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beerbaron

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Posts posted by beerbaron

    Debt spreads

    in General Discussion

    Posted

    Hi, does anybody have a good site to chart debt spreads of bond indexes?

     

    Thanks

    BeerBaron

     

    Which ones indices are you looking at? I have access to Barclays which has the info on all of their indices.

     

    I'm looking to see if it could be worth it for me to move from some equity to corporate or muni bonds. I will especially be looking for companies with high financial leverage that might wipe out the equity but survive after chapter 11. I was thinking spreads for:

    Muni VS Treasury

    High Yield VS Treasury

    Investment Grade VS Treasury

     

    BeerBaron

    Coronavirus

    in General Discussion

    Posted

    "The CDC predicts that at least 12,000 Americans will die from the flu in any given year. As many as 61,000 people died in the 2017-2018 flu season, and 45 million were infected."

     

    Why, exactly, are we all obsessing about covid19?

     

    China? maybe a bioweapons lab? maybe a wet animal market?  who cares.  this covid19 seems to me to be very much a nonevent, except for the panic.

     

    Why the panic?

     

    Partly because of this graph:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019%E2%80%9320_coronavirus_outbreak#/media/File:Illustration_of_SARS-COV-2_Case_Fatality_Rate_200228_01-1.png

     

    I'm 40 years old and I see my parent every day. If I catch this and my parent get it from me, there is 1 chance out of 6 one of them will die from it.

     

    For flu there would be 1 out 60 chances my parent would die from it. One order of magnitude bigger.

     

    BeerBaron

    Good primers on E-Commerce

    in General Discussion

    Posted

    HI I'm entertaining the idea of launching a startup that would sell products online and I'm looking for primers on the overall e-commerce business. More specifically I plan on selling products exclusively on .com (more specifically Amazon to begin with). I'm pretty well versed in the brick and mortar merchandising, advertising, portfolio/product management and product development. What I'm lacking is the .com knowhow, more specifically:

     

    - Advertising (channels, measuring, tweaking, effective methods, etc...)

    - Product launch

    - Acquiring consumer feedback, boosting reviews in a cost sensitive fashion (not Amazon vine program)

     

    There are a lot of info online but I'd rather not listen on get rich in 10 weeks schemes, I'm looking to build a real sustainable business, not sell crap on e-bay. Does anybody have any books, podcast or lectures to recommend?

     

    Thanks

    BeerBaron

    Question about auto-dividend reinvestment

    in General Discussion

    Posted

    Auto dividend reinvestment is a bad deal for you because the shares being purchased for you are usually being issued at the same time...it's a good deal for other shareholders tough.

     

    It's a better option to purchase shares from the open market because no shares get issued.

     

    Beerbaron

     

    I don’t understand your comment. How does issuance impact the pricing?

     

    Attached is a little scenario comparison to explain. Hope it clarifies the logic.

     

    BeerBaron

    DRIP_Scenarios.xlsx

    Real trade war impact?

    in General Discussion

    Posted

    You hit it right on the nail. Companies are not even remotely thinking about bringing back production to US.

     

    If you want firsthand experience, i m currently travelling to Asia, back from Vietnam guess what i was doing there... My company is goin full gas on getting out of china, like hundreds of SKU moving, halt on all new projects in China, etc...

     

    It was going to happen, just made it a top priority. Now how ho we profit from it is the question.

     

    Beerbaron

    Opportunities in developping countries related to US tarifs on China exports

    in General Discussion

    Posted

    For the last few weeks we have been spending quite a bit of time at my day job discussing new US tarifs on China and what it means for our supply chain that is all established in China. And one thing that stands out is that everybody was putting their hands in the sand thinking that Trump's tarifs were bluff but now I believe people are realizing that it's real and it might last for a long time. Believe me, the tarifs will have a real impact on China, but nobody is seriously considering returning to the US.

     

    Hence, I have been trying to find a way to profit from this by finding which countries will benefit the move of manufacturing jobs. If you think about it we might have a huge manufacturing center of 1B+ inhabitant lose jobs by the millions which should a huge bonanza for the other nations that will get this job's migration.

     

    Vietnam comes first to mind, but it's a communist country so does anybody have an idea of an indirect play on this one?

    Laos is also communist.

     

    Cambodgia, Thailand, Indonesia or Philippines might also be appropriate. A good way would be to buy banks in those countries. Anybody has good ideas around that theme?

     

    Thanks

    BeerBaron

    Need Your Support!

    in General Discussion

    Posted

    One of my best friend that I have known since I'm 4 years old has been plague with the same disease. When I was 7 years old they were telling us that my firend's life expectancy was 16 years old... today he's 38! Remarkeable the progresses that have been made there, thanks to your fondation and others!

