be interesting to see if this leads to Putin and the Russian MoD pulling their most loyal units back into Russia. It was shockingly easy for Wagner to turn on Moscow, and there are likely more angry soldiers and opportunistic generals for them to fear.

Nope, she’s nuts. There is no way Putin assented to a plan that made him look this weak, just to fire two guys he could have fired anytime he wanted to. It’s a pretty bad plan when it loses 7 helicopters desperately needed to defend against the Ukrainian offensive, and control of the strategic hub for supplies, men and ammo for their front. But it’s even worse to have all of Russia reading Prigozhins bluster about how the war was a lie, and that Russia needs a new president. Finally, the most terrible effect of all was all the Russian military units joining Wagner instead of fighting them. The FSB was fleeing offices everywhere on the path to Moscow knowing it wasn’t going to be defended.

There are also reports that Wagner fighters are extremely unhappy that Prigozhin made a deal, as well as regular Russian army units that had joined the insurrection. Whatever deal fir his personal protection he made isn’t likely to protect them. So this may not be over. And even if it is this has ended, it still has caused a major snafu in Russian logistics right as they face a renewed offensive.

Putin doesn’t have many options with few loyal troops between Moscow and Wagner, but tactical nukes are not very effective against troops. They are typically far too dispersed. His best bet would be to wipe Rostov off the map with something larger in order to decapitate the insurrection, but the consequences are entirely terrible for Putin.

Same could be said anytime a search is conducted for a hiker on Mt Hood or Rainer, or for a missing ocean kayaker, or kids trapped in a flooded cave, etc. As a percentage of society's spending, search and rescue is vanishingly small. The question isn't whether its not worth performing search and rescue for expensive submersibles containing wealthy tourists, its why aren't we doing more for Mediterranean refugees.

To be fair the reason I was late to finding this out is that I watched Rogans interview with RFK Jr first and they told me how wifi opens up the blood-brain barrier to toxins, so I had to turn mine off and now my only Internet access is through a 9.6 kbaud modem.

I don't do much (any) shorting but Carvana is up roughly 8x in 6 months. Did it finally turn profitable? Nope, Q1 operating loss was $130M (company description: one of our best quarters ever!). Did they eliminate their solvency risks? Nope, it's shareholder equity has increased to a NEGATIVE $1.3B. They have over $8B in debt, and $488M in cash. Their current assets are mostly inventories and finance receivables. The reason it's popped is that the company announced that Q2 will be even better. Will it be profitable? Well if you think $50M in EBITDA is kind of like a profit, sure! Not if you notice that $150M in quarterly interest payments though.

I'm not talking about heat signatures from the engines, though the lack of any are incredibly suspicious in itself. I'm talking about the heat generated by compressing the air in it's path at enormous rates of speed. At even mach 3 at these altitudes would leave a huge heat plume behind it. So if it exists, 1) It's not going at high rates of speeds. 2) Its a projection, not an object. 3) its not subject to basic physics we've repeatedly demonstrated as universal. And if it's #3, then why aren't we talking about whether these are angels? If you believe these things can violate the "laws" of physics why assume aliens and why not go full supernatural deity?