TwoCitiesCapital

My car insurance doesn't cost $10k/yr, nor does it have a $7k deductible, and I've spent way more than $7k on maintenance/expenses/repairs over the last 14 years despite only owning a car for 1/2 of them. While the insurance doesn't pay for the maintenance and no-accident related repairs, the costs of such would be substantial in the event of an accident. My home insurance for a $500k condo doesn't cost $7k/yr, doesn't have a $7k deductible, and I just made a $12k claim last year (my only claim so far). Health insurance is an entirely other realm of how little you get for how much it costs and how infrequently it gets used. There's 1000 things wrong with the system, it's not just the insurance companies at fault, but to pretend this isn't an issue and is 'affordable' and doesn't put those in less than pristine health and finances under pressure is insane.

1) per capital GDP is NOT the calculation to use, but rather median household income, (or an adjusted median income figure to account for employer's share) because we know a disproportionate amount of GDP is skewed to the top 1% while health expenses are not. 2) I would HOPE I'm below average in cost. I'm below average in age, above average in health, AND insuring a significantly larger portion of my own cost-risk myself with the $7k deductible . Those should all meaningfully reduce my cost-share. The fact that it's still at 11% of your bogus $80k figure is the travesty (and a significantly higher % of median income). What other service are you happy to pay $10k a year when you don't use it and have to front another $7k when you DO want to use it? Oh, and we punish you for it if you don't buy it?

Yes. But you still have go the hospital when you take an EpiPen. You don't just go about life as normal. And they still give you hospital grade epinephrine when you get there. And then you get to replace the pen.

The travesty is the $9k/yr in insurance it costs to cover the sub-$7k over 14 years. I don't have many medical expenses because I'm healthy with no allergies/pre-existing conditions and have largely been able to avoid doctors visits. Somehow it still costs $9k/yr for me to have the privilege of fronting the first $7k of any of my own expenses. My first girlfriend was diagnosed with leukemia at the age of 20. That would've bankrupted her. My second girlfriend had tree nut allergies. Despite mentioning these allergens at food places, you still often get cross contamination from less-than-attentive staff. She went to the hospital twice in the 4 years we dated to prevent her airways from closing. A few thousands dollars a piece per visit. Maybe wouldn't have bankrupted her, but would've left her hard up and behind on credit card/rent/car payments had she not been living with me and me covering her expenses. Why are you pretending this is something it isn't?

It quite regularly is....and I live in the US +1 I pay something like $1,200/yr for my personal medical premiums. My employer pays the remaining $8-9k. It is a high deductible plan with a $7k deductible. I'm 35 and haven't spent $7k on total medical expenses over the last 14 years combined. And yet somehow it costs $8-9k/yr to insure me even after I've agreed to cover the first $7k. The US medical system is f*cking bogus...

We knew that after Hawk Tuah girl. I don't understand hte appeal of memecoins, or Trump, but as long as people are willing to be so easily parted from their money, I'll be able to buy Bitcoin for less than I should be able to....

Maybe he'll make a strategic reserve of Trump coin!!! This is hyper mega bullish! Bitcoin is so yesterday!

Knock on wood. Cage free brown eggs were $4ish/dozen here two days ago and are now $5.49 as of the evening.

Lol I've had this exact thought before To be fair though - Aug 2011 was pretty damn close a to what was a top that wouldn't be passed until 2-years later.

+1 The lack of real wage growth over the last 40 years had been problematic. As has all of the running in place to just make back the value the $ has lost. An anecdote that I think encompasses our environment - Amazon stopped using FedEx to deliver packages a few years back in my area. Instead, they started using local contractors who are lacking in the same professionalism that FedEx used as well as lacking in infrastructure/systems like getting access to multi-unit buildings. Packages are regularly marked as delivered, but don't show up for days... probably because the driver is waiting for a time to opportunistically tailgate in behind someone during the day. Or, some of the lazier drivers simply leave the packages outside on the sidewalk or mark them as undeliverable and return the order. Multiple complaints to Amazon's customer service for my packages resulted in me being defaulted back to FedEx for my deliveries. But not the rest of the building for some reason (~110+ units). So a few nights ago, I was called by a member of the building about a theft in the lobby (I sit on the board of my HOA). Evidently, the Amazon delivery driver left three crates of packages out in the lobby, unattended, and they were stolen by someone. The complaint was that the board needed to do something about building security and to give the delivery drivers somewhere secure to deliver to. For some reason, in 2025, our HOA board is expected to subsidize Amazon's loss and/or the cost of an effective delivery as a result of Amazon intentionally defaulting on quality. We don't have this issue with UPS, USPS, or FedEx. Amazon is owned by one of the richest men in the world. Amazon pioneered this business model. There is no reason that Amazon can't do right. But they don't want to do it right - they want do it it cheaply. The end result is consumers lose out by having expectations of an appropriate delivery that is regularly not met. No two day delivery and sometimes no delivery at all. The HOA board loses out as we're the ones expected to pick up the slack that Amazon left for some reason - but in a way that doesn't raise HOA fees. The employees lose because there are fewer high quality jobs with high quality standards and high quality pay and just a bunch of shit-tier work/pay positions who aren't held accountable to anything other than # of deliveries "made" in an hour. And Amazon makes more money by keeping an extra 0.1% of margin. For all of the b*thing I see about Europe being uninvestable because lawmakers stifling innovation - I think America could use a bit more of it. Lol The answer has got to be somewhere in the middle and not in letting people with hundreds of billions of dollars make a few billion by fucking over communities, workers, and consumers to clip the penny on margins.

