Sweet

Not sure. Amazon probably - over 50% of their revenue comes from the USA. The run way remains large but execution could be challenging. A home building, maybe NVR, people are going to need houses. Biotech, I’d play it safe with an ETF. A bank or two, not JPM, although everyone knows it’s the best right now I’d probably go for the recently beaten up Bank of America. I’d also bet on an emerging market, probably India, again through some ETF.

Agree the two companies would benefit from their own thread. The use of debt is a bit disconcerting. Avis did survive the pandemic when travel ground to a halt. No mean feat.

I don't think these are terrible companies. In the case of Hertz they went bankrupt from quite an extraordinary event. And they are buying back shares quite aggressively too. Oh and welcome focused1

Which is a clearly a good thing but you wouldn't know if from the Bloomberg article.

Yes, that’s was surprising to me too, particularly given the free cash flow situation. Management have said they will continue because they believe share price does not reflect the value of the business. I’m interested too, but the trouble is I don’t understand the accounting even though think the business model is fairly straight forward. The buy cars from suppliers, probably at a discount, they keep the cars for two years in nearly every case and they sell it on. Their calculation is per car as far as I understand, depreciation is on average $300 a month per car then they have debt financing which is calculated at $167 per car. Utilisation of rental cars is 67-71% depending on the location. Don’t seem to be overstaffed, was wondering where all the staff where when I recently rented. Should be a decent low margin business in there.

Totally agree on rental vs Uber. There is some overlap but they are different markets too. I was surprised to find that Avis have reduced their share count by 50% since Jan 2019. They have been very aggressive at buying back stock. The website of Avis is investor friendly easy to find recent filings and calls and press releases. Not really looked at Hertz yet, wasn’t aware there were warrants.

Strange that Oxford Nanopore was also lower on news so far as I can tell but Illumina was largely unchanged or higher even.

Uber and Lyft definitely denting the area to some degree, but speaking from my own experience, I much prefer to rent a car and go where I want when I want. I don’t find waiting for an Uber convenient and if I am using the car multiple times a day not worth the cost either. One thing though, it is a headache sorted the insurance etc, if you aren’t prepared they’ll take a good chuck of money from you. I recently rented from Avis, small SUV for over two weeks. All in I paid about $600 which I didn’t think was too bad. Will check out uhaul - cheers.

Has anyone looked at the rental car industry lately. Avis and Hertz both trade at a PE of 4. GAAP income has been decent these past two years but before that it’s been very patchy so I understand why the market has valued it so low. Free cash flow is abysmal, both companies are seeing large outflows of cash, and both have a large amount of debt. Not quite sure how they operate their business but anecdotally I rarely see old cars at these companies so they must have a very large capital outlay to buy these new, or a large amount of leases. I’d just pass on this normally but I remember Buffett offered to buy Enterprise. Granted it’s probably the best run rental company but the economics of the industry can’t be that bad if Buffett wanted a slice back then. Will dig a bit deeper because I want to understand what I’m looking at. I’d use these companies quite regularly too. My gut says there isn’t an opportunity here… but I could be wrong.

Unlikely. My opinion on its uses and its value hasn’t changed. If I had to play book to understand it’s price then I would speculate on it maybe. I don’t consider it an investment though.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1946_Indian_provincial_elections

It’s hard to tell from the colour tones but what is the blue 46% position? Is that BAC?

Mine too

Yes the British shouldn’t have been there but that’s a hypothetical point too. The Muslim League leader Jinnah demanded partition and his party won 87% of the Muslim seats. Congress and the Muslim league voluntarily agreed on partition and set up a Partition Council to administer. This was what the Muslims and Hindus decided. The boundary commission created the line. The root cause of this partition was a divided people. Since then there have been no serious efforts at unification and one must ask why. So why is it not ok to suggest that it’s too simplistic to say partition was imposed by the British? Sure, but in your previous comments you suggested partition caused many deaths, there your hypothetical base case appears to be peace and little / no deaths. But it could also have been much worse, outright war and much more dead. This isn’t just a Westerner view, Indian commentators have made the same point, that without partition it could have been worse: https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/swaminathan-s-a-aiyar/independence-day-why-partition-was-a-good-thing-for-india/articleshow/15497403.cms?from=mdr

I wonder if these guys ever look at the amount of money lost by investors sitting on the sidelines waiting for a low to buy at. https://www.marketwatch.com/story/uh-oh-everyone-is-back-to-buying-stocks-again-4eba446e?cx_testId=22&cx_testVariant=cx_1&cx_artPos=4&mod=home-page-cx#cxrecs_s If you can buy low and sell high great, it’s definitely my preferred way to invest. But some of the great companies which produce the best returns don't often trade at low multiples. They might be 3-4 times higher before you see meaningful correction whilst all you’re holding is your dick. I don’t think I’ve ever seen an article on MarketWatch on CNBC which calculates the opportunity cost of not buying.

When minorities and majorities cannot bridge their differences it normally gives rises to independent countries. A map of the world tells that story. I don’t think it’s obvious at all that the Northern Muslims would have just accepted living in a Hindu dominated India. In fact I think there is plenty of evidence they wouldn’t have. And it doesn’t seem like there is any movement to unite Pakistan and India at any point since partition. So may a suggest to you that partition was always likely, with or without the British drawing the line.

Then not why not say that to begin with? Why lead with the platitude that it was the British that was responsible? History is complicated. With regard to partition in India, would the Muslims in the North East accept being dominated politically by the Hindus? What should the British have done when the two communities didn’t agree to co-exist in the same state?

There was no conflict in these areas before the British came? I think we are viewing history with rose tinted glasses.

That’s disingenuous and side steps the point. In both Ireland and India the British didn’t want to partition the country. In Ireland there likely would have been civil war, partition was a way to avoid it. In India the Hindu and Muslim leaders didn’t want to united India. Israel is a different story, it was the UN’s partition plan.

The same was said of Ireland, but in India like Ireland it was the people and political leaders that partitioned the country, the British just drew the line.

Biden is not so bad. Regarding the Conservatives, I’m from the UK, we haven’t had a proper Conservative Party in many years. Today even the Tories are called ‘fascists’ regularly on social media or ‘far-right’ - this is a party which in my view is only slight right of Labour. I can point to maybe three areas of policy they are different.

Milton Friedman blamed the socialist policies of the Indian government after the British left and he said that the newly independent India followed the thinking of Harold Laski who was a Marxist. I’m not Indian and don’t know the history of the place too well but it’s interesting to hear you make a similar point.

Bonded Labour sounds like indentured servitude, the practice was widespread in Europe too, most famously to pay for the trip from Europe to North America. Not a nice viewed from today.

India wasn’t colonised in the same way as North America, there were no settlers establishing a Jamestown, it’s not on par with what happened in Australia and North America. What do you mean by enslavement here?