     

    BeerBaron

    Canadian Foreign Assets above 100K declaration

    in General Discussion

    Posted

    Hi, I just got a letter from the Canadian Revenu Agency asking me for 950$ + interest because I declared my T1135 two months late. This is the first year that my forign assets went over 100K and got a newborn on April 2nd, hence had other business to atend to besides doing my taxes (usually the governement owes me money so I never pay interest).

     

    It seems like a VERY severe penalty for failure to file on time, especially considering it was my first time filing. Anybody else had this issue and were you able to settle with the CRA for a lesser amount?

     

    Thanks

    BeerBaron

    Cryptocurrencies

    in General Discussion

    Posted

    "Yes gold isn't going anywhere, but if the US government gets tyrannical to the point where it shuts down the internet I suspect I'll have larger problems than my Bitcoin holdings."

     

    This gets to my point: there is no hunt right now for a store of value.

     

    The hunt right now is related to greed, the fear to miss out on something or after almost 8 years into a major bull market.

     

    Imagine this whole conversation in 2008-2009 during the major downturn. Even then the supposedly great store of value or gold was down quite a bit. Everything was thrown away. Raising cash was all that mattered.

     

    I am not saying that Rkbabang is not onto something and that crypto is worthless. However, I am quite skeptical about the store of value argument especially after the kind of frenzy that we have seen.

     

    Cardboard

     

    Similar to your thinking, one would assume that if people were looking for store of value one would assume that gain in cryto would translate into an equivalent drop in gold. When I look at charts of golds it seems quite flat, suggesting one is speculation while the other is business as usual.

     

    BeerBaron

     

     

    Money Mustache: Why Bitcoin is stupid

    in General Discussion

    Posted

    There's been a lot of recent discussion of bitcoin on CoBF and I didn't keep up.  So I'm doing the lazy thing and asking:  Has the computational complexity (in particular energy requirements) of bitcoin transactions been discussed here somewhere?

     

    I have asked the question many times with very few answers... scability does not seem to be a concern for Bitcoin bulls. Maybe that is because trasaction volumes are of no concern because bitcoin if aimed as a store of value, not a transactional vehicle. Not sure but there is no free lunch, if a transaction today costs 20$ in energy someone has to pay for it and that that is the minimal cost not including capex. Similar to stock dilution, bitcoin dilution has a cost. People might not be seeing it because demand exceeds supply but it still is a cost.

     

    BeerBaron

    2017 results thread

    in General Discussion

    Posted

    About 13%, sligthly below my benchmark of 50% SP500 / 50% TSX. Due to Canadian FX gaining grounds on the USD, some years it's a tailwind some it's a headwind... makes no difference in the long run tough. Performance was achieved with about 20% cash. All in all, not a bad year considering the limited time I have to do research.

     

    BeerBaron

    Cryptocurrencies

    in General Discussion

    Posted

    So quick calculation:

    591 000 000 Gallons of oil at $2.50/Ga = 1.5 Billions in energy Cost per year

     

    Lowball estimate for bitcoin mining: 1 000 000 kWh @ $0.10/h * 24 *365 = $876 000 000

    Highball estimate for bitcoin mining 4 000 000 kWh @ $0.10/h * 24 *365 =  $3 504 000 000

     

    So here is the billion dollar questions:

    If today's power consumption for bitcoin mining is the same as a big chunck of the overall gold produced.

    What is going to be bitcoin mining power consumption next year or 10 years from now?

     

    It seems to me that it is just not a scalable solution, energy efficiency gains on the IC side cannot offset an exponential growth, at least not at this stage and not with silicon. If I were in the bitcoin business I would do everything in my power to address this issue... Is there solutions that would not compromise the security aspect or fragment the network? I don't know... but I'd like to hear about it because that is a pressing matter. Can the technological side support the demand?

     

    Saying that comparing BC to 1995 internet is not the same at all. In 1995 there were OC-192 communications lines available, a solid history of the silicon process increasing 50% per year, a solid understandind of where the theorical limits were to speed and size (can't go smaller than an atom). Hence, a lot of room to grow the technical side to support the demand.

     

    All in all, the internet had technological tailwinds while crypto currencies have technological headwinds. Maybe I'm wrong but I son't see how it would make sense to spend 100B in energy cost in 5 years for now to save on a fraction of that in transactions.

     

    IMO SD has a pragmatic view of the whole picture, I would listen to him for anybody thinking to invest.

     

    BeerBaron

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