investmd

My heart goes out to you Richard Cook. Stay strong.

yes - the TKP podscast on lesson's from Kaufman is a great episode. Takeaways include: Mirrored Reciprocation - whatever you put out, you get back - you have to go first - Go Positive First “all you have to do if you want everything in life from everybody else is first, pay attention, listen to them, show them respect, give them meaning, satisfaction and fulfillment. Convey to them that they matter to you and show you love them. But you have to go first.” "So much advantage in life comes from being willing to look like an idiot in the short term, willing to be uncomfortable. If you can get over the momentary fear of looking like an idiot, the uncomfortableness of that, then you can accomplish amazing things.” Most powerful force is Compound Interest - Dogged, incremental, constant progress Go Positive, Go First and Be Consistent

I don't get the hate or is it distrust of GS: he might have been seeded with $6M but didn't he grow the fund to over $300M AUM? How many of us have the ability to get others to put $300M in our ideas? Compared to so many other investors that charge fat fees, I noticed that GS focused on reducing his fees to have alignment of interests with LPs - started with 0/6/25 structure (0% mgmt fee, 6% hurdle rate compounded from all time high and 25% of profits over the hurdle rate), then introduced a lower fee class of 0/6/15 for those who committed to invest for 5 yrs+. Not many money managers lower their share of profits.

2025 returns of 28% after fees

BNTX MRNA NVO UBER GOOG

yes. Can confirm he closed his fund, Aquamarine, Dec 31. 2025. To date, official reason has been to spend more time with family. I know that in early 2025 he had a v. serious medical issue. Hope he is doing ok.

@Parsad: Book value today is approximately US$1,200/share - if we take a multiple of 1.25 and convert to C$ = approx C$2,100. With FFH trading today at C$2,400/share, I presume you are saying that FFH is at best trading at fair market value and does not necessarily provide a margin of safety for buyers at this level?

@Spekulatius: Some example to answer q of how AI could be reducing costs of drug development - both discovery and clinical trials: Here are 3 private companies with $1B+ valuations that have a thesis of saving costs by trading labor intensive work for compute and thus make R&D more capital efficient: Xaira - raised a $1B round in 2024 to reimagine drug discovery R&D Isomorphic Labs - use protein folding knowledge for drug discovery Formation Bio - recently raised $370M to make clinical trials more efficient using automation - next generation of CROs Again my thesis is that multiple companies are using AI to improve time and capital efficiency of drug discovery - all of which benefits Big Pharma. Thus, by decreasing costs earnings at Big Pharma can increase even if revenue stays stable. Recall that most use the figure of $2B as cost of bringing a new drug to market. Use compute to make that process more efficient and reasonable to expect profits to increase. Based on the thesis of AI lowering cost of drug discovery, I'm buying a basket of Big Pharma stocks rather than picking one. Relatively safe bets as PEs are approx 15 and they pay out a dividend of 3-6%, but upside exits due to use of AI to decrease costs.

+1 There seem to be many ways for AI to reduce costs for Big Pharma. Let's see if it eventually bears out in earnings reports Let's move this discussion of AI being a catalyst for Big Pharma to the Investment Ideas section. I'd take a basket approach for the strategy with 4-5 pharma stocks, but will start discussion in a thread for Merck, MRK.

I think we are in agreement that there are several reasons why cost and time to market for new drugs may come down, thus, increasing earnings for Pharma. Seems like a good time to get into Merck, Pfizer, Sanofi, Novartis...

AI can and I believe is reducing cost of clinical trials by patient screening tools to help pick appropriate patients, synthetic control arms, digital twins, optimizing efficiency of CROs (contract research organizations)... and yes - going to China is a way for Pharma to further decrease cost of clinical trials.

@gfp - I agree that Insilico and Isomorphic Labs are doing cool things and likely building good businesses. The 3 things that companies like Insilico and Isomorphic Labs do is: Improve speed to market Decrease cost of drug development Improve success rate of drug development As you point out these companies are partnered with Big Pharma. My point is the above 3 value propositions improve margins at Big Pharma. In terms of a basket approach, the following 4 are top 10 Big Pharma by market cap with P/E of <20 & dividend yield of 3-7%: Merck - PE of 13 with yield of 3.5% Pfizer - PE of 14 with yield of 6.9% Sanofi - PE of 17 with yield of 4.5% Novartis - PE of 17 with yield of 3.1% Thesis is AI makes input costs go down for Big Pharma, but drug prices stay the same or go up. Over a 10 yr time frame for basket approach: downside is 1.5-2x ? upside is 4x+ ? Thoughts from group? : on upside or downside guesstimates? agreement/disagreement re favourable risk/reward ratio if guesstimates are accurate? Overall, many businesses will take advantage of AI. I'm thinking Big Pharma is one where AI is economically feasible.

