ERICOPOLY

This one is from the same time period: BlackBerry announced Monday that it has agreed to be acquired by Toronto-based Fairfax Financial Holdings Limited for $4.7 billion.Sep 23, 2013

Today, I have been reading Fairfax's 2014 Annual Letter to Shareholders, but this is not really a Fairfax specific post so I'm putting it under 'General'. The valuation of three companies, Tesla, Amazon, and WhatsApp were used as examples of extreme market excess and they were shorting the market as a hedge because they couldn't believe the 'excess' out there: Here is the quotation from Fairfax's 2014 letter to shareholders: Last year, I quoted a major U.S. bank CEO who famously said, ‘‘As long as the music is playing, you have to get up and dance.’’ You can see how difficult it is not to dance! And what a party it was in 2013! The S&P went up 30% while the Russell 2000 was up 37%. As discussed earlier, the high tech stocks were soaring – particularly those with no earnings and very little revenue. Tesla Motors, for example, sold 22,477 cars in 2013 but commands a market cap of $31 billion, while Fiat, which we like, sold 4.4 million cars but has a market cap of only $14 billion. Amazon has a market cap of $167 billion but has not earned more than $1.2 billion in any one year since it went public in 1999. Facebook has recently made a $19 billion offer for WhatsApp – a company with approximately 50 employees and $20 million in revenue. This is the poster child for the excesses that prevail in the tech world! Tesla: because. it only sold 22,477 cars at the time, it couldn't be worth X... they delivered 367,000 cars in 2019. Amazon: it's stock now trades 6x higher just 6 years later WhatsApp: Facebook had no footprint with very young users, and this was a strategic acquisition (of unique value to the buyer). The price tag 6 years later is now $19 per user, not the $54 it paid per user at the time. Anyways, it's hard to know the future, isn't it.

The WH was warned last year that the country isn't ready for a pandemic. Hopefully after this, people realize the importance of having the right leadership in place.

If he is right that 50 people have it for every 1 we know about, then 22 people have died out of 180,000 infected in NYC. You have to take into account time it takes for the virus to run its course, though. Daily exponential growth means the vast majority of infections are early stage and haven’t had time to create complications. Do we also upwardly adjust the 180,000 number to add back the number of people who were once infected but no longer are? Really we need to look at this data at a cohort level, which as far as I know does not exist publicly. Without it we need to look at places like China where it's mostly run its course - otherwise we'll be comparing apples and oranges. The Chinese data tells us that 3.4% of the cases they identified died. But it doesn't tell us the % of infected that were identified. The Diamond Princess is the best population that I've heard of yet. 1% of infected died -- relatively old people go on cruises. So if we were to take the number of people who died in NYC yesterday, and if we can estimate when they contracted it, then perhaps we could estimate the number of infected people in NYC at that time. If we then estimate the rate of spread, we can take a stab at how many are infected in NYC today. I haven't looked into Diamond Princess in depth so I just tried to find some info. While I agree that it may be the best possible data set so far, it also seems potentially incomplete: https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/02/coronavirus-infections-keep-mounting-after-cruise-ship-fiasco-japan Given the number of people who were infected but did not test so at the time of disembarkment, I'm just not sure how reliable the data is (again, may be the best we have). Either way, still a high level of imprecision it seems. What's notably missing in this "analysis" is that the Diamond Princess passengers had the benefit of ample hospital, ICU, and ventilator capacity to treat themselves in Japan and elsewhere. There are patients in many places who will not get the same level of care due to healthcare overload. Furthermore, there may be more deaths to come. Of note, a passenger on the Diamond Princess just died TODAY: https://mainichi.jp/english/articles/20200321/p2g/00m/0na/050000c That's now 8 deaths. I can't find the data, but surely somebody knows how many of the ~700 infected were put on ventilators.

If he is right that 50 people have it for every 1 we know about, then 22 people have died out of 180,000 infected in NYC. You have to take into account time it takes for the virus to run its course, though. Daily exponential growth means the vast majority of infections are early stage and haven’t had time to create complications. Do we also upwardly adjust the 180,000 number to add back the number of people who were once infected but no longer are? Really we need to look at this data at a cohort level, which as far as I know does not exist publicly. Without it we need to look at places like China where it's mostly run its course - otherwise we'll be comparing apples and oranges. The Chinese data tells us that 3.4% of the cases they identified died. But it doesn't tell us the % of infected that were identified. The Diamond Princess is the best population that I've heard of yet. 1% of infected died -- relatively old people go on cruises. So if we were to take the number of people who died in NYC yesterday, and if we can estimate when they contracted it, then perhaps we could estimate the number of infected people in NYC at that time. If we then estimate the rate of spread, we can take a stab at how many are infected in NYC today.

Some will.

If he is right that 50 people have it for every 1 we know about, then 22 people have died out of 180,000 infected in NYC. You have to take into account time it takes for the virus to run its course, though. Daily exponential growth means the vast majority of infections are early stage and haven’t had time to create complications. Do we also upwardly adjust the 180,000 number to add back the number of people who were once infected but no longer are?

If he is right that 50 people have it for every 1 we know about, then 22 people have died out of 180,000 infected in NYC.

I don't see how hiding the jobless claims is going to bring confidence to investors who are trying to price risk into stocks. I don't think Trump realizes he's making it worse -- what govt statistics can be trusted?

