Dinar

Historically a great buy signal, except for a couple of times when it went to 70! Still on a two year view probably quite attractive

There is a difference between securities in margin and non-margin accounts.

What do you have to lose? Evaluate the pros and cons. The only downside that I can see is as follows: to lend securities, your securities must be in a margin account. Thus, they are commingled with the other securities including the firm's securities. If Schwab goes bankrupt, then you may not get all of your money back if you exceed SIPC + insurance limits.

Thank you very much, will do.

Spek, I love German wines, if you do not mind sharing, where are these vineyards? Also, do you know of any good place in the US to buy Ice wine? My wife and mother love it.

Spek, Twitter reminds me of the quote about Brazil - it is the country of the future and always will be. Twitter, as Zuckerberg put is, is a clown car that drove into a gold mine. The new CEO was CTO before and their technology was lousy. They need first and foremost someone like Zuckerberg who understands how to run a business. Keep in mind neither Elliott nor Silver Lake have been able to accomplish anything. Convert issuance is crazy. Yes, the fact that this property can be bought for $31bn is insanely cheap - in Zukerberg's hands it would be worth $200bn+. In the hands of the current clowns...

Were you the one who posted the VIC write-up with the same logic on Friday evening?

Understood, thank you very much.

Gregmal, am I correct in understanding that you think that NYC is very cheap or the suburbs are very cheap? if so, which areas of NYC if the former or Bergen county if the latter, do you think are very cheap? Thank you.

You know nothing about me, yet you lecture me. You compare adults to toddlers? Children must be raised and taught how to behave, adults do not need yours or anyone's else instructions as to how to live their lives as long as they comply with the law. I lived under socialism, and I know the consequences of no incentives to work, which come from high taxes and social spending. There was literally no food in shops, forget about toilet paper. Nobody had a car. Put your money where you mouth is: tell everyone you hire: handyman, waitress at a restaurant who serves you, a barbet, et all, that you will impose a 30% tax on what you will pay them and give it to the poor. Let's see where that gets you. Generosity at a point of a gun is not generosity, it is robbery being enforced upon you. If you disagree, please let know where I can meet you and how I can force you to donate to charities of my choice - since you believe that you can decide how much and to what causes I should donate, I feel I can dictate the same to you. So until you give 100% of your money to my charity of choice - scholarship to send inner-city kids to Catholic schools, you are just another blow-hard who tells the rest of us how to behave while ignoring your own rules.

Sharing implies voluntarily, hardly a fair statement when it comes to taxes. Sharing implies that you give the money to those who you think deserve it, not those who feel entitled to it.

I have the utmost respect for you and your mother, and I mean it most sincerely. Both of my grandfathers were raised by a single parent, one during Russian Civil War, the other during World War II. The problem is that for everyone like you and your mother, there are sadly dozens of outcomes that I described. I would be delighted if 95% of people on welfare ended up like you and your mother, I am worried that it is more like 5%. Look at the growth of underclass in the US, Daniel Patrick Moynahan wrote an essay on the topic 60 years ago - the collapse of the Negro/Black family. This is my problem with the situation. As for people exploiting tax loopholes, look, most government spending is wasted, so I understand people's reluctance to pay more than they owe.

You missed the reference, if memory serves me properly both Chaim Grade and Tomas Sowell were raised by widow and grandparents respectively.

So, it makes me very perturbed, but much less than the single mother for two main reasons: the single mother lives off me while these guys do not. The more important reason is that the single mother propogates the cycle of poverty and underclass, she will not raise future Thomas Sowell or Chaim Grade, at best her kids will be unskilled workers, at worst future convicts and teenage mothers on welfare.

Common, a 2 bedroom for a single guy? I lived in a studio when I was single, so did my friends. This is also very area specific, in some areas given the cost of living, $15 an hour is a fantastic wage, in others barely enough to make ends meet. As to your question, a decade or so ago, the Economist magazine quoted a study that claimed that a single mother with 2 kids would need an income of more than $100K per year, before your after-tax income would exceed government benefits that she would get if she would choose to stay on welfare. My guess is that very generous government benefits particularly over the 2020-2021 turned a lot of people off work. Not having to worry about paying rent - no evictions did not help either.