Thesis: AI can be a catalyst for Large Pharma. AI for drug discovery has long been an obvious application for AI in healthcare. However, instead of early stage biotech being the big winners, it might be the boring old steady Big Pharma like MRK and SNY that are currently trading at P/E ratios of <15 and have steady 4-5% dividend yields. AI has the potential to drastically decrease cost of both drug discovery & development (clinical trial cost) thus driving down spend at Big Pharma. Then these massive, stable conglomerates can see a significant multiples expansion. Seems to be upside with downside protection?

Well said. Thanks.

BRK, FFH & MKL are examples of successful insurance businesses where float can be invested well. Others have tried without as much success. In modern era, Chou bought the insurance vehicle, Stonetrust, from Pabrai after MP admitted trying the insurance business & investing the float was a failure - too many regulations to allow him to do what he needed. Thus, I’m curious as to thoughts on why deep value investor Chou could do well at Stonetrust whereas deep value investor MP couldn’t?

This is what Perplexity says: Has anyone used Solid Point or Recall? I am not familiar with either. Simply download?

I'm wondering how can we get an LLM to summarize a COBF thread on a particular stock? ie: there could be a thread that was initiated a decade ago on COBF and has 30+ pages and we might want to get a summary of comments in first few years vs. later years. I don't think I can put in link into ChatGPT or Perplexity - because a) it will likely only summarize the one page and b) I think we have to be members of COBF to access the thread? @Parsad: I'm sure you've been thinking about this? Is there an extension that can be added to COBF to permit?

+ 1 Does anyone know the fee structure at Marval Guru Fund? Online it is listed as 0% likely meaning it's not disclosed. At $400M in AUM, are they charging 1-2%? or ?

@This2ShallPass: Smart analysis with meaningful outcome. Well done. I see multibagger 10x+ venture like opportunities in public markets in healthcare stocks like : BNTX, MRNA, CRISP Circle of Competence: all have solid science with huge human impact. Moat: is provided by a)IP and b)large amount of R&D spend makes it challenging for any small competitor to do anything meaningful Good Management: While I have limited info on mgmt, my impression is that management is solid for all 3 Companies are trading at essentially net-nets given cash on the balance sheet.

@This2ShallPass: looked briefly at HIMS early this year. As I recall HIMS is a D2C business selling medications for hair loss, GLP drugs for weight loss, erectile dysfunction, birth control and some group therapy for mental health. As an investor: was concerned about a)lack of moat b)changes coming to rules around compounding of GLPs and c) how many individuals would want to pay out of pocket for doctor's visit when they may have insurance that pays for their own regular doc As a doctor: didn't find HIMS to be an interesting, impactful business affecting quantity or quality of life significantly. Had some concerns around folks bypassing the medical system to get GLP drugs. The good news for investors is that the stock is up >80% YTD. I don't have confidence that this a durable long term business. Your thoughts @This2ShallPass?

TDOC Great distribution strategy beats great product. TDOC has great distribution with 90M+ users annually plus hospital systems and is global. Have the data to apply tech. Using tech to help improve both healthcare efficiency and outcomes is low hanging fruit since it's already worked in other verticals, ie : finance, retail, entertainment etc...

Healthcare stocks that I'm dipping into. None have positive EBITDA and not "high quality" - all (except TDOC) have interesting novel technology that is based on transformational science with potential to be category defining companies in the future whose stock has been beaten down: Therapeutics using mRNA tech and gene editing tech: BNTX, MRNA & CRSP - all trading at close to save level as cash on hand Diagnostics: Grail, Natera & Exact Sciences are interesting Services: TDOC - only global telehealth service, >90M annual visitors, integrated within health systems as opposed to just being outside of health system - probably no rush to buy.

Healthcare stocks that I'm dipping into. None have positive EBITDA and not "high quality" - all (except TDOC) have interesting novel technology that is based on transformational science with potential to be category defining companies in the future whose stock has been beaten down: Therapeutics using mRNA tech and gene editing tech: BNTX, MRNA & CRSP - all trading at close to save level as cash on hand Diagnostics: Grail, Natera & Exact Sciences are interesting Services: TDOC - only global telehealth service, >90M annual visitors, integrated within health systems as opposed to just being outside of health system - probably no rush to buy.

@sleepydragonIPOs are cyclical - in and out of vogue - ok. These companies are already public so don't need to "ipo" - some have cash to potentially acquire other biotechs that are having hard time going public. Although I don't see the need for acquisition for these companies to grow in value, I don't see why the IPO market prevents Eli Lilly from acquiring one of the names listed...

Following on theme of "blood on the streets" the following biotech companies are all down approximately 50% ytd : from smallest market cap to largest: Crisper (CRSP), Vaxcyte (PCVX), Moderna (MRNA), BionTech (BNTX) -"only" down 30% ytd, Novo Nordisk (NVO) Are they all down simply because of Trump related politics on vaccine hesitancy rather than structural issues with the companies? Crisper, Moderna, BionTech have almost same amount of cash on balance sheet as market cap. What am I missing?