Dinar

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?

RELX PLC - RELX is the ticker

I would buy a basket of the following European companies (assuming your relative can avoid touching it for 10 years): Robertet (RBT FP), L'Oreal (OR FP), Davide Campari (CPR IM), Aena (AENA SM), Heineken Holdings (HEIO NA), I would also make a half allocation to Dior (owns LVMH). If you relative is willing to look at British pound, I would suggest RELX PLC & British American Tobacco as well as Cranswick PLC. I own all of the companies that I mentioned. I own a big position in Dior but I bought it in 2012 and I am nervous about Chinese economic situation and impact on consumption. If he is willing to own USD denominated assets, I own and like Charter (CHTR), NEN (but he should own it only on swap, otherwise tax headaches are insane for a non-US investor), Dominos Pizza, Facebook. In Swiss Franc, Lonza and Alcon are somewhat attractive. In Swedish krona, I own Swedish Match and I think that it is quite attractive. In Canada, I like both Canadian National and Canadian Pacific. In the US I also own MSFT, but I am hesitant to recommend it - bought around $117 in April of 2019.