I own and would buy today: FB (Facebook), Safran (SAF FP), Charter (CHTR - via LEAPs), New England Realty (NEN), CP (Canadian Pacific Railroad), FND (Floor and Decor), Heineken Holdings (HEIO NA), MSFT (Microsoft - a bit conflicted on this one - cost basis 117 in April of 2019 but LEAPs are attractive), Alphabet (GOOG), Davide Campari (CPR IM), Swedish Match (SWMA SS), British American Tobacco (BTI), Aena (AENA SM), L'Oreal (bought in spring of 2017, still think that it is very attractive), RELX (RELX PLC), Cranswick (CWK LN), Robertet (RBT FP). I own but would probably not buy today: ODFL, CRL, ALC, MNPP, Christian Dior (CDI FP), Rentokil (RTO LN) - I am miffed at the largely stock deal, Hingham Savings (HIFS), Dominos (DPZ), MSCI (MSCI Inc).

Assalam aleikum! When you are in NYC, let me know, I would love to grab a drink. I am older than you are - born in the late 70s, but still remember trips with my grandfather to the Alai bazari. I grew up in Tashkent, lived near the tractor factor - old Tashmi. You?

Thank you very much, will do.

I do not believe that you can finance commercial real estate at a 3.5% 30 year mortgage rate, even multifamily. Yes, for oneself one can get a mortgage for a house at 3.5%, but not for a $100MM building as far as I know. You also have liquidity issues and jurisdictional risks with bricks that are much bigger than with shares. To each his own.

Why? If real estate deserves to rate a 4% cap rate which is 25x multiple, why not companies with growth = inflation?

I was lucky since: a) I was born in the 1970s rather than when Stalin was running the country; b) I was an only child of very hard working and accomplished parents - my mother ran an IT department for a global exporter and had 40 people reporting to her, and yet she had to work another job as well to make ends meet; my father worked two jobs. I was pretty sheltered, although when one reads Balzac and Shakespeare and Dickens at the age of 10 and sees how the poor in their stories lived and then compare it to your life in the USSR, well, the comparison was not in favor of the USSR. The shops were empty - literally (no cheese, no meat, no fish, no sausages, no clothing, no books, no toilet paper). You could not really say anything anti-government, and these days the atmosphere on American campuses and large corporations with political correctness is similar. You do not get arrested in the US for saying certain things, yet, but... Crime was pretty bad - to survive most people broke laws, and it is a slippery slope from stealing from the government to stealing from other people, to robbery, murder. Corruption was insane and everywhere. No respect for human life, we were all cannon fodder for the glories of communism. Afghan war was good example. My grandfather was jailed for being a Latin spy - whatever that means in the early 1930s. He was lucky, he was released after seven months in jail and immediately left for the other side of the USSR. Adults felt it much more than I did, I was twelve when I left the workers's paradise. Had I been born 50 years earlier, would have been orders of magnitude worse. Stalin's purges and orchestrated starvation in Ukraine killed tens of millions.

Ball faced lies. Marx's utopia was not achieved not because there was not a global revolution. Marxism failed because it violates human nature and logic. What is the point of work if there is no reward? How do you allocate scarce resources? They whitewash/ignore the evils of communism and its consequences even where mass murder was not committed. They conveniently forget that every communist country had massive repression and most had mass executions that would make Nazis pale in comparison. Communists killed more people than Nazis did. The reason that communism is required on a global scale is because people flee communist countries at the earliest opportunity. So if the entire world is communist, there is nowhere to flee. The basic tenet of Marxism is to each according to his needs and from each according to his abilities. Think about how that would work in practice? Everyone or a lot of people want caviar, lobster, furs, jewelry and living next to Central Park in a five bedroom apartment overlooking the park so how do you allocate the scarce resources? If people live the same regardless of how hard and well they work, what is the incentive to work? They do not explain the consequences of no reward for differential labor, and consequences for abolition of private property. In the USSR, there was an article in the penal code that would allow authorities to jail you for not working, or for being homeless, etc...

I spent my childhood in the former USSR, and read this book and also books by Varlam Shalamov. It is a great book in my opinion, and yes, communism is always terrifying, it's just the degree varies between Stalin and Brezhnev, but it is just different degrees of hell.

I own bti and swmay, agree with the quote

Growth on the top-line is accelerating, as the transition from print to digital is basically over, the hit to exhibitions business from Covid-19 is in the rear view mirror, and the main division - risk is growing. So from 4% on the top line, to 5-6% on the top line, 6-7% on operating income and low double digit EPS growth between leverage and buy-backs. Why did you sell?