With my mind still reeling from the F vs. DDOG conversation, I decided to decide about my MF subscription. Frankly, I use the free boards about a gazillion times more often than I do the premium boards. I haven’t figured out how to tag or track or whatever the UPST premium board–which I think exists. I don’t have new money coming in, or rather I spend it all–what’s the old saw? Mostly on women and booze, the rest I just wasted… Anyway, I did renew. Still some rusty old core value beating inside that leads me to support the platform that provides WAFtT and Saul’s and New Paradigm (is there a pulse there still?) Uhmm. My mother would be proud. Easier to act on rusty old core values when the port was up double for the year. Sigh
Bear, Denny…others were sooooo wrong on TTD.
But ironically Bear an investor now…after missing a 10x move in mkt cap and still a 2x move in multiple even at currently “low” prices.
But let’s take their advice on investing as they give away most of 2020 gains and all of 2021 gains. Sure.
Good thread to keep for perpetuity, until it also disappears forever:
Uhm, ZS was up 8% on the day. Down 10% after hours.
Not much of a discount but I bought a teensy-bit. I’m a ZS investor with the intention of holding forever. I’ve held since November of…, uhm, let’s see… 2022. Almost a month now. Seems like forever in this market, though. Up 22%. (Pats self on back though not as flexible as I once were)
With some seriousness, I do feel the need to be invested more fully and I think it is time to buy whatever you think has that two to five years of that proverbial strong company performance.
Taking solace where I can find it:
CRWD position is up 10% and my $121 and $124 puts are (at this instant) out of the money. This is my top position at 5.0%.
VERI is 4.5% and is up 43%. Bought it also on 11/09, with the intent to hold forever.
SNOW is 3.1% of the port, up 5%. Bought half of that position on 11/09 (up 22%). What species of mushroom was I munching on that Wednesday night? I need to find more.
I have 13 positions in the green. I have 72% cash. 12% of port is in losing positions, 16% in positions with gains.
“As far as your assertion about what the market wants, the amounts of money (non-GAAP) that these companies are salting away as profits, are there in the bank. They can be used for paying dividends , or for a stock buyback , or for buying another company , or for anything else that the company wants to spend them on (even if you don’t like them because they are non-GAAP), and they are sitting there in the bank under cash and equivalents. What else can a stockholder really want?”
-Saul
What is ironic about this comment is that SBC apparently doesn’t matter.
So the company just, like, totally makes, like, tons of money…and they could, like, spend it on whatever they totally want, ya know?
Except to pay their workers extra, apparently.
For that, they just jack up the market cap of the company, and shareholders are just supposed to ignore that.
Is this the board where all those who are banned from Saul’s playground come to “tread”?
I have never been called an angel, so maybe I fit in better here…
If constructive debate and alternative points of view were allowed on that board, then someone would have pointed out that all that cash sitting in the bank will have to be used to pay their bills…their sales, general and administrative expenses, their R&D expenses, their electricity bills, their rents, their salaries etc.
If they decide to use all that cash for dividends or stock buybacks or buying another company, they will not have any cash left to run the company. The business would shut down and the company would go bankrupt. And oh btw, all the shareholders would see the value of their shares go to $0.
But then what else can a stock holder really want? The illusion of profits because adjusted earnings say that the business is profitable.
Seems very pets.com like to me, but then what do I know?
Seems to me that the answer is in the cash flow statement. Cash flow statements bewilder me before they put me to sleep. But maybe we could continue the conversation by discussing first, “Does the cash flow statement provide useful information on the performance of the company–from the viewpoint of the share holder?” If the answer is “yes”, then we will go into the Bermuda Triangle of stock based compensation. But I think that is o.k. as long we are focused on the cash flow. From the shareholders’ perspective, diluted number of shares and accumulated cash (increase thereof) should be informative.
Abuse welcomed.
KC
PS, not ignoring the question on eating eggs and lifestyle blog. Wish there were still PM’s. Don’t want to stray too far from investing and raise the ire of… Jen (?) and the content monitors.
This board preceded Saul’s by about 15 years.
But reinvention is all the rage, so we welcome the huddled masses yearning to breathe free.
Over on Champ’s board, I was reminded of how people can be right for all the wrong reasons, and then stubbornly adhere to dogma well after the fact.
Case in point: ANET
Dropped in early 2018 (I recall, but not positive) in favor of the increasingly popular/trendy move to SaaS stocks, we can look back now and see ANET sitting near ATH. SaaS stocks? Not so much.