That’s not the health insurers problem though. Health insurance is a good business and short tail too. Rates gets negotiated every year and costs just passed through. There is some risk of a catastrophic surge in claims I guess, but I think if such a thing happens, they get bailed out too. Well, the US Navy hospital ship won't bill them.

This is such a useless stat. What percentage of the population has no pre-existing conditions? 40% of Americans ages 20-39 are obese according to a quick Google search. In the US, 33% of adults have high blood pressure. Yep. Diabetes and obesity are also co-factors for complications. That's a lot of people in the US. The Chinese CDC put the overall mortality rate at 3.4% I believe, but they said the mortality rate was 10% for those with heart disease and 6% for those with diabetes. I imagine though if you are 80 with diabetes your risk is far different than if you're 30 with diabetes as the disease has been beating up your body for longer. Or if you're older your heart disease is more advanced on average.

Hospitals are canceling elective surgeries to make room for the onslaught. That's going to hurt them big time because those are their big cash cows. And in their place, they will see a rise of uninsured and the insured people they see won't be as lucrative as the surgeries lost. I believe, anyway.

If it truly gets out of control, there will be no hospital bills for many. Unless hospitals turn away uninsured, the amount of uninsured that they treat will rise. Using my imagination, the amount of insured patients at hospitals could actually fall if enough lost their insurance.

1% of infected died. I believe only around 0.25% of the passengers died as only 1 in 4 was infected. I meant that. It was 7 out of about 700.

The Diamond Princess remains the population where everyone was tested. We can confirm that it was disproportionately elderly, and 1% died.

This source claims that 52% of Italy's populace either still smokes (33%) or stopped smoking (19%). https://www.statista.com/statistics/866789/number-of-adult-smokers-in-italy/ I saw a headline claiming that men in Italy are dying at twice the rate of women from Covid-19. What I cannot find is whether they smoke at twice the rate too. I can't find a breakdown of male-vs-female smokers in Italy.

https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/ITA/italy/smoking-rate-statistics

I'd love to put Trump in front of Chris Wallace: Wallace: "Why did you tell Americans to go to work sick, and then the following week tell them that you always knew it was a pandemic?"

Two possibilities I see off the bat: 1. I give him 10 pinocchio's for his cover-his-own-ass statement about knowing it all along 2. He kept the secret to himself and encouraged Americans to go to work sick so that it would rapidly sweep through the country and we'd be out the other side of it before November.

Exactly. Fewer cases entered the country, but that mattered not at all with Trump "so what" attitude about the cases already in the country that were doubling every four days. He closed the front door of the barn after a few horses left the stable, and he let those horses compound and multiply into a US herd of horses. And Chinese were still traveling to other countries, and people from those countries were still traveling to the US, and as such he effectively left the side doors and the rear door of the barn wide open.

Here is some China-style leadership from Trump: Trump Administration Asks States to Keep Quiet About Jobless Figures https://www.wsj.com/articles/trump-administration-ask-states-to-keep-quiet-about-jobless-figures-11584676698?mod=hp_lead_pos3&mod=article_inline

Two weeks ago, Trump was still saying that it's okay to go to work sick. Locked down, LMAO. California's governor has ordered a lockdown, and the first to do so.

No. This is absurd. Absence of evidence =/= evidence of absence. Where would we be at if dozens or hundreds of more cases were seeded elsewhere? This complacency AIDS the spread of the virus. China-style lockdown stopped it in its tracks. It has so NOT been stopped in its tracks. The President required an intervention to bang it into his numbskull brain that this isn't a conspiracy of left wing media to undermine his presidency.

Not sure I understand this. A month ago, no one was dead in Italy. Now 3000+ plus are dead with an additional 400-500 coming in daily despite the fact the entire country has been shut down for 9 days. Similar numbers in the US would be 15,000 dead in 2 weeks time with a full shutdown - but we haven't done that yet. LA just announced it. Nowhere else has and we have over 100k confirmed cases w/o testing. This is already on course to be way worse than the 30k annually from the flu even w/ the shutdown which hasn't been implemented yet. I'm not trying to fear monger - just extrapolating the data that's available real simple. if you build a model and it tells you to do something stupid but you do it anyhow because you trust the model and have no common sense, then you do something stupid. Please share your model with us. cherzeca is correct: "A contentious exchange during the March 11 House Homeland Security Committee hearing on the coronavirus response revealed this reality. During the hearing, acting Deputy Secretary of Homeland Security Ken Cuccinelli explained he had advised the president to ban travel from China even though “the academic model suggested not to do that.” Cuccinelli further stressed that “the president was well aware” that the existing models recommended against a China travel ban but that Trump nonetheless instituted the ban." https://thefederalist.com/2020/03/19/neither-biden-nor-sanders-would-have-saved-american-lives-with-travel-bans-like-trump-did/ I don't think the travel ban saved any lives. Look at where we're at.

Not sure I understand this. A month ago, no one was dead in Italy. Now 3000+ plus are dead with an additional 400-500 coming in daily despite the fact the entire country has been shut down for 9 days. Similar numbers in the US would be 15,000 dead in 2 weeks time with a full shutdown - but we haven't done that yet. LA just announced it. Nowhere else has and we have over 100k confirmed cases w/o testing. This is already on course to be way worse than the 30k annually from the flu even w/ the shutdown which hasn't been implemented yet. I'm not trying to fear monger - just extrapolating the data that's available Not only did LA just announce it. All of California did! 40 million people.