All of this left-right talk on the Nazis seems to assume that the political spectrum is a straight line. I tend to view it as a circle. And radical socialism on the left is NOT far removed from radical fascism on the right.

Not sure why it would be? Whomever the counterparties are were already hedged if they wanted to be. With a roll, there is no discontinuation of exposure for the counterparties to need to sell and then rebuy, right?

First purchased in 2010. Sold in 2018/2019. Repurchased in size in 2021. Unfortunately, there's not a 3-4 year option on the poll so not sure what to answer for 'continuous' ownership

Sure - but you're t-bills you're paying 20-30% on the income generated. It's not any different.

I agree the tax is an impediment, but I disagree it stops it from being used at all. No different than if I were to buy stocks with excess savings and then decide I need to spend some of it. I'm currently considering selling some taxable investments, or margining them, to buy a new car. If I'm willing to sell stocks and pay taxes to buy a car, why wouldn't one also be willing to sell Bitcoin if its what they have available to them?

I think it will be widely acknowledged and accepted by Gen Z - I think everyone else will struggle with it. That being said, we don't need understanding to get wide adoption. A minority of 1% of people can explain the interconnection of our banking system and how things like wires and ACH work, why there are multiple days worth of delays, and etc. And yet nearly everyone has a bank account, swipes debit/credit cards, and uses apps like Venmo to pay friends. Bitcoin simply needs adoption on the backend of these institutional transfers and will magically take the market share of payment processors and all of the red tape in between. While we debate on and on about micro payments - Bitcoin's competitive advantage in large payments is basically insurmountable. I don't see why it can't be used for purchases of cars, houses, cross-border remittances, settlements between corporate accounts, central bank transactions, and a global reserve currency to get rid of exchange rates and all of the unproductive jobs/energy/cost/waste that goes into simply exchanging monies to the right monies.

I'd be more interested if there were impactful share repurchases occurring. Even if it was only for 3-5% of the shares. At such a large discount to their supposed NAV, share repurchases is almost a guaranteed 100% return which has got to be an easier lay-up than some of the businesses they're deploying capital into. And yet...they aren't.

I know I saw India's GDP growth is expected to slow some in 2025 - perhaps thats weighing on the market as a whole? The NIFTY index is down 10-12% since September? Also, while dangerous to apply generalizations to individual circumstances, my understanding is that MOST IPOs return to their IPO price, if not lower, within 3-years of the IPO once the hype and limited volume/access has faded. This is precisely why I have a rule to not buy IPOs in the first 2-years in place for my portfolios.

I've basically been concerned my entire adult life Not necessarily because of valuations - that didn't start until 2015/2016 when the US started to really get elevated to the rest of the world (and then later on an absolute basis). But more from a policy stand point. It's clear to me that too much debt IS the primary issue and we keep 'solving' it with more debt which is problematic. And I have been concerned about those policy responses since starting investing in 2007 by buying Ford stock. I think what I had failed to appreciate is that 1) debt crisis can take decades to work through and don't have to correct overnight and 2) it's different when you're the reserve currency. My caution probably would have been justified if I were European. Double dip recession in 2011. Brexit/Grexit fears thereafter. Started to recover and catch up to the US and then COVID reset the game. Then Russia's invasion of Ukraine blowing a hole in your energy security. But none of that matters to the US when you have the fortune of printing as much money as you like and there always being a bid for it as the rest of the globe is net short USD. Plus smaller impacts like one of tax changes, the explosion of fracking, etc also probably helped. Ultimately I don't think it's sustainable. I'm still concerned. But also recognize I have no ability to know where it ends. I've largely given up buying puts on the market, but still watch the market for the direction of the tide.

https://fortune.com/crypto/2025/01/09/federal-government-allowed-sell-bitcoin-silk-road-courts/ So the question is - do they sell as they always have? Or is this the start of the "Bitcoin reserve" we keep hearing people clamoring about. I think it gets sold. I have zero faith the US government, and especially DJT, care about balanced budgets and hard currencies. And even if they did, there is no feasible path for the US government to acquire anywhere near enough BTC to matter for trillion dollar deficits and tens of trillions of debt (and more unfunded liabilities).

