Sweet

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?

Absolutely. Although one difference, according to many on the left and many media outlets, anyone to right of someone like Bill Maher is far-right. Margaret Thatcher would be considered a fully fledged fascist these days.

Are you talking about the Queen Parsad? The Royal Family haven’t had any political power for a very long time - UK, Canada (not sure about Fiji) - Parliament makes the laws. Not sure what you mean about them dictating the fate of your family. It’s been parliaments for a great many years that calls the shots, well before 1982 in Canada, 1867 I understand.

Musk and Ackman still are liberals it’s just there is a section of the liberal left that went far-left and went crazy.

Execution is less important than what DEI means to people. Execution is downstream of whatever your DEI belief happens to be. If you believe DEI means fairness, equal opportunities and celebrating a diverse workforce the it’s hard to execute that and mess it up. If on the other hand you believe DEI means deciding there aren’t enough x,y,z identities, ethnicities and racial groups, and that needs to be corrected by ‘positive discrimination’ then there is no way to execute that fairly. And the problem is that many of these institutions believe in the later but package it in ways that give it a positive spin. On Rhodes, the student body tried to get his statue pulled down.

Same. Familiarity with the business is undervalued - food chains you visit, shops you shop at, companies you use - makes it easier to hold when you have a good grasp of what the company does.

Not getting at you Spek, but I swear every year they find some new data-mined metric that predicts the markets are going to perform poorly.

The testimonies of the University Chairs at Congress in December about anti-semnitism put Ackman on the war path. He wrote the below about DEI: https://www.thefp.com/p/bill-ackman-how-to-fix-harvard?publication_id=260347&post_id=140327600&isFreemail=true&r=hur45

I have a problem trusting these small caps. I was playing around in Finviz and there def cheapish companies. A quick screens can be comparing current PE with forward PE - both should be low - this weeds out a lot of companies with one off earnings or some other shenanigans. But I just don’t know enough about them to buy, I like to see and know a bit more about a company than just seeing a filing or some metrics. Anything I’ve just bought in the past based on metrics and financials alone turned out to be a crap investment. ie. JXN, DAC,FCNCA (not a microcap though)