STOCK % of Port Purchase Date Gain
SHOP 6.6% 5/2017 381%
OKE 78.0% 7/2020 182% *
ANET 6.6% 6/2017 306%
Just moved some cash into account.
* plus dividends (16% p.a. on invested capital)
ANET up 34% YTD. Of course, I rode SHOP up and down. Was, I recall, a 10-bagger. But I hate selling in the taxable account.
So, yah, I think that is 26% CAGR on ANET which is more than o.k. on a buy and hold cigar b utt stock.
KC, who will now go out and count my grass fed calves, Dreamer.
David Simon is a stud.
Imagine if the US Govt could be run like SPG…wowza.
I should have bought in the $80s last year and just enjoyed the divvy. Oh well. I am still hesitant to buy here, because I see economy getting worse before it gets better, and common sense says that “should” affect mall stocks, and in general I expect SPG goes down in sympathy if S&P goes down.
So while dividend keeps increasing, and SPG is back to pre-covid tenancy capacity, and while they have an A-rated balance sheet and are perpetually in the “Order” phase of Order/Complexity/Chaos, I just don’t see a ton of stock appreciation upside in next 12 months, so I am sitting on my hands for now.
I don’t know that I will be able to say the same thing if stock does get back to $80s or lower. Everything I have learned about SPG since Summer 2020 says that all the rest of the malls in the world can burn down, but SPG will be the one left standing. Businesses have gotten over their love affair with ecommerce and have recalibrated what the right mix of online and brick and mortar should be, and barring some hard-to-imagine future covid-esque lockdown scenario, I think those lessons learned will stay with companies for a long long time. Simon/SPG caters to the upper class, and they are all doing just fine.
Been watching this company for years, ever since hearing about them on a Sam Harris podcast, when they were known as Memphis Foods.
Think about all the advantages. Actual meat, but no animals harmed.
No animal grazing lands needed.
No crops grown, just to feed animals. (although some nutrition will go into the lab-grown meat, obviously)
As pure as organic.
All a matter of getting costs down and this will eventually be mainstream (or at least it should).
If it was never a live animal, can you be a vegan and eat cultivated meat?
can it be the best of both worlds?
there will be cultural hurdles to overcome first, but reality is people were totally fine with eating “plant-based meat alternatives” that were filled with chemicals and not really healthier for you. They are fine with EV’s over gas cars, while ignoring where electricity comes from or where lithium/batteries come from.
We used to jail folks for saying the earth revolved around the sun.
Eventually, intellectual honesty tends to win out. Although Trump Era working hard to set that back, along with AI-generated fake everythings.
But good science, with politics removed, keeps moving forward.
This thread could go in 20 directions, and a number of issues already raised. I’ll take just one in this post. From the CNBC reference:
Upside first takes a small amount of cells from a fertilized chicken egg. Then, its scientists select the best cells to develop a cell line. Those cells are placed in a cultivator, where they’re fed nutrients like water and amino acids in order to multiply.“”
Well, there are at least 3 issues here. The one I was interested in was the cells being fed amino acids. The obvious question is, “Where do the amino acids come from?” Does the culitvated meat contain complete protein? Chickens in the “wild” do not synthesize or inadequately synthesize some of the Essential Amino Acids and so these are added to feed from such things as chicken feathers (which came first, the chicken or the chicken feather?). Does it matter if the cultivated meat contains the humans’ EAA? Chicken EAA’s don’t grow on trees. Maybe they are grown on soybean plants, but how does that impact the environmental impact of lab produced chicken? Devil is in the details, like lithium for battery storage.
An interesting (to me) issue is what are the “best cells”? The 21-day process from a thread of cells to chick is quite amazing. Whether properly incubated or not, the embryo of the fertilized egg will begin to form. Within 72-hours, various cell types differentiate themselves. * As early as 72 hours after the start of the process, tail, wing and leg buds appear and the heart begins to beat.“” Can they extract and cultivate white meat cells?
In any case, will the strict vegetarian consider the product to be meat, either philosophically or biologically? Or does that matter from a marketing standpoint?
But the main issue for me is what are the actual inputs to the process, mainly the amino acid inputs, and where do they come from.
KC, whose chicken flock mimics his post-11/21 portfolio–from 25 producing chickens down to 7 chicks, 4-weeks old. Sigh.