I tend to agree that climate change is something that needs to be addressed - but I think it needs to be addressed by governments and industry by putting forth solutions and alternatives - not by starving existing industries of insurance coverage when no reasonable replacement exists

If you had said because of auto-401k contributions, I probably would have bought this. But you didn't so I remain skeptical. We don't have to go back more than 15 years to the largest recession/stock drawdown/economic chaos from the Great Depression. That was still THIS generation - in the age of internet and 401ks and IRAs and pensions and etc. It happened then - it can happen again. Especially once the view of society tips to inflation being a bigger threat than equity drawdowns and deficit spending is hamstrung...even in a pullback. Perhaps we're already there? The local top in bonds this year was right before the Fed started cutting rates and they've been bleeding ever since. Perhaps lower rates is no LONGER a good thing and perhaps neither are multitrilion deficits required to bail us out of whatever the next crisis is.

Lol - yes and know. I learned about Peter Lynch after Buffett - for sure. But I also remember learning that the average Magellan fund investor during his tenure compounded at less than 1/2 his rate because they were entering and exiting at exactly the wrong times which made me appreciate that human behavior and psychology are the beast to be conquered and NOT security analysis. I think the best book I've read on the subject - and that has formed much of my opinions on the market - has been the book Unexpected Returns by Ed Easterling of Crestmont Research which does a great job of overlaying historical market returns, multiples, to inflation and what forward returns have been from that matrix. Basically the items I took from it were : 1) Inflation matters a hell of a lot more to forward nominal returns than I ever appreciated (and not in a good way) and 2) There are times to be passive (when stocks on the whole are cheap) and times to be active (when stocks on the whole are expensive) I read it back in the ~2015 era and have been of the view that risk/stocks need to be actively managed since given that the U.S. was expensive on a relative basis to the rest of the world then and even more so (and on an absolute basis) today. As a result, I regularly trade around a core position selling rips and buying dips, sell covered calls to generate extra return while maintaining sell discipline, manage position limits and reduce positions from their maximums, committing to buys/sells at prices long before they're hit using GTC limit orders, etc. If the market was at significantly cheaper levels, I would probably just index and deleverage myself from the effort. Like many of my foreign holdings that I don't actively trade, don't sell options on, don't hedge, etc. But they're cheap. The U.S. market is mostly not. Even as I a devout believer in deep value strategies and use assets/NAV and low P/Es as my primary guides own Bitcoin. Its a different animal than any stock - and probably a more important development than any company has made in our lifetimes. Just as the cost of energy touches just about every industry and facet of life, the price of money touches everything and impacts everything. And when your money is based on unsound principles, it creates perverse incentives and results in a ton of wasted/unproductive work implemented for its production/distribution/maintenance of which sound money would only require a fraction of.

It will still be going. With people counting down the days until Trump's 3rd term where he'll finally release the companies!

The problem is when interest rates were zero, everyone used 0% rates as an argument for why multiples should be elevated (double counting IMO). Now that rates aren't 0%, they've forgotten all of that and multiples are elevated because the US is exceptional and the only country with high quality companies (or Daddy Trump is going to do 1000% better than he did his first 4-year term). In neither environment was I comfortable with the multiples nor satisfied with the explanations provided - but Shiller P/E HAS been elevated basically my entire adult life so who is to say it won't stay that way for a few more years? People will always find an excuse to justify elevated prices because their portfolio values, net worth, and/or happiness is dependent on 'number go up'. And to some extent - they're not wrong. Optimists get rewarded in the market far more regularly than pessimists. For me? I'm very heavily interested intermediate fixed income for someone my age. I own a few conviction names, a small % that I trade around, a hefty slug of Bitcoin, and ~50% intermediate agency mortgages and treasuries. Some people are happy to pay 35-40x for stagnant earnings at Apple. I am much happier getting 4-6% YTMs that are basics guaranteed and can use the income/gains from that position to pick off names that become attractive when they're attractive.